Robert Abele

There’s nothing else out there like Patrick Wang’s two-part, four-hour labor of love, A Bread Factory, and that’s wholly a good thing.

Mr. Woodhouse’s daughter may be a case study in the perils of playing God with others’ hearts, but Emma. is proof that bringing a timeless book and fresh talent together is still a worthy kind of artistic matchmaking.

Leon’s New York has plenty of uncertainty, but it hums with possibility, especially the notion that if you miss one connection, another one’s right around the corner. In that respect, Tramps is beautifully breathless.

In its barbs and visuals, indie vibe and old-school ambition, inside jabs and outsider artistry, it feels both of its time — when Welles’ cachet straddled an old guard who shunned him and young rebels who worshipped him — and like an acidly spit anecdote about artistic humiliation that still feels relevant.

What emerges in Fayyad’s gripping underground triage documentary is a compelling picture of compassion, grit, and feminist righteousness in Dr. Amani Ballor

The Daniels are unusually present ringmasters here, eschewing the flippancy that marred their splashy quirk-quake “Swiss Army Man” for a more big-feeling anarchic escapism. In their nifty code-switching, we-all-contain-multitudes metaphor, they’ve concocted something that feels genuinely attuned to our modern anxieties, but also embracing of our coping mechanisms.

As a wry commentary on religious tourism, and the limited avenues of prosperity for occupied, idealistic Arabs, “Holy Air” is tartly effective. And Srour’s deadpan way with storytelling, satire and elegantly fixed camera framing is a biting pleasure throughout.

It’s in that soulful shift from repair’s confusion to renewal’s fullness where Revoir Paris is most powerful, dramatizing what it can mean to outlive something unimaginable — and look at the world anew.

Bolt’s ethically engaging, easy-to-grasp and artfully conceived film covers a wide range of areas that stir us to think about benefits and costs.

Private Violence makes painfully clear the emotional and legal hurdles battered women endure just to feel safe again in or outside the home.

As DeBlois engineers this tale towards an expectedly exciting and poignant conclusion, one realizes how well that cleverly misdirecting title How to Train Your Dragon has morphed from literal to figurative, from being about command and obeisance to handling the turmoil within.

Fukada’s take on family is genuinely bleak — what he sees is loneliness together instead of real companionship, and all the problems that arise from manufactured togetherness. But his storytelling instincts are solid, and his actors always bring humanity to their darkest impulses and saddest epiphanies.

The introduction of a baby that Tonny supposedly fathered feels worrisome initially...but in Refn's skilled street-realist hands, the child becomes a potent, wailing metaphor for Tonny's own dilemma of rudderless need.

In her elegantly unsettling portrait of an invisible woman straddling two notions of home — far from what she’s known, working inside a perilous system — Jusu is letting us know she’s got all diasporic women employed by wealthy families on her mind. And that their fears can easily become nightmares.

Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.

Come for the cold case, stay for a couple of remarkably lived-in performances from Simon Baker and Natasha Wanganeen.

Concurrently, as Maitland provides pockets of warmth and humanity in the legacies of a handful of letter-writers, he relays through archival footage and interviews the fallout for Brody himself when the sheer volume of outstretched hands and scrutinizing eyes became too much for him to handle.

Unfailingly sensitive about issues of selflessness and suffering, The Departure is in a way its own work of meditation, on the pressures of living up to the turbulent promise of life’s expected length.

Side effects from watching the anti-Pharma documentary Drug$ start with rage, and pretty much stay there through the call-your-congressperson coda.

The fact that Laverty and Loach take their cues from research and interviews keeps the tension visceral, not artificially heightened. More than usual for these evergreen chroniclers of everyday strife, their politics contextualizes the drama, and vice versa. In their domestic gut-punch of a story, they’ve exposed our new feudalism in a way that feels honest and blisteringly human.

Directing his first documentary feature, Corbijn, a longtime music photographer who made the Joy Division docudrama “Control,” is well suited to this material’s creative highs and human dimensions.

By the end, as you dry your eyes, it’s their futures you want them to win — as scientists, optimists and change agents — not just a science fair prize.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

The tale of a kid whose rebellion is in feeding his knowledge is rousing enough, but it’s to Ejiofor’s credit that he takes care to meaningfully dramatize how the systems around William — social, economic and political — create a perfect storm of obstacles for anyone in a struggling community trying to seed a future.

The journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers.

Barnabás Tóth’s richly acted film exudes a faith in human connection as relevant today as such relationships needed to be in the years after World War II for survivors of unimaginable trauma.

Tomboy stands out as an especially affecting delicacy about the thrills and pitfalls of exploring who one is.

In truth (there’s that word again), Morris’ movie isn’t so much a debriefing as a very entertaining recruitment tool for the pleasures of Cornwell’s storytelling.