Robert Abele

With lines drawn along politics, class, race and economics, the strange-bedfellows issue of top-dollar killing and queasy conservation is one that Trophy...lays bare with gruesome, grim exactitude.

The good news is that this continuation is a similarly rousing and savvy adventure that energetically serves up more of what we love — from the sleek retro-futurist designs to the ticklishly severe Eurasian super-clothier Edna Mode — and yet wisely, wittily, reverses the first film’s accommodating traditionalism to make for an even richer, funnier portrait of its tight and in-tights family.

In its swirl of ingenuity, purity, and achievement, Paper & Glue can’t help but feel self-serving for its traveling, ever-creative dynamo, even when the tale JR has to tell is unquestionably riveting and inspiring.

Whenever Rebney gets to be Rebney -- be it insulting, sweet or wearily perturbed -- "-Winnebago Man shows a full tank of irascible charm.

Peter and the Farm is ultimately a portrait of whatever the opposite of “getting back to nature” is: the cycle of the land as a circle of hell.

The archival footage, the impassioned interviews, and the inspiring story of how warriors for solutions can overcome entrenched views on poverty and health, make for something genuinely stirring.

Sober and heartfelt, Union lets us see what Amazon and the world would soon discover about the power workers have when they invest in their dignity first.

By turns Dickensian, Marxist and dystopian, it's a movie as deliriously unclassifiable as it is expertly focused in its desire to provoke and entertain.

In its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.

Time to Die turns the showdown narrative of so many oaters into an actively intelligent, darkly funny and no less suspenseful rumination on the pull of the horizon versus the ill wind at the back.

The Desert Bride is nothing complicated, but in its unforced humanity, visually poetic landscapes and agreeably metaphoric storytelling suggests the intimate pleasures of a well-turned short story.

There’s something oddly appealing in witnessing this dutiful, besieged parent make do with nothing to offer but himself, wherever that takes him.

The cast’s rumble and spark are draw enough, but there’s also Chris Menges’ textured urban cinematography and Rosso’s empathetic direction, like neorealism rewired and amplified.

The scrappy superhero-noir indie Sparks busks its 1940s saga of dark redemption with considerable visual energy, if not always coherence or competence.

No matter how reflectively mellow the gray-haired, reminiscing interviewees are, the blizzard of featured illustrations from the magazine's '70s heyday offer scads of they-couldn't-get-away-with-that-today laughter.

In stripping genre ornamentation away to get to what brings people together in stark, lonely, and in this case, mighty cold circumstances, Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki”) has achieved something genuinely unlikely, and quietly renewing about what a love story can be.

The atmospheric heft of Il Futuro is invariably more bracing than oppressive, and in the complexly stoic Martelli and masterfully craggy, haunted Hauer, an alluringly opaque pas de deux of loss and uncertainty is wonderfully realized.

Jezebel is a reminder that in everyday human stories is proof that the world is wide, and that in going behind the doors that movies rarely open, there are even more worlds worth discovering.

She may have a terrible co-star inside trying to upstage her, but with humor, strength and messy honesty, Blair makes a memorable case for why her show must go on.

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.

For Hetherington, the front line was not just a set of coordinates in a bloody battle, but a space where true artists operated, and Junger's film goes a long way toward celebrating that mind set, but also recognizing how treacherous it can be.

By acknowledging what isn't known about drinking water, but what should be illuminated about the mechanism behind it, What Lies Upstream proves an exemplary piece of advocacy filmmaking. Outrage is a given, but more urgently, you're left wanting to learn more.

In the hands of its filmmakers and cast is a rivetingly good, human journey, full of sparks, flame, smoke, containment, ash, and the terrible beauty that sometimes mystifyingly colors stories of desolation.

It’s all a very believable, close-quarters theater of exhaustion and pain, with moments of lightness and warmth that only add to the difficulty of Mickey’s predicament, and all of it captured in alluring fixed images of depth and color by cinematographer Conor Murphy.

Wife of a Spy doesn’t necessarily change its tone when the stakes are raised so much as shift its concerns from what’s on the surface to what courses underneath in a time of war.

Orlando, My Political Biography is cheekily unclassifiable, which, considering its source and subject, isn’t surprising. But at its core, the film is sparklingly intelligent, Godard-puckish and moving, capable of deadpan wit and the most intimate swirl of ideas and emotions.

The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.

Whose Streets? vitally offers — despite its birth in sorrow and its many war-zone-like stretches — is a tale of alertness and awakening.