Robert Abele

In its thumbnail sketches simmering with risk, humor, and melancholy, illuminating a world of worsening disparities but spikier solidarity, it entertainingly takes stock.

The Crash Reel asks pointed questions about hazard, reward and consequence, forcing us to look anew at the rush attached to so many high-stakes sports.

It’s all plenty inventive and heart-conscious, grim without being punishing and, in its openness about impermanence and humility, could spark some significant parent-child exchanges about love, flaws and the necessity of meaningful time together.

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.

The result is a sharply assembled multiformat collage of memory and investigation that starts like a trip any of us might make into a what-made-him-tick past, but ends in the present with scattered feelings and tenuous bonds.

Human connections are gifts, imagination is powerful and empathy isn’t a trick. These are the things Look Into My Eyes patiently communicates to us from its watchful perch.

In its interlocking parts and willfully impenetrable details, Serebrennikov wants you to know that being Russian is too complicated to foreground one emotion or experience, or to rely on the safety of the linear when one day can feel like nothing and everything. This brazenly packed movie isn’t for everyone. Neither, we grasp, is being Russian.

This exquisitely rendered work from Kore-eda is a delicate web of compassion and embattlement: three separate views of one stretch of momentous time, spun and re-spun with care and craft.

Can now be appreciated not just as a minor classic of tragic destruction, but also as a somber exploration of conflicted postwar emotions.

While thrashing chords score this gutbucket nightmare, Saulnier's way with overwhelmed characters, pressing evil and dangerous escape mechanics is practically symphonic.

What initially augured a spiky portrait of late-age restlessness recedes into a woefully generic case of shopworn cross-generational uplift, sprinkled with tired wisecracks.

Satisfyingly emotional without ever feeling sensationalized.

Anchored by Weixler’s and Pearson’s natural charm, Chained for Life stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

What this installment energetically proves is that you can ruffle the feathers of a totemic tale and still capture what’s good, galloping fun in Dumas’ storytelling: nefarious plots to be untangled, villains to be exposed and principled heroes to shoulder the risk of certain death while they tease each other mercilessly with heaps of panache.

Can you tell it’s a play? Absolutely. Does that mean a damn thing? Not when the writing is this richly evocative, and the cast so often soars with it.

Buenos Aires and New York are forests of romantic entanglement, identity-searching and adventure in Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s artfully frothy Hermia & Helena.

If it’s been a while since you’ve felt the cold blast and hard crunch of midnight-movie meanness, Zahler’s shaping up to be your guy — the one selling illicit thrills out of the trunk of a well-restored, vinyl-topped LTD — and with “Brawl,” he sets himself further apart from his more schlock-minded contemporaries in cult cinem

Vogt, with his second feature, has crafted a disturbing and original heart-pounder all his own, uncommonly attuned to the perspective of unsocialized prepubescents: how their feelings work, what their minds process, and why their worst moments may bring catharsis to them, but can look terrifyingly wrong to us.

The Ross brothers augment the teams’ richly choreographed, competition-tested routines with slow motion, superimpositions, and separately shot material with individual color guard members. But these artful divergences feel naturally expressive, the filmmakers’ way of honoring the expressiveness, and wanting in on the inspiration.

In its perceptions and mood, Angels Wear White plays like acutely serious female noir.

Jude is hardly precious about his craft. But that’s because he’s confident you’ll leave bursting with thoughts and feelings about the price of progress, the weight of history and the ways we struggle to do right amid so much that’s wrong.

The Kafkaesque reversal-of-fortune humor that follows — centered on how outgoing, beloved Oswald’s mere presence pours salt on Guy/Edward’s identity crisis — is as shrewdly conceived a comic bad dream as we’ve gotten since the heyday of “Zelig”-era Woody Allen or Charlie Kaufman (whose film “Synecdoche, New York” this feels like a cousin to).

As horror, it's frightless and boring. As comedy, it's desperate and laughless. As exploitation, it's exceedingly dull. Even excrement was once something of substance. The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence is just rancid air. It too shall pass.

You don’t have to be a Deadhead, or even a casual listener, to find in Long Strange Trip a compelling tale of what happens when iconoclasts become icons.

Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss.

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

The condensing of consequential shifts in fortune into relateably tense, humanly funny scenes is admirable, and the tech aspects are never too confusing that they pull away from the story’s stakes.

Zhang uses quiet to suggest an active calmness, so when a particular sound punctures the air — gurgling water, the music on a videotape, a child’s questions — it feels like the notes of life, the stuff that’s supposed to spark us.