Robert Abele

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

As the memory of it washes back over you, Omaha lingers, like a devastating short story — devastating because it’s about a pained father for whom the road ahead only seems to get narrower.

What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.

It’s a well-meaning impression of a soul-searching documentary (and only an impression), but impressions can still be plenty entertaining.

Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.

It wants you to feel that nightmare scenario of being stuck, but it also wants to be meditative. It’s not always successful at merging those experiences — as experimentation it falls short, and the horror label is also a stretch — but it ultimately earns a liminal fascination as it fuses your perspective to the protagonist’s.

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.

That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes Fantasy Life feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

As overdue tales of history go, Palestine ‘36 (currently one of the last films with access to its real-world locations) is certainly more of a blunt instrument than a novelistic endeavor. But its broad strokes and rooted passions easily earn their place, and deserve to inspire more such stories.

Somewhat miraculously, we’re carried out of this consequential collision of hearts and minds on the lightest of notes, with the sense that our capacity to rediscover harmony will always be beautifully mysterious.

The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.

Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving Heel enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Without gimmicks or pomp (save a picturesque setting) and through the supreme talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, it offers up an affecting two-hander about a couple on the brink who’ve never really acknowledged said precipice. As directed with low-key confidence by Polly Findlay, the movie is both good and, in a certain way, good enough.

Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. I’m one of those who had no clue of this act’s history and I’m fairly certain I’d look forward to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Sequel.

Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.

A Poet rides its wave of misfit compassion so beautifully because its contradictions live inside Rios’s howling, pitiable shambles of a character, who at times looks like someone sketched by a cynical animator but finished by a sympathetic colorist.

At its best, when theme and visuals are in sync, Arco has the easy charm of something half-remembered from one’s cartoon-packed youth: beguilingly earnest and awkward in equal measure.

As A Private Life moves along, with Lilian negotiating a break-in, threats and lapses in judgment, it never exactly coheres. Yet it somehow entertains, which is a testament to Zlotowski’s energy juggling her various theme-colored story balls.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

With a breathtaking eye for one-shot scenes and unwavering confidence in the demands he makes on our monkey-brained attention spans, Diaz has crafted a stunning piece of time travel, its languidness and exquisitely hued imagery working in perfect sync.

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.

The actors sell it, especially when Dern is unafraid to mix revitalized pleasure with pushing for answers. But the stand-up storyline, so promising, is dropped and it feels like a missed opportunity. Still, the highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.

The movie is a powerfully blunt instrument of empathy. Ben Hania’s insistence on close-up melodramatics — faces in anguish, a handheld camera glued to them — sometimes overshadows a thirst for something more analytical. But it’s decidedly a vision, one steeped in roiling pain.

“Burt” isn’t driven by narrative. Director Burke is way more invested in the interpersonal dynamics of oddballs than anything else and, to that end, a fair amount of humorous tension is maintained.

Most assuredly, though, this is a duo of director and star once more moving in concert together, maybe not as confidently as with some previous efforts, but with a knowing intelligence.

In a year that’s seen a valuable rethink of how we process crime stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched book “Murderland” — Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.

At times it’s as if you’re onstage with the cast. And yet that simple approach, in confident hands, reflects the magic that only cameras and cutting can do: collapse distance and time into a special intimacy, letting strong actors with expert-level songs be the greatest of special effects.

Out of Plain Sight doesn’t need to be earthshaking filmmaking to relay a valuable ongoing story about a hidden nightmare for all of us.

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.

What’s quietly miraculous about Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, considering its added tragic weight, is what the force of Hassona’s personality and Farsi’s filmmaking choices still manage to do: speak to what’s ineffably beautiful about our human capacity for hope and connection.

Peter Hujar’s Day captures something beautifully distilled about human experience and the comfort of others.

It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.

As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.

Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.

Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions. His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart.

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

There may be little that’s psychologically fresh about Plainclothes, but the fact that its low-key, close-framed style suggests a taut, moody gay indie you might have seen in the ’90s works in its favor. It’s also well cast.

While The Perfect Neighbor is, on the most visceral level, a documentary horror film built with police footage, it also reveals how a violent tragedy can be unwittingly manifested by unchecked grievance and a law that weaponizes white fear more than it guards anyone’s peace.

Roofman plays like an indie drama photobombing a studio rom-com.

The movie ultimately treats us like adrenaline junkies, assuming we lack curiosity.

The movie, its many strands brilliantly threaded for maximum impact, is also an argument for the necessity of independent inquiry, and for a reassessment of what a “true crime” documentary means when the lion’s share of attention goes to sensationalized, overreported tabloid tales that go down easy in streaming formats.

“Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work.

There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

For all the movie’s crisp attention to bifurcated lives, The History of Sound more aptly resembles a painstakingly dry still life than a moving picture.

It answers Riefenstahl’s carefully chosen narrative, a fable of disillusioned purity, with an equally forensic counternarrative exposing her childlike narcissism about the impact of her talent. More disquietingly, she reveals a selective ignorance regarding the circumstances that brought her power and recognition.

When the key comic minds behind that singular sendup of past-prime glory-seekers aim to rekindle their magic, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues leaves one thinking some classics are better left in their original, endlessly re-playable states.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

Whether poking at superhero cliches (there’s a choice post-credit scene) or trying to be kill-clever, it’s all in dopey, gruesome fun, although, to reiterate, a “Toxic Avenger” even normies can enjoy doesn’t exactly sound like a true Troma tribute.

Relay proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.

The result may not be terribly illuminating about the (sub)human condition, despite the shout-outs to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Eden is probably closer to an expensive reality show about mismatched survivalists. But as August fare goes, it’s a sticky, sweaty hoot, well cast and paced like a disreputable beach read, even if you might sporadically wish Werner Herzog had gotten first crack at this material.

Even with the thinnest of narrative framing and some arty touches that feel superfluous, there’s an overall portrait of authentic grit and resilience here, of knowing when to hold on and when to let go, that is well-nurtured by Beecroft’s admiring eye for these renegade women.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist’s ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure.

It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning.

2000 Meters to Andriivka is a war chronicle like no other.

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.

Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting.

Everything about the story, from opening to closing dance party, feels like it was made up on an especially unimaginative playdate by bored kids who’d rather be watching TV.

In its graceful intertwining of meditation and obscenity, Afternoons of Solitude gives an ancient, controversial tradition the chance to shock and awe without hype or favor. It’s inhumane, it’s human and it’s a hell of a film.

Friedland’s acute debut feature, drawn from her experience in the memory-care field, is a small miracle of realigned empathy, turning away from the condescension and easy sentiment of so many narratives about late-in-life adaptation.

Power shields its misdeeds with propaganda, but Panh sees such murderous lies clearly, giving them an honest staging, thick with echoes.

This poetic gem is a journey from the weight of absence to the serenity of presence, thanks in no small part to the inquisitive, gifted woman pulled from obscurity: Sheila Turner-Seed, whose life was short but full and worth revitalizing.

In the fleet, pacey manner of the editing, toggling between private and public moments with highlight-reel efficiency, the film is a stirring glimpse of top-down kindness as a winning leadership style.

The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.

When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, We Are Guardians, like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.

Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city’s stray colors, sounds and personalities.

It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.

In its focused glimpse into a strange, funny-sad friendship, it’s almost mesmerizingly nonjudgmental as it treks to a very dark place.

There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, Rust is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it

One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made Bonjour Tristesse without necessarily feeling its turmoil.

Just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

Writer-director Saxon’s own virtuosity, occasionally aggressive, eventually leaves our hopes for real emotions wanting, once we’ve become attuned to the dazzle.

If this ends up being Cronenberg’s last, he’ll have gone out with a worldly, weighty epitaph.

The film explores what’s funny — and terrifyingly truthful — about being wrenched into adulthood.

When its cinematic influences aren’t so obvious and its story particulars aren’t distractingly fuzzy, this earnestly moody film serves notice that indie urban noir can still be a potent calling card for up-and-coming talents.

The Friend strips the pet-movie genre from the easy appeal of mawkishness, bringing it closer to what an ongoing dialogue between lonely species stumbling into connection actually feels like.

Holy Cow achieves its own special texture and flavor the more its central character boils, curdles and cools.

Palud’s directorial emphasis on that internal experience, guided by a simple shooting style trained on Vartolomei, is what keeps Being Maria afloat on its turbulent seas.

What should be a nasty hoot, however, is closer to a ho-hum.

Ash is categorically a vibe more than it is an especially unique story or illuminating character study, even if González’s steely beauty conveys plenty about the psychological stakes at hand. But in this age of expensive and overwrought world-building, it’s Ellison’s experiential care with well-worn material that delivers the goods.

As with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

Maybe the most rewarding quality Eephus displays as a first-ballot hall of fame sports movie is the dedication of Lund and company to just being what they are: no-nonsense celebrants of something ephemeral yet enduring.

In its atmosphere of gnawing discomfort with imposed secrecy about bad men, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a uniquely dimensional work of character and temporality. Nyoni’s brilliance is in portraying the gap between public and private, past and present, as spaces where submerged feelings awkwardly co-exist, leaving nobody able to feel truly whole.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

Mildness reigns and indifference blooms. What calls out to be well seasoned — a dish with bits that are scorched and raw — is instead merely a tepid porridge.

The movie is built on the drifting life of a smart, stunningly beautiful and unfulfilled woman. But “Parthenope” shouldn’t have to strain as hard as it does — it plays like a fragrance ad. That qualifies as a disappointment for a filmmaker whose sensualist impulses are God-tier.

As a dark techno-farce with a violent wit and some daring empathy (coming as it does in a time of suspicious excitement about our modeled, molded future), Companion is a sleekly designed, well-powered date-night package.

Thankfully, filmmaker Bruce David Klein finds the sweet spot between admirer and honest broker with the warm, engaging tribute biodoc Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story.

When Masear dedicates herself to something as simple as an impaired hummingbird’s hesitant first jump from one stick to another, the tension is both unexpectedly beautiful and poignant. These are small, scary steps for hummingbirds, seeding faith in giant leaps for humankind.

To watch Santosh is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.

While the boxing is kinetically directed, Morrison grasps that the movie’s fiercest stands are taken outside the ring, when Claressa — faced with tough choices about her future — asserts herself to the people who need to hear it.

Delaporte and De La Patellière understand that Dumas’ type of novelistic revenge, whether froid or chaud, is best served onscreen in the most picturesque European locations, with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc’s cameras ready to swoop and soar as needed, and paced to gallop, never dawdle.

In a world increasingly obsessed with the notion of homelands and borders, it’s good to be reminded by a chill hang with an open-arms message that the world is strongest when we get to make our best lives anywhere we choose.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

A sublime and stirring documentary.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

In its simple, generous spirit of giving these creatures palpable narrative power, there’s a profundity: Flow might only be imagining their coping skills without us, but it’s a charming, poignant vision of community and perseverance we could stand to be inspired by.

The world is full of ego-massaging celebrity documentaries, in which legends we know star in glorified tribute reels. But the zesty, illuminating The World According to Allee Willis feels like what the showbiz biodoc was meant for, to give voice to someone who was so much more than a ubiquitous album-sleeve credit.

It’s a dazzling, tune-filled collage of images, words and sounds, recounting the moment during the Cold War when Congolese independence, hot jazz and geopolitical tensions made a sound heard around the world. But also, how that music was muffled by lethal instruments of capitalism and control, still a factor on the global stage.

If it’s too much to ask of Arnold that her bid for heightened naturalism make a ton of sense, “Bird” at least maintains a heartbeat of ache and affection for youth in all its rudeness, revealing a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of losing her claws if she traffics in the thing with feathers.

War movies have always made use of spectacle to heighten existential dangers, but Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too.

Anchored by performances that refuse to tell us what to think (especially Hoult’s cagey calm), Juror #2 skillfully depicts how, in practice, the ideal of blind justice too easily becomes the shortsighted, look-the-other-way kind.

None of it would work, however, without the command of this justifiably Cannes-honored cast.

For anyone who needs a gut-punch primer in what the lack of reproductive freedom looks like now, the propulsive documentary Zurawski v Texas from co-directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault is here to put your voting decisions into sharply delineated, heart-rending focus.

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.

Thanks to the deadpan chops of the cast, the low-grade silliness is funny enough to offset the occasional feeling that a shorter, tighter version built around its biggest laughs might have been more effective.

In artist Titus Kaphar’s emotionally knotty, semi-autobiographical directorial debut about hurt and resilience — and, of course, making art — we get a refreshingly bone-deep view of how someone can be saved by the act of creation, yet flummoxed by its therapeutic limitations.

One wishes that space in Separated had been saved instead for real stories told by the policy’s victims, or perhaps more historical context. Nonetheless, what we glean from the totality of the interviews and research, and Morris’ well-honed style of coalescing information, is damning enough.

Nothing in The Universal Theory is going to blow your mind, but as it plays its fastidiously crafted notes of conspiracy and chaos, you’ll know the idiosyncrasies of the art house are alive and well.

The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization.

In Jason Reitman’s overstuffed, adrenalized Saturday Night, a dramatization of the windup to that fateful first broadcast, you don’t feel the buzzy air of revolution so much as hear the voice of present-day legacy curation getting in the way.

It’s a quietly shattering place All Shall Be Well goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.

As respectful as writer-director Jon Watts is toward creating opportunities for wise-ass capering, the movie is curiously both a labored and lax attempt at restoring that luster.

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).

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.

When you won’t speak the evil of “Speak No Evil,” then a disservice has been done to the source terror and how expertly it refused to deliver us to a safe place.

There are some cringeworthy moments watching the pair win at detective work while losing as vulnerable fangirls. But like any soulful quest worth its salt, Seeking Mavis Beacon makes the lows as meaningful as the highs, endorsing a wild web world in which mystery and exposure can peacefully coexist.

There’s an acting master class to savor, as one might expect from a cast that includes Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, each of them in career-best form.

A childish slog of hero worship.

[Woo] may have tamped down some of his more sentimental and tragic impulses, but he definitely flexes for the climactic melee in a deconsecrated church, which is beautifully bananas, but also, in a funny way, a personal statement on the intimacy that quality action filmmaking should create.

Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of The Crow.

Writer-director Chiwetel Ejiofor (following up his impressive 2019 directing debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”) proves more earnest than skillful at bringing heartfelt complexity to another tale of whiz-kid promise and resourcefulness.

Even the landscape speaks to an emotional duality. It captivates with its natural beauty and sweep at the same time it tragically underscores the remoteness of places like St. Joseph’s, where evil could keep secret.

In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.

While the dance is clearly intended to be positive and inspiring (we’re told 95% of the fathers who participate never go back to jail), the movie isn’t afraid to show just how much fragility and uncertainty goes into the buildup and its aftermath.

Every Irish speaker in Kneecap wants to be seen, felt and heard in their fight for freedom. That funny, funky riot of attention-seeking pain and pleasure, inspired by the pioneering voices of American hip-hop, makes for a bracing, entertaining transatlantic dispatch.

Clearly there’s no better narrator than an obsessive like Scorsese for an archival dive into the duo’s unusual and extraordinary oeuvre. It’s his heartfelt analysis as host of filmmaker David Hinton’s documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger that puts this rewarding, personalized master class above most movies about movies.

Working from an excellent screenplay (by Chika-ura and Keita Kumano) that’s a finely tuned model of narrative empathy, and boasting an all-timer portrait of decline by the great Tatsuya Fuji (“In the Realm of the Senses”), it conveys both keen insight into a tough situation and, at the same time, intriguingly lets some workings of the heart and mind remain impenetrable.

Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders.

As Lane wends her way to a conclusion of her own, it’d be a mistake to view “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” with its serious curiosity balanced by a quirky theremin score and humorous asides, as Lane turning personal experience into public advocacy. She’s cagier than that.

The result, anchored by enchanting performances and Kormákur’s reliably visceral storytelling, is an appealing pivot for a filmmaker who tends to gravitate toward adrenalized tales of survival.

Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving Daddio feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.

Schamus’ sensitive and funny debut brings its anxieties and pleasures to full bloom so they can be properly considered and found suitably fleeting.

Tremblay’s template for on-the-run suspense is effective, primarily by avoiding the exploitative in favor of scenes that drive home the feeling of lives susceptible to being uprooted.

At a certain point, it feels as if scenes are missing, and what’s left reads as unconvincing.

It’s all music, Wilcha’s sweetly philosophical movie seems to be saying — and being present enough to listen.

Regrettably, the movie itself feels trapped by its airless gallery of carefully crafted images, familiar to the high-toned end of the horror genre: elegantly mood-thick surroundings, deliberately half-seen creatures, actors positioned as if in a still life.

The supremely watchable pairing of these magnetic actors is what helps lift this lyrically crafted frontier love story above the usual efforts to restore the genre’s appeal.

If the details of “Kidnapped” aren’t familiar, do yourself the favor of withholding an online search until the full thunder and rigor of Bellocchio’s dramatic instincts can work you over — equivalent to a lavish ’60s period costume drama burnished into an engine of galvanizing narrative intention.

What comes through are highs and valleys seen from the inside, a clarifying memoir from an unsentimental woman who endured being called every shaming name, with powerful grace notes of understanding from a son whose eyes betray a tough childhood.

Power could just as easily have benefited from the docuseries treatment, although at under 90 minutes, it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.

It’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work.

After so fruitful a collaboration on “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi and Ishibashi may have topped themselves with something even more compelling.

Apart from mistaking energy for exhilaration, the movie is a mostly flavorless puree of dark humor, comic-book sentimentality and ultra-bloody combat. But it’s the relentless and banal video-game aesthetic that may get you involuntarily reaching for a controller in hopes of finding a pause button.

Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the beleaguered complex’s decline was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for doleful poverty-gazing. But in Windy City native Baig’s solid hands, it’s a resolutely poetic, at times even golden-hued portrait of lives unafraid to hope amid growing despair.

As things play out, however, Loach and Laverty are realistic enough in their tale of invigorating compassion to grasp that, as difficult as it is to find and nurture hope, just as essential is recognizing the danger lurking in festering grievance.

The idiosyncratic earnestness of an experienced horrormeister playing with the classics still makes for a substantial midnight snack.

If Coup de Chance is an exit for Allen, it’s at least a gracefully made one. To see where it’s heading doesn’t devalue its breezy appeal as a shaggy-dog tale about regret, power and luck.

Thanks to its actors, there’s a credibly heavy sense of the personal prisons within literal ones that only a wretched war can foster.

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.

The blessing is that Buckley, Colman, Spall and Vasan are expert enough that dimensional character work still peeks through the vibe of cookie-cutter idiosyncrasy.

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

Like one of those energetic Martin Scorsese montages where we’re privy to how a vibrant underground ecosystem works, the documentary pulls us inside a partying milieu of lights, stage gimmicks, fad dances and tough, colorful characters, a handful of whom are interviewed here alongside a few cultural commentators.

This underground festival hit is a feverish fit of creative buffoonery — you haven’t experienced anything remotely like it.

Knox Goes Away should be noirishly enjoyable hokum. But instead, screenwriter Gregory Poirier’s tribute to an earlier era’s taciturn machismo is more muddled and ludicrous than fleet and clever.

If kids can grow out of their pretend pals, so too can horror audiences of cynical snoozes like this.

In charting that road from disorienting fragility to determined independence, Ebrahimi serves up a memorably nuanced performance.

The story that Kiss the Future tells — culminating in U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement — offers an admirably potent blend of darkness and light. Specifically, the light that can emerge from darkness.

At a time when extremes in discourse always seem loudest, the modest pleasures of The Monk and the Gun are appealingly reasonable. Brandishing new ways doesn’t have to mean holstering old ones.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

It’s bracing to watch a movie whose very flow communicates how to experience it, which can also be said of Zhou’s captivating turn as a young woman committed to being elusive as a ward against what being still and reflective might bring up.

Good Grief ultimately promises more than its starter kit of rom-com elements and good intentions can deliver. But within that inviting aura are a number of pleasures, starting with Levy’s homo-neurotic appeal as a cynically romantic gay lead.

A guarded Jessica Chastain and a rumpled Peter Sarsgaard make mysterious, sweetly dissonant music together in Memory, a touch-and-go drama about connection that’s as steeped in discomfort as it is cautiously hopeful about one’s ability to find peace within it.

The leads give it their all — Hopkins’ vinegary parrying is especially lively — but the overall takeaway is of historical puppets playing philosophical gotcha, when we yearn for three-dimensional humans filling up a room with their lives, learnings and flaws.

The result is also one of the year’s most memorable theatrical experiences, because it’s Wenders’ return to 3-D (after 2011’s “Pina”), proving again how versatile and intimate the format can be when skillfully applied outside the genre of blockbusters.

If anything, you want even more stories from these guys who started out as rock and roll dreamers, transitioned to individual contractors, then came to feel part of something larger than themselves.

By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring.

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.

A well-meaning but slapdash travelogue, Fioretta does find gratifying closure in the company that the Schoenbergs find: curators of a collective memory that won’t fade on their watch.

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.

Most gratifying in Newnham’s investigation is how Hite reclaimed her own positive sense of self in exile through some key female friendships: a love goddess finding refuge with like-minded souls after a bruising battle with unenlightened, resentful mortals.

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 overall flavor profile indicates that Waititi, whose own cartoonish appearance as a priest feels like an afterthought, has become bored with his signature brand of goofy uplift. Going by the unfunny self-referential gags (“The Karate Kid,” “The Matrix,” “Taken”), you’d swear the Oscar-winning filmmaker was struggling with the impulse to go full parody.

Documentaries with life-or-death stakes, not to mention wider resonance in our increasingly unsettled geopolitical world, don’t get much more nerve-racking or heartbreaking than “Beyond Utopia.” At the same time, the film is inspiring about the lengths people will go to for a better life.

When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, The Marsh King’s Daughter goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.

Despite its bumpy execution and general thinness, Suitable Flesh boasts a playfulness that feels ripe for slicing up and serving anew.

This is Krieps’ show, another elegantly virtuosic, intelligent turn that, in this case, imbues sickness with dignity so that every strained grasp for breath feels like a victory for autonomy.

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.

In its voices tinged with sorrow and re-examined history, this expertly tuned film is simply pro-introspection: a heavy-hearted look at an unnecessary death and a cultural superiority long deserving of scrutiny.

If your recipe for outrage needs a villainous presence, Peck isn’t interested in stoking it that way, and shouldn’t need to. That’s not the oxygen Silver Dollar Road, building off a 2019 ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, wants to breathe. Rather, it’s the warmth, togetherness and persistence of a family fighting a ruthlessly unfair system, holding onto each other as forces move to expel them.

It’s easy to be reminded of silent film’s who-needs-words heyday while watching Mami Wata, even when the foreboding sound design is doing its part and the actors are delivering their sparely written lines as if their characters’ lives depended on it.

If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

Reptile, a studiously atmospheric, layer-peeling mystery from director and co-writer Grant Singer, foregrounds Del Toro — playing a calloused detective investigating a young woman’s murder — in a way that makes you want more of him. But also, regrettably, less of movies like “Reptile,” which tries to match its star’s unpredictable magnetism with a forced eeriness, only growing more ponderous and unfocused, like a case getting colder.

As tributes go, the documentary is always lively. Archival clips zip by and nobody ever gets more than a sentence or two before the film cuts away, which means it never burrows in as often as you might want it to, considering the colorful, thick life on display.

That Neither Confirm Nor Deny doesn’t ignore the wider controversies of the CIA is welcome . . . But at heart, this is a heist saga designed to enthrall in its ingenuity and ambition, one of the more presentable cases of cowboy spycraft from an us-versus-them time.

It rewards the attention of a committed voyeur, which all proper cineastes and many of our best provocateurs are anyway. The pinched of mind and the humorless need not bother. Invariably more welcome (one imagines Oren thinking) are those who enjoy their senses and perspectives pried open while their heads get a thorough scratching.

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

With her feature debut, Alberto keenly understands that any story of self-discovery is as much a constellation as it is a journey, and that’s how her adaptation plays, as a mature accumulation of the tender, the uneasy and the clarifying.

It’s a rom-com both com-less and rom-less.

Our Father, the Devil is the type of movie for which a satisfying ending is less about tidy resolution than potent insight, and in that respect, Foumbi delivers something befitting her grueling, clenched character study.

It’s not uncommon that the most intriguing first films are the ones that stumble on their way to purposefulness, and Mutt easily meets that standard, presenting us with a vivid character we unabashedly root for as the day’s challenges try to pierce a newly armored soul.

Grief is universal, and yet no two stories about it are alike, a distinction that keeps Koji Fukada’s tender drama “Love Life” unpredictable as it mixes the mundane with the inexplicable, and empathy with alienation, to nuanced, if never fully stirring effect.

The film’s chaotic structure and panting sensibility leaves Veil feeling more like the star of a fast-moving timeline than someone we get to know.

What rings truest and richest about The Eternal Memory, as exquisitely humane a film as you’re likely to see all year, is what abiding love and stewardship look like in the moment: to care so deeply for someone as to tend to their memories, and to be loved so deeply that it’s the last beautiful thought one may ever need.

Conquering time travel may be a big deal, but Greer’s affecting portrait of a woman processing a second chance keeps the miracles of Aporia grounded and not flashy — a portal to human epiphanies, not digitally rendered spectacle.

In Barthes’ curiously distanced, muted handling, we only sense points being made, not lives being lived.

A well-cast, modestly affecting drama of the kind studios regularly programmed in the before-IP times, it boasts a generous heart gently dusted with life’s complications as it beats a familiar rhythm of easygoing redemption.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

A lyrical, edifying and blistering plea for Indigenous justice.

Acrid and harrowing, it’ll slap you awake.

The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.

It’s an unapologetically soft ride in the slice-of-life sweepstakes, flecked with era-specific archival footage as connective tissue, but with a sneaky, gathering poignancy that prioritizes the journey over story payoffs.

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.

Classify Pietro Marcello’s sweet new film Scarlet at your own risk, because its pleasures are as diverse and unexpected as a stroll through uncharted lands: Mapping the terrain wouldn’t be half as enjoyable as letting the place host its own truths and enchantments.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

Demolition is a state of mind in White Building, Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang’s sad, beautiful feature debut, an urban elegy about what’s thick in the air when the home one has always known is not long for the world.

Philippe winds up with a curatorial hodgepodge; the lovingly cited connections about shifting realities, artifice, searching and all those plush Lynchian curtains never coalesce into anything unifying, and sometimes get repeated by different narrators.

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.

Oakley’s interrogating approach of a moral moment and McEwen’s portrayal of see-through armor help us understand the viewpoint of someone who was never going to be a hero, but who could tragically internalize a rising hatred that might upend her life at any moment.

It’s a winning cast, but don’t be surprised if you think about how many commercials for good times with friends or wellness products could be excerpted from the buoyant cinematography and editing style of Rise.

The race to the end is certainly technically proficient, and all the actors gamely play out the ride (including an acid-tangy Marin Ireland making the most of her two scenes). But it’s not horror anymore — more like a medical drama with a race-against-time diagnosis and cure — and ultimately no memorable deepening of King’s ruthlessly efficient, vividly sketched black hole.

Reality reaches beyond Winner’s experience on one momentous Saturday afternoon to prod us all into contemplating our own relationship to actions over words, and the powerfully wielded consequences that keep many — but thankfully, not all of us — from doing nothing.

Unabashedly theatrical in presentation but broken up with interludes of nature, this Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

At its best, 32 Sounds gets us to consider the transformative, context-rich qualities of any given swath of audio.

The Starling Girl doesn’t always hold our attention, mainly due to an occasionally shaggy pace that forgets we’re often ahead of the plot. There are also two endings: one built on a choice of Jem’s that’s incredibly stirring and naturally tense, but then a subsequent scene with music and dance that reads more like something scripted to be a meaningful bookend.

Whether you see Lévy, a spritely 74, as a hot spot gadfly or a dedicated war reporter, there’s no denying his dedication to the cause.

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.

It can feel more like an audio/visual presentation for a decarbonization conference than an impassioned, artful work building its message to a fever pitch.

Manzoor, an instinctive stylist, always finds an honest vibe to win you over, whether it’s sisterly camaraderie (or annoyance), youthful awkwardness or you’re-going-down spunk, which allows the abundant personality in her wonderful cast to hit all the necessary top notes.

"Everything” — anchored by strong performances from Marceau and Dussollier — is a refreshingly in-the-moment chronicle of what it means to love someone enough to grant them something so final, and, in a society that doesn’t fully accept it, to see it through legally and logistically.

A long-overdue creation corrective that gives an outwardly revolutionary cultural icon his trailblazing due at the same time it grapples with the conflicted soul that rarely knew a lasting inner peace.

As the satire retains its acridness to the very end, Sick of Myself proves itself well-aware that narcissists don’t learn lessons — they learn how to adapt.

Some films benefit from tying their persuasive abilities to sustained righteousness more than careful slickness, and this collaboration between Cheyenne filmmaker West and veteran documentarian Kempner (“The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”) is one of them.

Millepied’s debut . . . is a woefully pretentious and uninvolving slog, an arthouse screen-saver only sporadically ignited by its two best components: composer Nicholas Britell and Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma as a flamboyant nightclub owner-performer.

Paint may ultimately be just modestly amusing, but at least it understands that a palette of well-blended tones has a better chance of earning our laughs than the one-color-fits-all kind.

Thankfully, in the stretches when Monk is playing, he gets to be exactly who he is, his exhilarating music doing the talking, his exquisite dissonance suddenly more revelatory than perhaps intended.

Nature nurtured into an eerie consciousness by a celluloid craftsman, it feels like a throwback to “Wicker Man”-era folk-tinged freakouts — confounding enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those ready for a pot of its brew, plenty transporting and tingling.

Rodeo takes its blind corners and open roads with plenty of ferocity, but also a necessary compassion for the searching force of nature at its center.

Cinema doesn’t suffer for shoutouts to the great Italian stylists of the grotesque and/or bleak, but we could also use more descendants of Risi’s sturdy faith in the alchemy of well-timed long shots, middle shots and close-ups in real-world settings to reveal simple, lasting, bittersweet truths about people.

Is 65 a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull.

Ithaka isn’t as effective an advocacy doc as it could be, sometimes feeling trapped between wanting to intellectualize with onscreen text and contextualized history and looking for observational moments that crystallize the pain and concern for the Assange family.

Ritchie has always been a performative director, so maybe Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is right in line with his jocular acts of gutter criminality and Hollywood imitations, existing in a kind of touristy netherworld of entertainment – more a handsomely mounted “ruse” of an action comedy than one itself.

A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.

As Katsoupis’s exhibitionist experiment teeters between prickly psychological suspense and yawing pretension, it’s always Dafoe — perhaps channeling the audacious immersion of his roots in Wooster Group theater — who mesmerizingly portrays this “Inside” job as if his life and art counted on it.

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.

Gravel, in the heart-stopping vein of Belgium’s social-realism-minded Dardennes brothers, invests his protagonist’s one-challenge-at-a-time needs with the kind of visual intimacy and racing rhythm that makes us feel intensely close to Julie, from first sprint in her dehumanizing day to the exhaling bathtub soak she takes each night.

A sumptuous travelogue it is not; a visually stunning, soul-clenching examination of the curious push/pull between humans and the environment it most certainly is.

In its empathy-driven terror and ghoulish wit — including the Chekhov’s-gun rule hilariously applied to the placenta — “Baby Ruby” won’t be for everyone, although it only ever feels steeped in the honesty of experience, which, according to the press materials, was partly Wohl’s own.

[A] fleet, gripping documentary.

An often tense release-valve scenario flecked with moments of dream imagery and lyrical naturalism, “Beautiful Beings” certainly positions Guðmundsson as one of the more thoughtful chroniclers of the awkward age, even if he never quite knows how to corral his many moods into something wholly resonant about the nihilistic trap of delinquency.

As a micro case study about some acutely flawed 21st century strivers, When You Finish Saving the World has its well-turned moments, but when you want it to be gloriously messy about families and human interactions, it stays resolutely in lab mode.

It’s all great fun, even if there’s no central performance as riveting as Cho’s in “Searching.” Then again, acting in movies like this is an admittedly uphill battle, one that Reid is better at when not having to rely on the occasionally tinny dialogue. Long, Leung and de Almeida, meanwhile, fill the tapestry of intrigue efficiently and appealingly.

Some not great things happen in Mars One. And there is agony. But there are also the good things done in response that keep families like these soldiering on.

Movies about the people who grow our food, who struggle as honest land stewards in a time of heartless industry, are few and far between, making Alcarràs a rare gem. In its unforced, plaintive artistry, it nurtures to a palpable ripeness the beauty and burden in these all-too-hidden lives.

Loudmouth is better when it operates along parallel histories of strife and battle: galling incidents that expose America’s racial fault lines, and how Sharpton’s activism affected those spaces.

Overall, Corsage shows a tantalizing way forward for the hopelessly staid biopic genre: honoring, provoking and upending with verve and humor as it liberates a complex woman from iconography’s deadening glamour.

Forster’s haphazard direction is so checked-out it’s painful – he shows no interest in giving anyone a scene that isn’t wholly about snapping something into place, and his comedy mise-en-scène and timing in even the simplest moments of humor is flat. And the less said about Thomas Newman’s phoned-in score, the better.

With its aura of melancholic humanity and last-minute grace, Living reminds us that we’re all susceptible to a personal “infrastructure week,” but that it’s never too late to do something about it.

The Quiet Girl is both the best reason movies should look to more compact narratives for adaptation and, in a few instances, indicative of where cinematic choices can leave unnecessary footprints. But everything in this heartfelt tale is made with the deepest sincerity, and gently packed with soulful portrayals and lovely imagery.

With its mix of collected video, on-the-ground scenes in more than a dozen cities, interviews with Ukrainians (including some dissenting Russian voices), and media coverage, “Freedom on Fire” is a pulsating jumble of hearts and minds making do amid war and wreckage.

As Leonor Will Never Die parties to its close, Escobar reminds us that while life is unerringly finite, cinema is the complicated, messy, riotous love affair that never has to end.

This is a movie that could probably have done with less chronological vérité or media moments and more wide-ranging interviews drawing out observations from Prakash, Gunn-Wright, Rojas and AOC, because whenever we do get to hear them, we can see how smart, interesting and perceptive they are, and why they’re needed for the challenges ahead.

If you’ve ever doubted how art, rage or action can make meaningful change, Goldin’s combination of all three fighting an opioid crisis that nearly killed her is exhilarating proof of the power of “screaming in the streets,” to borrow what the queer artist David Wojnarowicz — one of many close friends of Goldin’s whom the AIDS epidemic took — wryly described as a necessary ritual of the living in a time of too much death.

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.

Clermont-Tonnerre’s emphasis on playfulness and energy is understandable, but an opportunity to bring back a layered epicness to sex on film feels lost.

Being privy to this proud, close family at such a heavy, teetering moment is naturally emotional, which means Sbarge’s occasional voice-over commentary and the overactive music score can feel superfluous. But it’s well-intentioned empathy.

Heineman’s trust in what his camera reveals — in the forlorn faces of U.S. soldiers, in the slump of Sadat’s demeanor, in the distraught eyes of a mother caught in that Kabul airport scrum of the desperate — tells its own necessary story of war wreckage.

“Love, Charlie” plays like a whirlwind story, and an often entertaining one, but there’s no breathing room to process anything beyond hitting the highs and lows. We’re left in some unresolved limbo between celebrating what makes a high-end restaurant sing and considering this culinary legend’s life a cautionary tale.

The cars are the stars in Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, a pamphletized biopic that does the easy thing — beautifying Italy and vintage automobiles — but stalls with everything involving humans.

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.

Whether we read about someone like Hasna or watch such a sad journey dramatized, it’s worth being reminded that stories like these always leave behind many who are forced to reckon with a society’s notion of what and whom they resemble.

The Wonder undeniably resonates in these confounding times concerning belief, fact and manipulation.

As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?

With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.

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.