Robert Abele

If its wobbliness doesn't always serve its commanding central performance, the movie does mark a sensitive, low-key approach to outsiders of any kind, one that legitimizes their struggle without selling them as ready-made saints.

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.

Because it's all shot to look like a South Korean noir, with umpteen slo-mo shots and stylistic noodlings to affect a kind of grimy urban anti-hero chic, Christensen effectively leeches the emotion from the central story.

Director and co-writer David Wnendt is after serious comedy here, a character study of psychic pain, wounds hereditary and self-inflicted, and body-conscious absurdity that treats the human condition with wry intelligence, not empty prurience.

Composed of breathtaking images and cheeky bits of humor, Dencik's travelogue reveals a journey with curious traces of the past, eye-popping encounters with a wild present and — in discovering an oil company's ship in the group's midst — a weighted reminder of our future as stewards of the Earth.

Icaros is a mini-epic of serene, intelligent mind-body wooziness.

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.

In giving historical context to the poisonous nature of our oft-bemoaned political discourse, "Best of Enemies" showcases brainy bloodsport with humor, nostalgia and, appropriately, a lacing of melancholy.

[Filho's] mastery of pacing, theme and stylistic eccentricity throughout Neighboring Sounds is so assured as to be breathtaking. Don't miss it.

Director James Kent’s adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s 2014 novel — about a ghost-like Germany, a broken British marriage, and the healing powers of a passionate thaw — has the unfortunate quality of a hot-blooded soap grafted onto rather than merged with a historical-political drama.

It’s also worth remembering that someone as complex as Alvin Ailey isn’t going to be captured in any one film. Ailey is, therefore, best absorbed as an elegant, impressionistic primer, a chance to bask in his mastery of movement and dance, as framed by those near enough to him to know what it took out of him to gift it to the world.

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.

It’s disappointing that the story machinations get in the way, because the lived-in heft of Collins’ turn is better suited to the atmospheric portrait inside “Jockey,” the one scored for tonal moodiness by Bryce and Aaron Dessner, than the story that shoehorns in a dubiously engineered motivation late in the film for added drama it didn’t need.

Prophet's Prey is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.

This is the rare Morris movie that feels led by the personality of its star figure, in this case Dorfman’s wry positivity and love of what she does, rather than his need to probe.

A striking and maddening delivery system for art house creepinesss.

Think Guy Maddin as the long-lost seventh Python. But it’s also one of the more vivid and amusing excursions in a year marked by unclassifiable realities and the need for diverting art.

Catnip for comedy nerds and psychoanalysts, "Jim & Andy" works as both a vibrant raising-of-the-dead for the crazed, showbiz-piercing genius that was Kaufman — there's plenty of footage from his performance-art career — and a peek into the mind of a massively talented, box office-busting comedy star at a self-doubting, turbulent time in his life

A documentary that shouldn't have to be made, about a law that needn't exist, explored via a crime that could have been avoided: 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets is a thought-provoking, mournful experience, perhaps more so in the wake of the killings in Charleston, S.C.

Joy and redemption aren't exactly punk mantras, but A Band Called Death might just give your heart a thrashing.