Robert Abele

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.

While not enough to sell Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Bardem’s mission to out-cartoon his animated scene partner (admittedly not difficult) still feels like a blow struck for old-school flesh-and-blood eccentricity in the age of blah digital cutes. May that battle continue.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.

It’s worth being reminded by James’s layered, grippingly told account of a principled betrayal that when it comes to the biggest threats facing the globe, sometimes one person in the right circumstance can make a difference.

Thankfully, Hold Me Tight, with Amalric’s alert, empathetic stewardship and Krieps’ gripping portrayal, sets aside the banality of grief’s burden for something more alive and elusive, but no less affecting.

In a sense, Dos Estaciones creates its own gripping shot-chaser cycle of moods, the accumulative effect of landscape beauty, grim news, observed process (the machinery of making tequila), and abiding solemnity from Sánchez’s commanding turn, giving us plenty to digest when the incident-heavy final stretch occurs.

Baumbach’s textural/visual/sonic approach is stylish enough that even when White Noise is just churning along, there’s always a keen detail to absorb or killer observation to take in, if not an emotion to latch onto.

In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.

Maybe if you hate movies, LaBute’s attempt to bore us to death with classic noir material is a nifty prank. For anyone else, you’re better off revisiting Garfield and Turner, or Stanwyck and MacMurray, or Hurt and Turner — or even “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

It assuredly can’t be easy for a filmmaker to choose whether to leave viewers motivated by warmth or woe. Yet your capacity to be both awed and enraged is ultimately well-served by “The Territory,” a gripping portrait of an endangered community for whom nature is both their precious environment and the facet of humanity that can all too easily be turned malicious.

Rogue Agent is plenty fascinated by the abridged version of this saga — bad men are out there — but you’ll wish for that darker, less cleanly shaped telling the more you think about its scarier contours.

Girl Picture is designed to feel as closely observed as a diary, but it’s also like being pulled along by a friend eager for you to experience what they go through, see things the way they do, to just get it and have a great time too. That’s a special kind of invitation, and Girl Picture is more than enough movie to make its compassion for the lives of teenage girls a swirling, swooning high.

This may be the first movie to apply the Chekhov’s gun rule to vultures, a portent sure to satisfy the more horror-minded ticket buyers, not to mention anyone else eager for the kind of back-to-basics survival excitement “Fall” refreshingly serves up in this dreary age of apocalyptic popcorn emptiness.

Hints of Koy’s stage charm burst through occasionally in Easter Sunday — mostly because he’s also playing a comedian trying to hit the big time, so stand-up-like bits are built in (or crammed in) — but as directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (“Super Troopers”), who also has a small role as an agent, this feature opportunity is a woefully run-of-the-mill, laugh-challenged attempt to translate Koy’s comedy to the big screen.

Thirteen Lives may be a vivid rescue procedural first and foremost, but it’s also a testament to the guardian spirit possible in any of us.

Big swings can make for big misses, and that’s the situation writer-director Quinn Shephard’s internet satire-screed “Not Okay” finds itself in, lining up all kinds of juicy targets regarding fame and shame in our social media age, but proving not so discerning about character, humor, and story when it comes to following-through.

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down never fully escapes its branded-content vibes, but as a parallel love story and back-to-battle story, it succeeds.

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

Lest you think this is all a bit much for one family to endure, Rasoulof’s storytelling acumen is firmly in the realm of propulsive, detail-driven ethical thriller built on its character’s actions, rather than mere punching-bag melodrama. And it goes somewhere, most importantly, with its ideas, leaving you after its final, devastating image with something to think about instead of simply abandoned with your rage or pity.