Robert Abele

The result is a film made of loosely connected scenes, the best ones floating between observation and storytelling, not unlike a dream.

Though its seriousness of purpose and visuals of trees whole and hewn keep Peepal Tree intermittently compelling, one wishes the more pointed audaciousness of Kanadé’s last film, the stylish acting-school melodrama “CRD,” were in effect here to rev the urgency of what is clearly a deeply personal crusade for the filmmaker.

Hive is occasionally bumpy, but it’s the rough terrain of a raw narrative — the out-of-place music cue or awkward dream snippet doesn’t disrupt the social realist momentum, which is at its best when focused on the grit of how moving forward is also moving on.

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.

Low-key and likable, the Nassers’ Gaza Mon Amour is a movie with no use for sentimentality but in which the timing of a simple kindness, a nervous smile or a cathartic laugh means everything. Which it often can.

As breezy primers go in a life that’s as full as it gets, this collection of the archival and the anecdotal, with the occasional preparing of dishes as mouth-watering interludes, is decidedly more feast than fast food.

A mishmash of star power, bleakness, CGI and the cutes, it will on the one hand remind you of how charmingly adaptive Hanks can be, while the same time proving just how problematic the end of the world is as a scenario for schematic heart-tugging.

As messy (and even physical) as the family’s exchanges can get, Benguigui always has the sisters’ inherent solidarity in mind. But it’s still a jarring mix of tones to contend with, and the many narrative strands — which include a trip to Algeria — aren’t all satisfactorily resolved.

If it sounds critical to say that the resolution of the murder at the center of the narrative is the least interesting aspect of the movie’s intrigue, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What makes Eternals feel special is that, for once, the director genuinely cares as much about the character within that spectacle, as the spectacle itself.

Jacquot pays tribute to his mentor and friend, by adapting Suzanna Andler less as the movie you want than as an intimate walk along that precipice of desire or nothingness.

Becoming Cousteau may not be as deep a journey as some would hope, but for having to chart a lot of years, it hits its points about passion, fame and activism smartly, even movingly.

The blurring of real testimony with a compassionate filmmaker’s inventions is so compelling that when the documentary portion arrives, the movie can’t help but sink a bit.

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.

The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.

When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.

Set on a remote farm in the Icelandic tundra that could center either a horror film or a children’s fable, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature — which is sorta both — is in certain ways unexplainable, and in other ways as straightforward as a family portrait.

As a representative display of historical-but-reimagined players on well-worn ground, The Harder They Fall has undeniable pop, but as a movie needing character, narrative, and pacing beyond revitalized nostalgia, it’s all too often a bloody, showy mishmash that rarely holds its clichés and archetypes together with any lasting resonance.

Ponciroli shows natural flair for holstered and unholstered suspense (if not always story logic), plus he’s got a worthy partner in the muted exteriors and sparsely lit interiors of John Matysiak’s cinematography, and a cast that dutifully plays along with every stare-down and line of colorfully poetic cowboy dialogue.

If there’s a quibble with this graphically imagined The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s one common to the movies Coen made with his brother: It’s ruthless, intelligent, and entertaining, and mightily drinkable as filmmaking, without necessarily raising the emotional temperature past a clinical, grim efficiency. Often, even with the never-not-human Washington going for it, dazzlingly so.

The intimacy, warmth and humor of the memories give the footage of him teaching the feeling of watching home movies from the adoring offspring of a cherished father.

In the aggregate, Karam’s directing is so meticulously composed about conveying the density of what’s unsaid, and the mood around the people instead of the people creating the mood, that “The Humans” can feel a bit suffocating.

To the less patient viewer, the lack of clarity on the finer points of high finance and characters’ backgrounds and not getting period-orienting news updates about the political situation, might seem confounding. But Azor works without them, because those details would only disrupt the artfully portentous chill Fontana gets from the pitch-perfect performances and design, and Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography.

In eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

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.

At its best — when the flow of voices, archival clips (co-director Pollard being a master at the textural impact of found footage), and nicely blended-in recreations made to look archival, is thematically strongest — "Citizen Ashe" becomes a documentary about how experience becomes voice becomes action.

A road movie that, considering who made it, starts pretty far down that road, Cry Macho is familiar and loose, sometimes rattly, occasionally wince-inducing, and in a few moments genuine in ways no one else seems to know how to do anymore.

As a curdled storybook, Bad Tales is highly watchable. The problem is that the brothers aren’t telling stories fueled by powerful characters; they’re staging awkward cruelties as if for a gallery show.