Robert Abele

Of course, our desire to know more may be the aim in his making art out of civilization’s rubble — that he can get us to pay attention through the sheer majesty of how he pays attention, hopefully making for true engagement, not mere spectating. Still, sometimes you just want more than what you’re given. That’s human too.

Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.

What exists in this visualized afterward may not look like anything, but that’s why we’re fortunate to have artists like Vasyanovych to show us what’s dazzling, strange, tragic, comic, touching and eventually optimistic about the way forward.

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.

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc’s immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness. Acasă, My Home is much more complicated, as any thorough portrait of our modern world is when progress is a balance between old and new ways and people like the Enaches find their notions of survival and independence challenged.

Even with a thinly drawn lead, Blizzard of Souls maintains an undeniably raw power as a small country’s coming-of-age story, told through a bright-eyed wannabe hero and forged in a maelstrom of death and disillusionment.

That silver-lining nature is also what keeps “Herself” from entirely distinguishing itself, too often leaving an admittedly powerful story about female fortitude to rely on schematics and clichés instead of the accumulated impact of its many well-played human details.

Handsomely mounted if never exactly stirring, Louis van Beethoven honors the struggles that gnawed at brilliance but is itself little more than an elegantly tailored time-filler.

The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.

In its modest, quiet maturity, Luxor avoids the cliché of presenting the East as exotic or renewal as a catharsis — it’s the rare travel story that understands how sometimes being someplace else is as much about the “being” as it is the “someplace else.”

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

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.

With every line and look, Loren both reminds us of her legacy playing tenacious women and paints Rosa’s distinctive fire and grief like an artisan. It’s a compact master class in the movie star’s craft: exquisitely tailored glamour and deft characterization working seamlessly in tandem.

However one ultimately feels about Fisk’s reportorial compass, This Is Not a Movie presents a necessary, thought-provoking portrait of a dedicated truth-seeker.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.

Justine recalls the golden era of the conscientious, well-acted movie of the week: a slice of life built around hardships, but without exploiting them.

Like a fan excitedly showing off their record collection, the documentary Streetlight Harmonies flips through its history of doo-wop telling a tale both tuneful and essential in the development of rhythm & blues, rock and roll and civil rights.

Thanks to Crip Camp, we can all get a window into how a struggle is unified, people are emboldened, and differences are made.

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.

A briny Northeastern noir powered by women with secrets, Blow the Man Down is a pleasantly spiky slinging of small-town sin that should prove to be eminently companionable viewing for these sequestered, streamable times.

In its extreme length and precise technique, it’s decidedly not for everybody. But although it is at times distractingly opaque, occasionally Heise’s family’s words, juxtaposed with his sounds and images, crystallize into something singularly wise about the nexus of place, history and trauma.

First-time feature filmmaker Dave Wilson and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Mile 22”) can manipulate the speed of combat scenes all he wants (the stylistic crutch of a slo-mo point of contact is evergreen) but dull choreography, CGI overuse and Cuisinart editing are still the bane of today’s action sequences.

Their street-level stories, frequent Cannes winners since 1999’s “Rosetta,” typically hinge on a central desperation tied to simple survival, but when played out with their trademark visual restlessness and character-driven purposefulness, they’re often as nail-biting as any genre exercise or melodrama.

The fact that Laverty and Loach take their cues from research and interviews keeps the tension visceral, not artificially heightened. More than usual for these evergreen chroniclers of everyday strife, their politics contextualizes the drama, and vice versa. In their domestic gut-punch of a story, they’ve exposed our new feudalism in a way that feels honest and blisteringly human.

For good stretches, The Banker can be as dryly engineered as a loan application, but the galvanizing story it tells — like a last stand of rebel ingenuity before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made discrimination unlawful — is a solid interest-earner.

It makes for one of the more alive portraits of artists in the moment you’re likely to see, a thumping gallery show forged from survival, and assembled out of passion and need.

When the focus is on how he made Playboy pop on the page — as backed by archival footage, interviews with Paul and those who worked for him, plus plenty of examples from the issues — director Jennifer Hou Kwong’s movie compels as a portrait of unwavering dedication to aesthetics and breakout creativity.

There’s no getting around how enjoyable it is to watch Coogan effortlessly play an entitled bastard, whether giving it or getting it. He’s so expert at the darkly witty, cringe-while-laughing insult, it’s like watching a pro athlete in flight; it’s a shame Winterbottom’s ambitions for Greed weren’t greater as a rollicking, truly scary picture of unrepentant gluttony.