Roxana Hadadi

The franchise has always centered Blanc as the champion of the underserved, but in leaning away from his shenanigans and slapstick and making space for someone like Father Jud to illustrate the film’s worldview, Wake Up Dead Man shows how much it has on its mind.

Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable.

To a Land Unknown presents the cousins’ ordeal as something no person should have to go through, something unnatural and surreal and Kafkaesque. But there’s also a creeping devastation in how the film convinces us of their pain and of all the opportunities and chances that were stolen from them through statelessness.

The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give.

Thanks partially to actual protest footage filmed by Woman, Life, Freedom participants, there’s a thoroughness to the way the film presents the perspectives of the young women living in the country.

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

Alongside Gladstone’s expressive performance, Fancy Dance’s ability to choreograph that criticism gives the film a singular grace.

Sex can be a rigid rubric of performance for some and a fluid experiment in expression for others. The friction between those two perspectives fascinates Femme, a volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

Under the Fig Trees is a big-minded film that grounds its ideas about labor, sexism, faith, and modernity in the zippy rhythms of its characters’ negotiations around friendship, romance, and work. Most of the film’s runtime is people talking, but with evocative dialogue and lived-in performances from mostly first-time actors, it’s an unapologetic slice of life.

The documentary may be understated, with its long dialogue-free stretches. But the distractions that pull Abbass’s stare away from her daughter’s lens give Bye Bye Tiberias a pointedly political backbone that the documentary buoys with clever editing and a tangible self-assuredness.

What elevates the film above trauma-porn gore and pushes it into transcendence, though, is how its philosophical script and unshakeable performances navigate the question of whether survival is a transgression against God.

It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Chloe Domont’s film divides the entire world into binary moments of understanding and misunderstanding — without the shades of gray that would make Fair Play and its characters more tangible and its central tension less didactic.

You’ll remember Anaita Wali Zada’s eyes. As Donya, an Afghan refugee in the wry and wistful Fremont, the first-time actor is a steadily building wave, a maelstrom of intention and purpose.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline wants to pick a fight, and it does so with an appealing lack of artifice, its heart on its sleeve and its agenda in its punching fists.

The relationship McInerny and Tucker build is so convincing in its mixture of exploitation and yearning that Palm Trees and Power Lines capably secures what Lea desires most too: your attention.

Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.

Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.

The people who maintain the status quo are those with power, and those with power are often unwilling to share: with those who are weaker, with those who are younger, with those who are other. The propulsive energy of the film is driven both by that injustice and by the scars it leaves on places and on people, and so the horror, the horror, of Saloum is both timeless and timely.

Akl and Clara Roqet’s script provides depth to these characters and immerses us in each of their perspectives and relationships — which shift along lines of blood and love.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

Neptune Frost is a mission statement by way of a musical, and its defining image is a middle finger taking up the whole lens.

Bob’s Burgers patently rejects cynicism, and The Bob’s Burgers Movie is no different. It’s a pleasantly unchallenging expansion of the family-friendship-loyalty worldview that Bouchard and the Belchers have made their own.

There is a sparseness to Hit the Road that reveals the intuitiveness of Panahi’s filmmaking, his grasp of these characters and how they tug and poke at each other, and his understanding of the ways fear, paranoia, and loss turn us into people we might not like, let alone recognize.

When Kurzel does penetrate the unkempt veil of Jones’s hair and closes in on his face, it’s to capture how the actor sprints from one emotion to another, alluding to the impetuousness and spontaneity at play within Nitram.

These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.

The quiet poignancy of the film’s previous vignettes are almost overshadowed by the goofiness of Weerasethakul’s final explanation. And though that doesn’t ruin the film, it doesn’t quite match Memoria’s other layers of curiosity and complexity, either.