Ryan Lattanzio

While the meandering sensibility of Acasa, My Home makes it a tough sit at times, the spell it casts through its all-access dive into subterranean life brought to the surface forms a compelling addition to one of international cinema’s deepest, and ever-growing, pockets.

It’s a challenging movie, but one so overflowingly empathetic for even its cruelest characters that the emotional beats outweigh the headier structural conceits that make for a narrative often hazy, out of reach, and gorgeously weblike.

In not trying to reach too deeply into the well of profundity, Sarnoski has incidentally achieved a pretty profound movie.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

This film is about the contagious power of storytelling — which includes lying and self-deception — and what a potentially lethal device it can be in the wrong or even right hands.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

Rockwell’s direction is sophisticated and visually imaginative even as the movie could benefit from a tighter edit around its New York cast of characters and the rapidly changing city in the hands of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.

While Chasing Ghosts is hardly as bold in its stylistic approach as Traylor, that’s by design, as the documentary is keen to get out of the way and let the work speak for itself. This movie should introduce one of the greatest artists you’ve probably never heard of to a bigger audience.

The central narrative, of the emotional dance between these two men over decades, holds even as the running time, while never boring you, often feels exaggerated for the sake of epicness rather than wholly necessary to this telling.

With a Michael Haneke-esque impassive glaze and a Ruben Östlund-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the film acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families.

While the narrative hardly goes into the fully unhinged direction it teases, it’s pleasantly askew and always marching to its own strange and, slightly off, beat.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography is a film of many visual pleasures, and they’re ones Preciado clearly shared in while devising this generous and buoyant inquiry into institution and identity.

Without Kidman in a fearless turn and Dickinson there to pivot her to the edge, “Babygirl” wouldn’t work as smashingly as it does. This is a sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work. Don’t sleep on it.

Luzzu is beautifully shot, if at times emotionally restrained, in its centering around a man who’s occasionally hard to read. But it boast a true discovery in the casting of Jesmark Scicluna, a real fisherman who plays a version of himself, and here playing a struggling parent trying to eke out a living along the docks.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, Mirrors No. 3, is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it.

If you want your del Toro weirder, Frankenstein might not be your cup. But if you want a period monster movie that’s solid, almost oaken in its sturdiness, you don’t need to knock on wood to assure that del Toro is keeping the innermost essence, the soul of cinema, alive at least.

[A] sturdily enjoyable if emotionally uninsightful heart-tugger that aims straight down the middle of the audience for a mildly reassuring experience mostly made with families in mind.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Kendrick makes the case for why she belongs in more dramatic roles that allow her to shed her normally peppy usually cheery onscreen persona. We know how good she is, and we’d only love to see more.

Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Girl” still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed lacks for drama in its portrayal of the quotidian realities of sexual kink, but Arnow’s voice is distinctive, shrewd, and spiky enough to keep it afloat.

As a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, Maestro succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic.