Steve Pond

As with many of the other recent documentaries about abuse, it hits hard, making it difficult to watch without being both heartbroken and enraged by a system that, in the words of one gymnast, “would sacrifice our young to win.”

It’s an acerbic, tough look back, which makes it a rarity in a genre that often (and sometimes effectively) dons rose-colored glasses.

Both actors are riveting in this sad duet, and Lafosse isn’t much interested in giving them a facile reconciliation. Everything is hard in The Restless, a potent drama that never quite succumbs to dread but always keeps it close at hand.

Moonage Daydream is a bracing, gloriously messy (or, more likely, gloriously messy seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie.

The footage, as personal as it is horrific, is often hard to watch.

Deliciously disjointed and dreamlike, it eludes easy tracking and relies on the odd beauty of its imagery; at first, it makes you wonder how David Lynch might tackle a film about depression.

As befits its subjects, Marianne & Leonard is as much poetry as documentary — it’s a gentle, rhapsodic film, an emotional change of pace for its director and a moving portrait of a love that still resonates.

There’s nothing showy about Amrum, but it can leave an audience shaken. Akin has fashioned a rare film that relies on the power of simplicity to tell a story that is anything but simple.

The Western is a genre weighted down with dark history, and Henry is a man in the same position, haunted to a degree that Nelson makes transfixing.

A carefully staged and meticulously cast presentation disguised as a cinema verité documentary, it’s confounding if you feel compelled to put a label on it but raucously moving if you take it as a day-long adventure with a group of fascinating characters.

You could argue that Sorrentino is treading water after the deeply personal explorations in “The Hand of God,” but these are rich and mysterious waters to tread. “Parthenope” is a work of casual mastery; you could say that it’s great and it’s beautiful.

The old footage puts us in the studio in 1994, the new moments supply some valuable context and the ragged nature of the film eventually begins to feel of a piece with the ragged nature of the album.

The film skims over much of MacGowan’s post-Pogues career and doesn’t include any old bandmates talking about him. It’s not the Shane MacGowan chronology; it’s the Shane MacGowan experience. And that’s a tough, heartbreaking and inspiring experience.

Where “The Father” was subtle and twisty, this drama is more agitated and restless, even melodramatic at times – but that’s a directorial decision that certainly fits the dark and troubling subject that the film explores but doesn’t exploit.

For all the battles that Nadia wages when she’s in the water, this is a subdued and subtly powerful look at the unexpected perils of dry land.

It is not artful. It is urgent and ruthless and horrifying, and it shows the unspeakable.

In a movie whose setup that almost inevitably leads to rampant sentimentality, Pugh and Garfield are enormously charming actors who are also skilled at undercutting their own charm; they commit to the sentiment without yielding to it, making We Live in Time a truly charming and surprisingly rich film.

Clara Sola mixes religion, mysticism and sexuality in a way that feels simultaneously odd, disquieting and richly rewarding. It starts out beautifully restrained and ends up somewhere else entirely, but it’s all the more interesting for its split personality.

it’s an endearing Sundance bonbon: quirky but not annoying, charming but not cloying, slight but in a good way.

Things come to a head in a way that is simultaneously slapstick-y and touching, and entirely in keeping with a movie that has never lost its sense of charm through an hour and a half of twists and turns and engaging mountain escapades.

Everlasting Storm is an anthology film that is as uneven as most anthology films, but one that offers a disquieting and essential snapshot of the time from which we hope we’re emerging. Like the lockdown itself, it can be a slog and it can be a kick.

Dark and unsettling, The Forgiven doesn’t ask us to like its characters, but it forces us to watch as privilege begins to shatter and people for whom everything feels inconsequential have to deal with consequences.

The Way I See It is a marvelous portrait of Souza and of two administrations that not coincidentally also works as a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump. It is decidedly not a film for Trump fans, but others may well find themselves moved and saddened by the contrasts between then and now.

The film can be confusing, but it’s not meant to be pinned down. And despite the occasionally surreal touches, it’s an examination of how the beauty of tradition can also be an opponent to justice and humanity.

At an hour and 27 minutes, the film has the feel of an exquisite miniature, succinct and evocative.

"The Story of Film" is long (though not by Cousins’ standards), it’s infuriating at times (entirely by design) and it overstates its case with defiant glee (again, it meant to do that), but you can’t love movies and not love a good chunk of what Cousins puts on the screen.

The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives.

It’s disturbing and messy, a fever dream for a disturbing and messy time in Brazil. And occasionally, it’s a lot of fun, too.