Steve Pond

Miller is after immediacy, not reflection or explanation.

Below the Clouds is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.

Does the film explain “Hallelujah?” Of course not – the song stubbornly resists explanation, because it’s so many different things and because there’s a beautiful mystery at its heart. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is smart enough to embrace that mystery and that beauty, and to know that there’s far more to Cohen than can be summed up in four, or seven, or even 150 verses.

Fahrenheit 11/9 grows slowly from an exhausting movie that is all over the map to a rousing one that makes a call to arms in troubled times.

Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive.

If it may be a return to familiar pleasures rather than an excursion into anything new, that’s hardly a problem when those familiar pleasures include Herzog dropping bon mots.

For better and for worse, Carax never goes for half measures and Annette never stops being bold and weird.

As Zappa makes clear, Frank Zappa spent his whole career keeping himself unique, often to his credit and occasionally to his detriment. Winter’s movie does the same, in a way that does justice to a guy who’s not easy to do justice to.

This is not Farhadi doing a genre exercise; as is most of his work, Everybody Knows is a quietly gripping examination of societal divisions, of class, of secrets that bind us together and pull us apart.

From “Body Heat” to “Fargo,” women have driven the action in noir films before — but the way this one plays out, with AARP-age women holding all the cards in a setting we usually associate with rugged men, feels like a genuinely fresh take on a time-honored genre. And the ending, all cagey glances and serene indifference hiding some seriously twisted stuff, is downright delicious.

American Symphony is about the creation of art in the face of pressure, tragedy and heartbreak, and about the tension between the glory of creation and the pain of living. It manages to capture the glory but it never ignores the price.

In the end, Donnersmarck has it both ways: He’s sentimental and he’s provocative, a craftsman who has something to say and it going to take his time saying it.

The setup is durable, as “Russian Doll” has most recently proven, but Barbakow, Samberg, Milioti and writer Andy Siara find a freshness in the way they play with it and the way they mess with the romantic comedy tropes that are all but inevitable when you stick a couple together like this movie does.

You can come for the music and stay for the politics, or vice versa; either way, it’s a vibrant document of an inspiring event that never loses sight of what that event meant for a community, a city and a culture.

An elegant chamber piece that deals with big issues – life, death, family, guilt, grief – in a beautifully austere way, Coming Home Again rarely raises its voice, but it cuts deeply.

Sharp and warm ... It reaffirms a distinctive cinematic voice who might be going back to his greatest hits, but has brought something new to them.

It’s hard to say that any WWII film can feel fresh after decades of documentation, but Apocalypse ’45 finds a way to trade in the typical war-doc toolkit for something more personal and more striking.

It is a quiet movie until it isn’t, a gentle character study that goes into extreme territory, a wrenching drama that you think is about finding acceptance until it threatens to become about the impossibility of that very thing.

In this time for movies about teens in trouble, it’s the mom in this one who packs the biggest punch.

The action meanders, but there’s always an undercurrent of dread. And while many of the episodes are down to earth, the filmmaking lets things flow from image to image with lines that search for deeper truths but don’t advance the plot.

The Shrouds is sober, serious and profoundly sad Cronenberg. It’s still a hell of a ride, but it’s going down a road where there’s a heavy toll.

It’s unexpectedly touching and even lovely, a grandly sad benediction to people who don’t need no stinkin’ test to tell them who their soulmate is.

While it sometimes feels as if it’s just not enough fun, once you get to the twin switcheroos and then the insane ending, you have little choice but to buy into horror-audience protocol and embrace it for the bloody hoot it is.

EPiC is Elvis through the Baz lens, where big and bold is always preferable to straightforward and where going over-the-top is never considered a bad thing. If it’s not revelatory for people who’ve seen the existing films from the era, it’s the most imaginative, generous and entertaining look at a time in which Elvis’ comeback still had real life to it.

Spicer has a deft touch with his story, and his cast marvelously fleshes out a bunch of people we care about even though, in most cases, we know we probably shouldn’t.

Make no mistake: This is an angry movie, both in form and in content.

Knox Goes Away is a character study of a disappearing character or maybe a thriller that stays away from actual thrills. However you label the film, it’s low key but satisfying.

This is a gentle, genial update, consistently amusing and always likable; it may not break new ground, but it finds enough of new jokes, and Morgan’s obvious love of language gives it an extra charge.