Steven Scaife

Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.

The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.

The film is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all.

However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.

His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.

The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.

Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.

It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.

By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.

Jason Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.

Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.

The film is an aimless, albeit sometimes funny, chronicle of absurd behavior and government ineptitude.

The can-do spirit of Dead Lover, as evidenced by the way it couples goofy sound effects with cuts and camera movements, takes it a long way.

Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.

The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.

Promare often feels like a maximalist season finale trimmed of any build-up, a climax that’s outstanding to watch yet empty beyond its pure spectacle.

The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.

Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.

Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.

The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.

The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.

Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.

Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.

Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.

The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.

Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.