This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail.

While a degree of naturalism does still make its way into many slow-burn scenes, Quy’s filmmaking largely favors expressionism.

The gradual transformation of an innocent child into an accessory to violence, forced to become increasingly pragmatic and cold along the way, is far from a fresh hook this far into the history of crime movies. But Colonna’s film, co-written with Jeanne Herry, is a riveting, moving take on this narrative.

The sometimes-rapid shifts in tone, even within the same scene, are aided to tremendous effect by the magnetic, fearless performance from Saura Lightfoot Leon.

Rooting his drama in the specifics of rural Taiwan and the Southeast Asian diaspora that make their way there, Chiang’s tough but affecting film taps into tragically universal notions of feeling invisible or ineffectual in one’s day-to-day survival. These concepts are most certainly not lost in translation.

To a Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.

Gazer might be inspired by New Hollywood, but its existence is almost reason to believe that a similar filmmaking renaissance could be on the horizon.

The film is ultimately most interested in celebrating the irrational levels of devotion that live theater inspires in the people who make it. While it doesn’t pull punches about the challenges that lie ahead, “The Great Lillian Hall” ultimately makes it clear that its protagonist is lucky to have something that’s so hard to let go.

Beautifully written and performed (Patra Au Ga Man as Angie being the standout of an excellent ensemble), All Shall Be Well illustrates Yeung’s keen eye for the nuances of social dynamics, especially regarding matters of wealth and class that many may prefer to skirt around when it comes to family.

Entrancing from the start but slow to reveal the full scope of Wilson’s vision, Look Into My Eyes locks into that furtively cinematic essence by framing its psychic readings with a stiff naturalism that recalls the interview scenes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life.”

It works because the movie around these actors strikes the right balance between silliness and sincerity, even if only by virtue of being sillier and more sincere than any of the previous installments.

You may think you know your sports movie tropes, but you’ve never seen them used quite this way — that is, within a queer cheerleading drama firmly focused on complex female characters — and Waterson’s Backspot delights in skewing such expectations for often (but not always) new ends.

A sweet and gracious and often painfully labored dramedy about a stand-up comic who struggles to connect with his autistic 11-year-old son, Tony Goldwyn’s “Ezra” rides an emotional honesty that’s almost completely undone by the sweaty contrivances of its plotting.

Regrettably, “never again” proves to be a misguided ethos for a film about pain that’s so nakedly unresolved, both in its characters, and in a world that has learned nothing from the lessons they were born to teach it.

It’s good enough, rousing enough, compelling enough.

Aspects of the plot do feel predictable, there’s no getting around that. But “Solo” is too smart of a film to be held back by contrivance. With nods to “All About Eve” and classic Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, the gradual unraveling and backstage backstabbing paints a picture of how the damage queer trauma leaves behind can shape us differently from person to person.

Suri’s film is full of non-actors who excel at being themselves in front of the camera, the result so eminently watchable because it feels so remarkably like the real India.

Filmlovers! melds fiction and non-fiction, the personal and the political, popular and art cinema, into a lyrical tribute to spectatorship, embracing all the theories and emotions that come with it.

It’s the brilliance with which Erradi performs, especially in the musical sequences, and the touching portrait of a woman pursuing her art despite the world seemingly conspiring against her to do so, that sustain and invigorate the film.

Depending on how you look at it, Black Dog is either the most violently depraved feel-good animal movie in recent memory or the most wholesome neo-noir we’ve seen in a while.

Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.

In posing substantive questions about the nature of romance and relationships, it’s smarter than virtually any American studio romantic comedy of recent years

The evils within the film feel tragically prescient, and “The Most Precious of Cargoes” makes those parallels explicit

Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.

Lellouche may not be an original, but he is a committed craftsman and an avid synthesizer of forms, and if there’s one thing this starry-eyed epic demonstrates, it’s that even well-worn genres can be enlivened by sincerity, surprises and visual punch — in other words, a bit of ouf.

Sight is a perfect film to watch if you want your eyeballs to glaze over.

The beats of All We Imagine as Light are calibrated with hypnotic grace creating a rhythm that induces pure pleasure.