For an extreme sports documentary, Super Frenchie, tracking the increasingly dangerous exploits of gonzo skier/BASE jumper Matthias Giraud, can’t help but feel benignly pedestrian.

If perception has its limitations, this deeply sobering, stimulating film suggests, that may be another way of saying that it is fundamentally limitless. There is so much — too much — to see here, and no end of vantages from which to see it.

Undine is a poker-faced fairy tale, a fantasy wrought by a committed cinematic realist. It’s an example of how a filmmaker can take an outlandish central idea and play it beautifully straight.

While Ahead of the Curve doesn’t offer any solid answers, it does make the case that understanding lesbian history should be a key part in assessing the future.

Chaves is a solid craftsman with a weakness for easy jolts, but also a gift for filling the frame with strategically unnerving pools of light and shadow; he can turn even a daylit room into something ominous and suggestive.

The rhythms are uneven, the patterns of meaning often elusive. But they coalesce into a moving glimpse of lives lived and artistic legacies forged in the shadow — and sometimes the harsh, glaring light — of momentous historical change.

For all its questionable creative choices, Moby Doc is at least more personal and daring than the typical music documentary. This is the movie equivalent of Moby’s discography, with highs and lows tied directly to its creator’s own embarrassing slip-ups and sublime moments of grace.

There is an enjoyable fight scene and the production design and cinematography of “Funhouse” do what they can with limited resources. One wishes the script hadn’t been the most limited resource of all.

Period re-creation is decent (the interiors-heavy film was shot entirely in Puerto Rico), Polish effectively peppers in bits of archival footage, and the story is often involving despite its missteps. Still, it’s hard not to wonder where the picture might have landed with a more skillful, charismatic lead and a subtler retelling.

What it lacks in uniqueness of concept, it makes up for in evocative implementation of the medium.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s clinical and fascinating 135-minute assembly of this priceless archive is a categorically weird, thrillingly immersive distillation of four days of official, cultish pomp and mourning for one of the 20th century’s biggest monsters.

Roth wisely manages to avoid excess mawkishness and keeps the action moving apace.

While its surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved.

To call this movie assertive would be an understatement; to describe it as small would be a lie. At nearly two-and-a-half hours and with a terrific ensemble of actors singing, rapping, dancing and practically bursting out of the frame, In the Heights is a brash and invigorating entertainment, a movie of tender, delicate moments that nonetheless revels unabashedly in its own size and scale.

Franco pursues this nihilistic thesis with a single-mindedness that one might call rigorous if it didn’t also feel so lazy.

Lindon’s youth is remarkable, because her point of view on the experience of the teenage girl is so immediate. But such a confident and self-assured debut would be remarkable for a filmmaker of any age, as “Spring Blossom” is a finely wrought, sensitively felt and artistically bold work.

Bana is, as always, a very watchable screen presence; the film is not bad. But there’s a spark missing that could make the story burn, and the film’s abrupt ending will leave viewers high and “Dry.”

The relentless tension and close-quarters intimacy that [Krasinski] established in the first film can’t help but slacken under the weight of a swiftly expanding narrative.

For the most part, The Djinn is effectively taut and tense, helped along by a spooky, synth-heavy score, some nifty special effects and a genuinely disturbing twist ending.

An enjoyable, absorbing, characterful testament to shuffling the whole deck of genre conventions, and then politely setting it on fire.

When juxtaposed against a history of Iranian cinema that has often relied on child-centric allegory and non-specific narrative to make its societal critiques, There Is No Evil practically blisters with the intensity of specifically living in Iran as it exists now, as a state once believed to carry out the most executions of any country outside China.

Adams tries, as always, to make intelligent choices, to underplay the intensity and avoid the obvious. She works against the freneticism of the filmmaking, emphasizing Anna’s moments of groundedness and lucidity as well as the instinctive empathy that likely made her a good psychologist to begin with. By rights she should be the centerpiece of a great and genuinely Hitchcockian thriller. This one is for the birds.

Profile works on several levels — as a cinematic feat, dual character study, gripping thriller … and as a cautionary tale.

If Spiral hoped to reinvent the franchise, the dull installment merely amounts to bad fan fiction.

The upshot, deftly blending over-the-top violence and healing crisis management sessions, ultimately ties all the laugh-out-loud audacity and tender sweetness together with a festive Christmas bow

Fast-moving and slow-burning by turns, The Killing of Two Lovers suggests that real life — and real drama — so often unfold in the in-between moments, in the anticipation rather than the actual execution of the next move.

Less a hand-wringing dispatch from a repressive land than a judiciously glossy nudge toward a better world, The Perfect Candidate isn’t complicated, yet earns its mixed/hopeful conclusion.

The scenery’s gorgeous, Redgrave and Bergin are pros, Tom Everett Scott is fittingly gross as the selfish stage dad and Goodacre has some charm. But the film forgot to graft a personality onto its protagonist and seems so determined to be PG-clean that sparks between the leads are … hard to “find.”

For better or worse, it’s very much a Zack Snyder production: unwieldy but absorbing, awash in stilted dialogue, flimsy characters, bone-crunching violence, ridiculous-verging-on-sublime needle drops . . . and have-it-both-ways political subtext.

It’s a film to be watched not for its more literal filmmaking achievements, but rather for its ability to make you feel seen, with vulnerability and with love.

Burnette handles the genre film and the art film pieces of Silo fairly well but shortchanges them both by not committing fully to either.

A lot of big action pictures add “a little heart” between the thrills, but The Unthinkable reverses the ratio, centering emotions. Some genre fans may be impatient with this approach at first, but by the end, it really works.

Monster is a terrific film: a strong, absorbing, beautifully performed and crafted social drama that, unfortunately, proves even timelier today than when it was shot in 2017.

Ego-stroking bio docs being a cottage industry these days, Balvin is one of the more disarmingly open figures to get this kind of treatment. But it’s also nice that The Boy From Medellín makes the most of its allotted time with a busy phenomenon to at least dabble in the ins and outs of an artist contemplating his place in the world.

Heavy-handed acting from the young cast and Needell’s hackneyed dialogue further unmask the movie’s lack of visual wonder and narrative cohesiveness.

Among other things, “The Disciple” is a decades-spanning chronicle of an entertainment industry in constant technological flux, which means it’s fascinated by the ephemeral as well as the eternal.

Paper Tigers may not be a deep comment on aging or friendship, but it has enough humor and action to make it worth a few rounds.

An offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by interrogating the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite.

The story moves crisply, though with all the twists and the lack of introductions to the main players, it’s not easy to follow at first. The fights and chases are handled expertly (the “action director” is Jung Doo); they’re dynamic but believable and deliver emotional impact.

With a colorful blend of biting absurdity and copious dad jokes to offset the commonplace narrative, Rianda and Rowe optimize their dysfunctional family road trip for high-functioning enjoyment.

The absence of God, the trauma of war, the weight of history: None of these are new ideas for Andersson, a fact that reaffirms the wisdom of this movie’s title. But the implied grandiosity of those themes is dissipated, again and again, by the exquisite lightness of his touch and the startling tenderness of his gaze.

It takes a peculiar kind of ineptitude to cast an actor as good as Michael B. Jordan and wind up with something as decidedly not good as Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse.

The film is a vital historical corrective, inscribing the names of these women into history as the innovators, independent thinkers and trailblazers they were.

Youthful self-expression is a joyride in a minefield in Danny Madden’s Beast Beast, an adrenalized, tone-shifting indie bringing the technology-fueled lives of three suburban souls of varying circumstances, hopes and concerns into pathways destined to converge.

Writer-director Chen, along with the two leads, delicately navigates this story, and the result is something deeply humanist and nuanced rather than sensational, though the rainy milieu adds drama to the proceedings.

Inextricably rooted in lead Arndis Hrönn Egilsdöttir’s quietly defiant performance, The County tells an immersive, timeless David vs. Goliath story set against a contemporary backdrop of shifting societal norms.

While the cast is great, the milieu is vivid, the images are polished and the atmosphere is effectively moody, Things Heard & Seen fails to connect on a visceral level.

King for a Day is never less than riveting.

It’s off-putting the way Velle bombards us with statistics and warnings and ominous music before settling in to his (mostly white) brain trust of researchers and experts expounding on population growth as the survival topic we shouldn’t be afraid to address.

Oberli and Ziesche, who’ve divided the story into three chapters plus an epilogue (the less said about the plot the better to protect a few solid twists), attempt to lay bare the thorny issue of outsourcing care work to migrants but don’t layer in enough heft or context to make a wholly satisfying statement.

The distinctive visual style is notably fluid and detailed. The layout artists craft lovely painted environments with rich textures. The action is enjoyable and character-specific. As one would expect from an anime this popular, the imagination is off the charts.

The craven commitment to fan service that has long afflicted big-budget adaptations is still in evidence. The wooden dialogue and indifferent performances aren’t bugs so much as features of a corporate mindset that sees IP fidelity and imaginative storytelling as mutually exclusive aims.

By the grace of a talented cast, especially the reliable Helms and the revelatory Harrison, Together Together is a sweet, albeit incomplete search for companionship in the unlikeliest of places.

For the most part, aside from a slightly slack start, and its stirring but simplistic ending, that kind of well-researched procedural detail is what makes Penna’s film such an engrossing and surprisingly touching addition to a genre already bursting with splashier, more extravagant and more overtly sentimental titles.

Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.

If every picture tells a story, the body of work displayed in the hauntingly intriguing documentary “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” speaks volumes on the life and times of the artist in question.

This honest examination of a passionate, disastrous, adult relationship, might feel like a warning itself. Papadimitropoulos doesn’t offer easy answers, but what Monday brings is something tangibly real and profoundly human.

While We Broke Up is focused, lean and heartfelt, it does feel at times a bit insubstantial.

Wheatley’s film works on a purely elemental level; like nature itself, the film is a sensory event, the narrative often subsumed by the aural and visual experience.

Hope isn’t about getting you to cry, even as some of its characters occasionally do, but rather giving you an invigorating, even uplifting sense of what hearts can do under duress; nothing is forcibly tragic here, just experienced fully and openly.

The themes of Jakob’s Wife are a bit simplistic, but the lead performances are incredibly complex, drawing on the two stars’ decades of screen (and life) experience.

Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

Between the forced artistry and the confused tones, it leaves this well-intentioned tale of transgressive imagination and transactional humanity more temporary in its effect than permanent.

Favier carefully dissects the complex power dynamics at play, as well as the emotional devastation that results from the abuse. It’s an honest, and surprisingly, even hopeful portrait.

Norbu charts an inspired, fittingly meditative journey to enlightenment.

Even if some segments are invigoratingly thought-provoking in the same manner that a young student feels engaging with classical thinkers for the first time, the format’s lack of stimuli beyond cutting between speakers soon turns tedious. In scenes conceived as static frames, Puiu plays with depth of field for slightly more visually layered results.

It lacks the cleverness or the panache to give its schtick the proper zing.

While Williams and Faith do a fine job of capturing the frustrating powerlessness of a low-wage-earning woman in a sexist and classist society, The Power never generates much in the way of shocks or excitement.

Hermanus, as a Black, queer South African, isn’t about to paint Nicholas’ predicament as on a par with apartheid’s true victims. But the emotional intelligence he infuses Moffie with — all the way through its inevitable march to the front line — feels personal nonetheless, and empathetically inquisitive about the kind of masculine indoctrination that fuels oppression through rituals of violence and the criminalizing of identity.

Burger presupposes all the right questions (and anxieties) about the realities of climate change-induced space migration; it’s just that as a film, Voyagers feels like a role-playing game rather than a character-driven story.

Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.

One is given to wonder what it is exactly that the filmmaker himself lends to this film other than a completely ordinary commercial veneer.

Poetic and painterly, personal and political.

Unfortunately, writer-director Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, despite its thematic acuity, loopy vitality and committed acting, doesn’t add up to enough in its too-brief 72 minutes (plus end credits) to warrant all the cross-wired mayhem that gets us over the movie’s dubious finish line.

Laboriously paced, the indulgent jolts and bloodless scares, neither deeply rooted nor artfully raised, float as lifelessly as a lily pad on a bog.

After so many tentpoles that have insisted on being metaphors for this or that, the abundance of sound and fury here — take a bow, Tom Holkenborg, composer of the majestic synth score — blissfully signifying nothing, qualifies as a colossal, giddily escapist relief.

Part tribute, part reconciliation, "Tina" makes a beautiful case for why survival sometimes means saying goodbye.

Nobody gathers from the familiar blood-soaked stream of “John Wick,” “Death Wish” and the “Taken” franchise to fashion a savage ode featuring the same mettle of its inspirations but with far greater humor attached to the well-worn beats.

The laughs are certainly there, but Andre’s almost trademark sense of intentional derangement is missing and in many ways, this is one of his strengths as a performer.

The movie is too ponderous and dry — neither endearingly trashy nor effectively scary.

Shoplifters of the World, in fact, belongs to Cleo, not just because Howard is such a dizzyingly charismatic actress but because her story, which unfolds parallel to Dean’s, is a heartfelt coming-of-age drama that perfectly embodies the youthful angst, ennui and romantic longing expressed so well in the music of the Smiths.

It’s a potentially intriguing bit of fiction that plays out in, at best, serviceable ways.

Afineevsky’s by-the-numbers, for-hire production feels unnecessary. Even if one can’t argue with its distilled message of loving thy neighbor, Francesco just serves to remind us of all the horrors unfolding simultaneously.

Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have crafted a morally complex film that mingles sex and violence in ways that are meant to make the audience uncomfortable.

A deeply aware film, Rose Plays Julie allows for the fantastic as a means and space of catharsis.

Subtly sensorial more than conventionally narrative, The Fever inhabits an ethereal plane that centers Indigenous beliefs and cultural practices not as primitive but valid modes of engagement.

Restless and bracing, Wojnarowicz gives a notorious life its due. Even at its clunkiest, it leaves you breathless at the heights of personal expression he achieved.

As the piles of Biggie-related material has proven, it’s perhaps impossible to cover everything this story is really about in under two hours. City of Lies makes an honest effort but doesn’t get the job done.

The brawny Enforcement doesn’t shy away from brutal action, but the film is more in line with recent police thrillers like Deon Taylor’s “Black and Blue,” and Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables,” which fuse overt sociopolitical commentary with genre thrills.

The vibrant, absolutely vital documentary “Martha: A Picture Story” introduces audiences to the now-septuagenarian photographer as she’s suiting up for a night out, strapping on a backpack with her camera to tag along with taggers, keen for the perfect shot and to avoid getting caught.

What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.

It is didactic without losing its sense of organicism; it is radical without losing its sense of humor; it is intentional in its visual and formal design without flattening itself to the status of aesthetic image emptied of its politics. It is, in all ways, a reminder that any radical future must trust in the transformative potential of the communion between past and present.

Swinton manifests, with magnificently nuanced modulation, an emotional tangle; at times, it is raw with a cathartic force, while enmeshed with meekly conciliatory moments of codependence. Wielding a hatchet with violent purpose or begging for a final rendezvous, Swinton’s every scorching word cuts deep.

This would be tough material for anyone to tackle, and the Russos take aesthetic chances that — while admirably bold — flop more often than they fly.

It’s clichéd, falling back on the old pulp premise of the culturally diverse “ragtag team” of tough guys and gals, barking out clumsily expositive dialogue in between unimaginative fights.

Grünberg effectively incorporates archival photos and footage, drawings, and lyrical, illustrative bits of animation into this brief but rich documentary, which ends on a lovely note that brings Elbaum’s journey full circle.

In any genre, a distinct filmmaking voice and clever avoidance of cliches earns a closer look; perhaps even more so in the realm of sci-fi/horror. And no spoilers, but where Come True lands is extremely satisfying.

The best nuggets come from the interviews, as when a lawyer remarks that when it comes to white-collar criminals, they historically have no filter on the phone.