In I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first feature film in a dozen years, the Brazilian director manages an impressive feat of teleporting, placing the viewer inside the cheerful chaos of a large Brazilian family.

To a Land Unknown is unquestionably topical. It’s also rooted in a well-known movie tradition, films that are empathetic portraits of low-level urban criminals struggling for survival and dignity.

Ernaux’s precise and thoughtful commentary connects the images to memories, discovering yet another harvest from the well-cultivated field of her autobiography.

Anemone is a redemptive tale, but slow and dark and haunting, sometimes slipping into fantasy and playing out like a fairytale, and sometimes unfolding like a Greek tragedy. As films go, it’s a triumph.

It occurs at a certain point that Ronstadt was kind of the Meryl Streep of pop music, capable of taking on any vocal role and making it sound like she was born to it.

The Cave may be the saddest, most infuriating chronicle of the ghastly ravages of war on a country’s most vulnerable citizens —children — ever made.

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

Women, men, relationships, the patriarchy feminism, nature, and body-horror merge in writer/director Alex Garland’s creepy, allegorical art-house horror thriller Men.

A semi-autobiographical and powerfully moving story by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, My Dead Friend Zoe is inaccurately described as a “dark comedy” or as a “buddy film”.

Yes, it’s a formula and we’ve been here before. But the characters are engaging, the performances elevate the material, and the various dilemmas of each gives this more layers than you might expect.

What draws us in is the inventive and luminous cinematography from Michal Dymek (with additional footage by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert), using drone shots, fish-eye lenses and red and blue filters. Accompanied by an unsettling electronic score, the donkey-in-a-disco effect is trippy, a hallucinogenic projection of what it might be like to live in an animal’s consciousness, including its dreams and flashbacks.

Pointed, wryly funny, and well-cast, American Fiction is easy to recommend for its humour and timely commentary.

A major factor in making this work as well it does are the performances, which are pitch perfect.

Out Come the Wolves director/co-writer Adam MacDonald keeps us guessing until practically the final frame as to how it’s all going to play out in this finely crafted sylvan thriller.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is one of those rare dramatized histories that seamlessly blends facts with fiction.

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes.

Starring two grande dames of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, The Truth is a mistress-class in the art of French close-up acting, from the twitch of a dismissive eyebrow to a pout of disappointment.

Queer Japan serves as a series of lively snapshots of a multifaceted and shifting subject and comes up a little short on the issues of day-to-day experience of Japanese gay life.

If the film’s execution doesn’t always rise to the level of its elusive ambitions, the fault is not a lack of sincerity.

It’s wonderful for its restraint, and for the things it doesn’t do.

The success of Miranda’s musical story is not just the strength of its lead, but the strength of the supporting characters.

Nikolay Michaylov’s up-close and occasionally claustrophobic, documentary-style camerawork pushes the realization that Anne’s giddiness is always flirting with a dark rebound. We sometimes feel we’re in it with her as the camera whips around Campbell’s face.

No one should mistake The Long Walk for fun. But there’s satisfaction in its endurance, in the way grim inevitability drives the narrative with allegorical force. By the credits, you’ll feel as though you’ve marched every mile alongside the boys exhausted, shaken, and strangely, perhaps, wanting more.

The Plague is what remains if you strip most of the actual horror out of a horror movie, but keep the fear. The tension gets so thick you could cut it with a knife. Then it goes beyond that; you’d need something stronger, and sharper.

Ruizpalacio’s purpose is to present the harried workplace as a microcosm of American capitalism, its obsession with abused undocumented immigrants, anger at women’s reproduction rights and devotion to the churning machinery of consumption. The message isn’t new but, in the present moment, the sheer bluntness of the critique feels liberating.

Groff and Radcliffe are great in two very different roles (each won a Tony last year for their performances) but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast, and the music is grand.