That pace can also lead to some wonky performative moments, but everyone is earnest and charming enough to overcome brief lapses pushing for a laugh.

Here’s a rare sequel that matches the original by narrowing its focus. Instead of adding to the Supers’ milieu, its animators reveal new sides of the beloved family.

The Sentence is a powerful film full of rich, raw emotions as all parties explore their vulnerabilities.

It’s about hypocrisy, mistrust, and the struggle felt by second-generation immigrants everywhere. And Haq pulls no punches in depicting just how devastatingly bad things can get when a child’s mind is torn between a community built on archaic ideals and another entrenched in a present where such stringent rules prove impossible to uphold.

The result is a tense thriller with noir undertones revealing a more complex web than we ever could predict. Not every discovery is tough to guess, but each carries another question to distract us from a desire to pat ourselves on the back or presume we’ve cracked the case.

Without taking itself too seriously or academically, Upgrade operates with a level of remarkable rigor. This is a film that kicks ass, takes names, and has a healthy skepticism of the future without straying too far away from its B-movie, body horror ambitions.

Buckley and Flynn keep us on our toes, their darkened malice turning to teary-eyed contrition until we’re left hopeless as far as figuring out which is more real.

We’ve gotten plenty of sports films over the years, but precious few that wade into the deep, dark machinery that fuel the underdog stories and inspirational tales we love to love.

As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it. That bitterness speaks not of the physical colonization we saw with the conquistadors and rubber barons of Serpent, but more of a sort of colonization of ideas.

The Workers Cup is a bittersweet portrait of the labor that built the glimmering towers, stadiums, and luxury malls: spaces these men are not permitted to be seen in public areas of.

Its jaw-dropping and gripping beauty does not stem from a drama-filled storyline, but from the simplicity with which Simón captures the worldview of her alter-ego heroine, and the complex power struggles Frida engages with her new family.

It’s the inconsistency under the surface of Solo that stunts its growth into a piece of this universe worth actively revisiting. Ron Howard manages to wrangle familiarity and charm into enough whimsical adventure to make for decent escapism, but the question of leaving a memorable mark may be another matter entirely.

En el Séptimo Día aims not for a glorified, glamorized version of an existence only slightly above poverty nor an excessive grittiness with pretenses towards “realism.” Rather, it seeks to portray a certain way of life with compassion, vitality, and above all fidelity, aims that are deeply felt and executed throughout this remarkable, vigorous film.

Noer isn’t interested in the pulpy, wannabe mythic journey of Papillon when there’s a meatier through-line highlighting our humanity in dire straits. Rather than make his film about how far our bodies can go, he seeks to portray the lengths are hearts will.

It is a film that will entice the viewer’s senses, if not necessarily their brain activity.

In strict terms of craft, Donbass is an impressive achievement, but its heavy-handedness nevertheless feels inordinate.

The staggering emotional payoff — a transcendental moment so beautiful in its simplicity that the previous three hours of seriousness appear to melt away — is worth every last minute.

Shot in gorgeous turquoise and cerulean blues by that fine cinematographer, it is often a remarkably beautiful film and, with that suggestion of real experience, an inevitably sad one. Such qualities might not be enough to entirely disregard any feelings of familiarity, but they might just be enough to forgive them.

By drawing our empathy for such morally dubious and potentially damaging characters, Shoplifters remains a real heartbreaker, the kind of which only this director seems capable.

Although Long Day’s Journey is a far more polished work than Kaili Blues, it also feels a lot more calculated, often sacrificing emotional impact for ostentation.

Garrone’s prowess as a director is still undeniable, and as far as nasty, gripping brutality goes, Dogman certainly delivers. If you’re looking for pulpy violence, you won’t be disappointed. Just don’t expend too much thought over what it’s all supposed to mean.

There is something quite reassuring about the fact that — infuriating as it sometimes may be — he has not lost that particular passion nor that roving eye, and that maybe, though he might not admit it, that love of images, too.

You could argue that Lazzaro Felice owes a debt to Pasolini with its fascination for peasants, saints, and faces, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez with its mix of rural life and magical realism, but that would be to discredit the shear vivacity and boldness of Rohrwacher’s directorial hand, not to mention her incredible warmth as a filmmaker.

This effort to show Lara’s struggle like a coming-of-age story is what sets Girl apart. Dhont fleshes out his story with little growing-up moments everyone can relate to.

Border is only really at its best when focusing on Tina’s rediscovery of her true nature.

As with the several other slight departures from realism, the artifice added to the story proves distracting. Without being successfully integrated, such choices fail to bestow the narrative with depth and pathos as intended, but only draw attention to the flimsiness of the its construction.

Boom for Real is an engaging enough oral history from those that were there – directed in a manner that’s perhaps a little too straight forward for just how vibrant the material is.

Delicate, immensely strange, but filled with a singular Rudolphian magic.