This is an elegiac story, a humanistic metaphor for a vanishing world seen through the prism of a vulnerable couple cruelly written off by their families as worthless encumbrances.

American Fiction is smart and, thanks to its fine cast, has genuine heart.

No One Will Save You proves a singularly intense experience.

Wolfe has made an admiring but nuanced feature that doesn’t aim for biopic completism or cause-and-effect formula.

What’s nice about Migration is how, between the comedic bits and tangential adventures, it never loses sight of the lessons embedded in the Mallards’ story.

As a penetrating study of character and milieu, it’s the work of a mature and enormously talented filmmaker not afraid to take chances.

There will be blood, yes, but mainly there’s a well-written and beautifully performed investigation of yearning and the mysterious realm that apps and algorithms can only profess to quantify.

The Promised Land is a terrific story driven by skillful writing and strong performances. There’s an art to bringing vitality and modernity to historical drama, and Arcel shows a firm grasp of it.

What resonates beyond the brawls and blood is a profound affection for the people onscreen — those grace notes provided by a fine cast, with Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy stirring undercurrents that are particularly affecting precisely because they’re never explicitly examined or explained.

Optimism is indeed at the heart of The Burial, a film that genuinely believes in the ability of the legal system to fight injustice.

While hope is a quality not readily associated with the Mexican auteur’s work, it keeps surfacing here to extend a lifeline, even as we wait for the other shoe to drop. In that regard, Franco’s latest represents a slight departure, without surrendering the director’s signature austerity and intensity. He’s helped considerably by Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, two riveting leads who hold nothing back.

While the landscapes, especially in the parched Sahara section of the story, are dazzling, Carnera’s camera always keeps the focus on the humans, sometimes specks seen from great distances moving through the sand and sometimes studied in close-ups that fill the widescreen canvas.

Despite its heavy-duty subject matter, the film co-directed by Capobianco and Pierre-Luc Granjon is filled with welcome humor of both the visual and verbal varieties.

Don’t sell Songs of Earth short, mind you, as an exclusively visual experience. Its sound design and score are every bit as immersive, and that may hold the actual key to best experiencing Olin’s film.

Walker and her editors have created an absorbing narrative, so the film never feels as cobbled together as it actually is.

It’s wry, vivid and moving in unexpected ways.

Dear Jassi has the feel of a timeless folktale, made all the more unbearably sad because of its basis in fact.

Gasoline Rainbow pays homage to all the road movies that ever were but is still its own quirky thing, uniquely of its time.

Perhaps there are a couple of unnecessary complications on the way to the denouement, but the storytelling is lively and piquant, demonstrating the director’s sense of humor and sharp observational skills.

Even when Mountains’ narrative, which often feels more like a series of beautifully conjured vignettes, doesn’t hit its full potential, the way Sorelle thinks of gentrification rewards our close attention.

The film is both a food lover’s dream and an aspiring chef’s guidebook, uncovering the sophisticated alchemy that makes such places not only run flawlessly, but serve up groundbreaking dishes that are also locally sourced.

The two superb performances and the tactful hand of a gifted new director ensures that the audience will still be thinking about these people long after the journey ends.

A celebration of art, resilience and the mutability of the human spirit, Matthew Heineman‘s American Symphony never feels like it’s quite the documentary that its director originally intended it to be. Nor does it tell the story that featured star Jon Batiste presumably hoped for it to chronicle. But it’s all the more joyful and emotionally resonant for those deviations.

Writer-director Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za pocetnici) is a fizzy, huggable portrait of a self-made, roughly blended queer family.

The veteran action director fully delivers the goods with Silent Night.

Extensive archive news material is drawn on to explain key moments in the struggle over reproductive rights, but mostly the story emerges organically from the interviewees themselves.

Although the film starts as the gritty crime thriller suggested by its core premise, it pivots, unexpectedly but effectively, into something much more tender.

That so many have to struggle not just with the disease but also the cost of staying alive is a national disgrace that documentaries such as this, however well-intentioned, can only begin to address.