If making a film is challenging under fortunate circumstances, one can only imagine the obstacles faced by filmmakers trying to survive annihilation.

The film is not merely an observation of aging. It is also about how this process echoes the emotional dramas of adolescence, and Friedland liberates the story of older adults from the confines of melancholy.

Harvest stands strong and tall, a work solid as an oak. Full of a sensual love of nature and a distinctive vibe, it’s tangy like a home-brewed ale.

The film is exceedingly funny, even in translation, right up to the point where the tone shifts dramatically. Deeply endearing on every level, from its anti-authoritarian politics to its body positivity to general joie de vivre, this is a crowdpleaser through and through (unless the crowd happens to be made up of moral policemen and dogmatic clerics).

The animation, too, is consistently delightful, densely crammed with visual gags and imaginative flourishes.

What saves this from being just best-of list bait for upmarket film critics is the sincerity of the performances, especially from the core trio of Wu, Lee and Panna, each of whom projects a profound loneliness that’s never more apparent than when they’re in the middle of a crowded place. Which, this being Singapore, is just about everywhere.

Any thoughts about the violence we’re seeing are strictly our own, never fed to us by the filmmaker. That makes Afternoons of Solitude, in its uncompromising way, a doc as muscular and ferocious as the poor creatures being ritualistically slaughtered in those bullrings.

TWST is set up like a concert film, but instead it’s a combination of two nonfiction categories — the tone poem and the city symphony — that are used as fallback catch-all classifications for critics and scholars. Ujica blends them with archival rigor and effective whimsy to create a movie that’s dreamy and clear-eyed at once.

Hardcore Ozon fans will have fun arguing about where exactly this falls in the ranking of his substantial body of work, but it’s surely somewhere in the top 10 or even the top five, a rock-solid demonstration of his control over storytelling, technique and ability to get the best from actors.

The subject matter alone could be enough to trigger geysers of tears in viewers, but what makes Le Fanu’s direction especially impressive is its lack of sentimentality. Instead, she focuses on daily rituals — the little murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the sense of exhaustion that stretches out for hours, days and weeks as one waits for someone to die.

At times the movie feels so raw and unedited, it’s as if Loktev dumped all her footage onto the table without shaping it into a definitive cut. Perhaps a leaner two-hour version would have yielded something more dynamic, though the point of My Undesirable Friends isn’t to entertain us, but to capture every detail of a democratic movement that was doomed to fail.

This is the kind of robust entertainment — wholesome though not at all toothless, alternately joyful and heart-wrenching — that doesn’t get made much anymore. . . It’s a family movie in the best sense of the term, a crowd-pleaser with a ton of heart.

A haunting lead performance from Marco Pigossi, steeped in melancholy and raw pain but also in moments of openness, optimism and even joy, helps make High Tide an affecting portrait of untethered gay men seeking meaningful connections.

The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too often searching, autobiography of a figure whose political transformation is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

One of Them Days, produced by Issa Rae, is the kind of big-laughs, mid-budget theatrical comedy that used to be more common; it’s a shame TriStar scheduled a January release, because the film had the potential to be a summer hit. Its two charismatic leads alone make it worth seeing in a theater, surrounded by a crowd primed for a good time.

Do stars Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon manage to make the material feel both fresh and engaging? Yes.

One of the chief rewards of 28 Years Later is that it never feels like a cynical attempt to revisit proven material merely for commercial reasons. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have returned to a story whose allegorical commentary on today’s grim political landscape seems more relevant than ever.

The numerous fight scenes, which often lapse into extreme gore, are as amusing as they are exciting.

With its focus on the news gathering process, Waves affirms the importance of independent and ethical reporting.

Questlove shapes an engaging narrative that charts Stone’s undulating career.

The Ballad of Wallis Island breaks no new ground, but it’s an unexpectedly pleasurable, funny-sad watch, full of sweet, soothing music.

The movie arguably takes a little too long to kick in, but once its sense of danger — devious, disturbing, wryly amusing — is established, it never stops.

The place Beecroft stumbled upon is fueled by girl power, and the story she and her collaborators have created is wise and messy, keenly aware of the dark places at the margins as it burns bright with life.

The insights and artistic inclinations that populate Kramer’s work aren’t for everyone, and there’s a good chance By Design won’t connect with most viewers. But the alienating nature of the premise is what makes it fascinating, pushing us to question how we want to be seen and experienced as people in the world.

Through all this, Byrne’s high-wire act remains riveting, scrutinized for long stretches of the film in DP Christopher Messina’s probing closeups. It’s a bruising performance, digging deep into the intense pressure and isolation that can sometimes accompany motherhood.

Whatever the movie lacks in surprise or sophistication, it makes up for in sly comic verve and a soulfulness that sticks with you.

What makes Twinless special and surprisingly compassionate is how this director handles grieving characters.

It’s a moving and intimate narrative about the toll displacement takes on generations of people.