The standout performance here is Charli XCX as Bethany, channeling her party girl persona into a character who approaches her wanderings as an introspective vision quest, searching for a deeper truth within herself.

The end result is a nifty ethical puzzle about balancing the needs of individuals versus those of the community. Still, it’s best not to take the plot too seriously given the wild implausibilities that come into play in the third act.

Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.

The Rip doesn’t reinvent the cops-in-a-pressure-cooker genre, but its mix of closed-quarters tension, car chases and gunfire gets the job done. Thanks to Carnahan and his accomplished cast, it’s both more convincing and more watchable than the average original streaming movie.

The movie is a sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.

The writers have, wisely perhaps, toned down the language of the original version, although it is still lusty entertainment.

The result is a sharp-eyed, open-ended inquiry into marriage and romance.

Charlie Polinger opens his thrilling and uneasy directorial debut feature The Plague with an arresting sequence that quickly establishes the haunting undertones of this adolescent psychological thriller.

The film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.

The interconnected structure lays the ground for a gripping mystery attentive viewers will be eager to solve.

I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film’s joy.

At a time when people feel obliged to choose which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they stand on, Holding Liat takes a thoughtful middle ground that exposes the situation without exploiting it.

With its vivid footage, sometimes captured from breathlessly intimate proximity, you might be able to believe, just for a moment, that you could really reach right through the screen and touch her.

It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.

In an indie landscape with an insatiable appetite for trauma and misery, it’s a breath of fresh air, a fun time that’s also a witty commentary on shifting sexual mores.

There’s integrity to the performances even when the writing falters, or when de Araújo gets overly literal in showing how haunted Josephine is by the incident, despite mostly maintaining an inscrutable expression.

When it’s cooking, which is most of the run time, this is a smart, sophisticated and incisively acted adult entertainment that savages the crumbling institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down in a bitter reckoning that seems irreversible — until a window of hope and healing gets cracked open.

Featuring an award-worthy performance by Andrew Scott in the lead role and solid supporting turns by Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon and Chris Messina, Pressure lives up to its title with its expert ratcheting up of sustained tension.

In his latest, Fjord, the Romanian New Wave auteur brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama of parenting and education, in which a suspicion of possible child abuse escalates into a full inquisition during a head-spinning rush to judgement. It’s also a nuanced reflection on otherness, and how anyone failing to conform to the values of a community invites distrust.

Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.

A shot of a bear sitting on a clifftop gazing out over Hudson Bay while waiting for the waters to freeze — flashes of seals, beluga whales and other prey shuffling through its head along with images of traps, cages and vehicles in pursuit — is one of the more heartrending movie images in recent memory.

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind.

While it feels a fraction overlong, Gibney’s film is a vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.

Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

One in a Million feels both ultra-specific and universal.

Josef Kubota Wladyka, the director and co-writer, shifts from poignant emotion to comedy to surreal scenes that take us inside Haru’s fantasies just as gracefully as the dialogue shifts from Japanese to Spanish and English.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

By its very existence — and in what it reveals about the IDF’s killing, maiming and wounding of Palestinian civilians over the past few years — the film is a condemnation both of Netanyahu’s far-right war machine and the U.S. government’s steadfast support of it.