Absorbing and heartwarming, it’s easy to forget that this tender drama is about human trafficking.

Despite its nearly three-hour runtime, it never overstays its welcome and plays out beautifully, maintaining a gripping tone and complex narrative about an ordinary family that doesn’t fall into cliches or repetition. Roustaee’s filmmaking is subtle yet leaves a lasting impression, solidifying him as one to watch.

The film ends on a slightly too simplistic, almost crass note regarding that point, but it cannot take away from its overall highly sensitive and formally rigorous exploration of nostalgia and of the other, different relationships people can afford to have with their past.

It is this direct line to the characters that keeps the film relatively interesting, even as it does become rather exhausting to watch these very kooky and carefree young people gallivanting about.

There may be romantic closure at the end of “Fire Island” but not a sense of finality, just a vision of endless possibilities—a horizon tinted by a sunset that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Tori and Lokita puts its characters through hell to elicit some tears and send an urgent message. You may consider this an empathetic film — exploitative might be the better word.

"Look at Me” provides a fascinating overview of Onfroy’s meteoric rise in the music industry, while also broadly touching on the various legal issues, including appalling allegations of abuse, that dogged his career.

As a straight-forward thriller, Holy Spider checks off all the boxes that make it an intriguing watch: it maintains a tense tone and has a gripping plot, it transforms into a courtroom drama halfway into its run, and features gritty and stylish visuals.

When you’re this good, the weakest entry in your filmography can still be largely inoffensive, far from fiasco territory. Even so, there’s only one person doing it like Claire Denis, and now we must wait even longer to be taken once more to the heights of insight, emotion, and style only she can reach.

Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms.

Eo is a joyful, experimental, and strangely moving piece of filmmaking that doesn’t always take itself seriously—yet it is nothing if not sincere.

The witchy atmosphere Jenkin conjures is spine-tinglingly devilish, the poetic manifestation of the subject’s deep grief, ever-ambiguous and frosty, taking on the aching melancholy of loss.

Saleh’s film works on many different levels because it’s a layered blend of various elements from different genres. He has crafted a spy thriller that succeeds as a coming-of-age narrative and can also be an entertaining film that keeps you captivated up until the final breathtaking moments.

The Eight Mountains is a sentimental ode to those singular friendships we make in our lives, the kind that can’t be severed by any amount of distance, physical or temporal. Even when there’s so much left unsaid, it’s the comfort they find in each other that resonates most.

Decision to Leave is ultimately a seductive romance, one made all the more fascinating by the boundaries the characters tread but never dare cross. Stories of longing are so tantalizing because they hang in that gray space of potential. The build-up is often more gratifying than the release, and Park wrings it for all its worth.

The scope shrinks in the final third, as Morgen seemingly retreats into a more comfortable linear chronology — the last twenty years of his life blast past as quickly as his first — but whew, this is one helluva technicolor starship.

Just as [Cronenberg’s] characters can live in a suspended state of rot, he can thrive within a world and culture in its death throes. In his reenergized perspectives on degeneration, he’s created one last safe haven for his fellow degenerates.

“The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is nevertheless satisfying for its undiminished comic brilliance throughout, and for how confidently its sensibility transitions into big-screen entertainment.

The power of Mungiu’s work is his writing. Like much of Eastern European cinema of the past decade, he’s crafted a morality tale that should prompt a viewer to take a look at themselves in the mirror wherever they may live. And if it ends without any hint of resolution? With barely a glimmer of hope? So be it.

Corsage succeeds precisely by ditching the myth of objectivity in favor of portraying a woman eternalized by the glory and dolor of her imperfections.

More impressionistic and less definite than a diagnostic, our understanding of why the two protagonists behave the way they do builds up cumulatively rather than didactically. It generously makes space for the entirety of their lives and histories and allows for the possibility of change.

Bold acrobatics in editing and ambitious creative choices feel all the more superfluous next to Mescal’s effortless charisma.

As Sandra, Seydoux puts forward a delicately incandescent performance portraying someone in an unstable state, whose conflicting emotions about what she can’t change overwhelm her.

In the past, Östlund has shown a deft facility in sending up meaty topics, applying granular attention to male ego in “Force Majeure” and art-world pretensions with “The Square.” Here, however, he stoops to the broadness ascribed to his work by its harshest critics, now more parody of himself than parodist.

Prior and Zagorodnii are at their best in casual conversation, either exchanging sheepish glances or knowing pleasantries under the base’s Big Brother-ish nose. But as soon as things get serious or even faintly sentimental, they talk like the guys in the movies.

We never get a full sense of what these people went through after finding out that Cline was their biological father, mainly because Jourdan doesn’t seem particularly interested in unpacking these issues, or giving enough narrative space to explore the psychological toll.

The cumulative merits on display in Miller’s museum of amazement, from the whiz-bang recreations of freakified old-world grandeur to the humbler miracles shared between two wayward souls, we hang on every word of the narration — as sure a sign of a well-spun yarn as any.

Compelling, yet lacking a broader perspective that would have elevated this from book report to a serious and groundbreaking new dialogue, “Diamond Hands” follows the lead of its most vocal subjects: in fast, out faster, and utterly out of its league in a scenario where it could make a difference.