Devika Girish

Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.

The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.

By the time we get to the film’s closing scenes . . . this modest documentary becomes something epic — a microcosm of the eternal cycles of life.

The film’s striking images — a girl’s made-up face, sullen amid a crowd of colorful revelers; solar panels gleaming sinisterly below a full moon — leave an indelible trail.

The power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.”

The film is so enamored with Ghafari’s status as an exceptional symbol — a powerful woman in a man’s world — that her actual work as a politician gets short shrift.

Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.

The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.

Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.

Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, The African Desperate is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection.

Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, Gigi & Nate opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.

It’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies.

The relationship between mother and daughter is rather thinly etched — there’s a little too much going on in this ambitious, intergenerational film — but Hadjithomas and Joreige deftly use Maia’s archive to weave together past and present.

Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.

An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of We.

If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.

Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting.

The topic is, of course, timely. (When is racism not?) Yet The Walk feels dated.

The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.

The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.

Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.

The message — that science cannot succeed without a politics of solidarity — is important, but the film ends on a note of uncertainty that feels defeatist rather than urgent.

7 Days takes a warm, witty look at the kinds of companionship that can emerge even — or especially — in the most unromantic, pragmatic of circumstances.

Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.

Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze.

A South African thriller haunted by the ghosts of many Hollywood blockbusters past, Indemnity trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: a great deal of fun.

It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.

The most stirring parts of “Beijing Spring” showcase the power of the cinematic arts. The film weaves in long-unseen footage of the artists’ demonstrations that thrums with both history and stunning aesthetic beauty.