Ryan Lattanzio

While it certainly offers up a necessary-if-dour vision of patriarchy-dominated life in this particular corner of Europe, by-the-numbers storytelling and a flat, visual style occasionally lead to dramatic intertia. Still, Gashi is powerfully, effectively steely as a woman who must take matters into her own hands, even when they are tied by society.

The film shimmers with beauty and sadness despite its length, and the Japanese director’s background as both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker brings a gossamer naturalism to this realistic tale about a young woman’s regrets over abandoning her child years after the fact.

Atlantis is a political howl from the soul about a decaying Europe. But its cold, violent exterior turns out to be a bleak disguise for what is an unexpectedly sweet love story at its molten core.

While the meandering sensibility of Acasa, My Home makes it a tough sit at times, the spell it casts through its all-access dive into subterranean life brought to the surface forms a compelling addition to one of international cinema’s deepest, and ever-growing, pockets.

The actors ably carry the script, as if aware they’re pawns in a genre exercise.

The actors’ gifts are all heightened by Msangi’s delicate touch in this empathetic portrait of immigrant life in America that is, refreshingly, less interested in big drama than in a family quietly building itself back up when it may be too late.

The pop icon’s stardom is so etched in concrete at this point that he could tell his fans just about anything and they would never stop listening. So it’s a pity that the documentary vehicle that surrounds him isn’t more forthcoming about the man beneath the wife beaters and airtight skinny jeans who sends so many swooning, but surely must, at times, feel lonely late at night like the rest of us.

This is a gentle and joyous film not to be slept on, even as its low-key aura lulls you into a soothed state of mind.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

While the narrative hardly goes into the fully unhinged direction it teases, it’s pleasantly askew and always marching to its own strange and, slightly off, beat.

Chiseled as a haiku, director Wayne Wang’s Coming Home Again opens a window onto dying days in all their ugliness, but also onto their possibility of redemption for a mother and son.

The script is half-baked and rushed, too much of a collage of other, better movies, and too coy to embrace its trashiness or ever go beyond PG-13 levels of horror.

There’s enough go-for-broke and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone on display to suggest this filmmaking duo has a future, even when their characters don’t seem to have a past.

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

While the film, both written and directed by Lacôte, is grounded in oral traditions that may seem exotic to certain viewers, the movie is really about the universal power of storytelling regardless of tongue — and how it can be used as a way to survive.

There is no reason to care about anyone in Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time, a sweaty, bloated mess of a movie that flushes a knockout ensemble down the drain.

The Broken Hearts Gallery will fit snugly on the shelf for tweens and teens as a source of comfort and maybe even empowerment, an ode to rebuilding, when the dissolution of a relationship leaves you feeling like a husk of yourself.

The 24th means well, and while it, sadly, mostly elicits a shrug, what the film lacks in pizzaz it more than makes up for in educational value, for better or worse.

While Margiela’s visions likely deserve a more radical treatment onscreen, Holzemer’s film offers perhaps the most complete insight yet into one of fashion’s most elusive geniuses.

Despite the claustrophobic entrapment in a violent and hyper-masculine world, The Shadow of Violence is an ultimately moving morality tale announcing a confident new voice in international cinema. Not to mention a powerful vehicle for its two leads, Jarvis and Barry Keoghan.

The origins of the room in question are never explained, which is half the intrigue, but mostly the frustration. The core conceit is enough to make The Room a not entirely wasted ride. Still, enter with care. It’s a mixed bag, but upon exit, it somehow runs through the mind.

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

Relic exists firmly in the realm of allegory, and if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie.

It’s a clever exercise in no-frills science fiction that should please fans of the genre, but it’s more than just a sci-fi exercise thanks to a script that prioritizes, and cares about, its characters.

The movie’s topple into melodramatic excess is fitting for a film set in the 1960s, a time dominated by melodramas. And also like the cinema of the 1960s, there’s a grit and urgency to To the Stars, of something bigger and darker coming along with the changing times.

Though hardly subtle in its metaphoric intent, this story of a rural cult of all women, segregated into “sisters” and “wives,” led by a single powerful man makes for an unnervingly effective thriller dripping with atmosphere and foreshadowing.