Serena Donadoni

Jaron Albertin’s mix of crisp realism and oblique dream logic results in a haunting experience.... Still, while his first feature (shot by Darren Lew) may be gorgeous, the characters in this rural family drama prove so amorphous that their struggles engender detachment instead of empathy.

Director David Kerr engineers Atkinson’s intricate routines with clockwork precision. That said, his first feature film has little to offer anyone not already attuned to modestly absurdist British comedy.

No one does dissolute hubris with as much charm as Grant, and his ebullience is the perfect foil to the misanthropic McCarthy.

While Saldivar and Burgos are better dancers than actors, Collado and Flores are incredibly charismatic performers who bring every scene they’re in to life, but it’s Zayas who anchors Shine. His gravitas shot through with mischief sets the film’s tone, showing that serious-minded storytelling can still be fun.

Director Susan Kucera and the film’s guiding spirit, Jeff Bridges, have created a wonkish lovefest, incorporating the diverse ideas of (predominantly white) scientists and academics, philosophers and authors, activists and politicians into a plea for equable reflection and sustained action.

With Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Loveridge celebrates the mashup aesthetic that enabled the artist to find a voice, and reveals that reconciling contradictions — like an outrageous sense of humor and earnest political activism — is key to both Arulpragasam’s music and the life she’s constructed with audacity and wit.

While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.

The effect is like strolling through a lovely display of early-twentieth-century Americana, admiring the streamlined beauty of mass-produced objects that mimicked the handiwork of artisans, all while encountering a cast of bubbly historical park re-enactors.

Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.

Rojas and Dutra have created a singular fable where anxiety and fear are directed inward, even when the danger is all too real.

Pin Cushion has the visual cues of comedy, with its candy-colored kitsch and exaggerated signifiers of eccentricity and snobbery, but at heart, it’s a tragedy of naïveté.

Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.

The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.

In his astute look at the artistry and business of food, de Maistre makes the case that haute cuisine serves the same function as haute couture, creating an indelible experience while encouraging new ideas to filter through the industry.

The Singhs aren’t able to make Yadvi more distinctive than any other women whose fate is controlled by the hubris of men, or who’ve lost the wealth their titles once afforded them.

The portentously titled Measure of a Man is at once an escapist fantasy and sensitive portrait of adolescent transformation.

Early absorbs Freda’s pain into his own, and McNeil builds a delicate idyll from their defiant embrace of unexpected second chances.

Qu unpacks much that matters in Angels Wear White, including the abuse of power and importance of status and wealth in Chinese society, but her most thoughtful, nuanced observations involve female sexuality.

Tully encapsulates the psychological process of maturity with pithy humor and vertiginous insight. Tully’s appearance may have seemed like a magical interlude, but she solidifies Marlo’s reality by exposing the path that led her there.

The structure of After Auschwitz may be simple (talking heads and archival footage), but the cumulative effect of six women revealing the physical, psychological, and emotional toll taken on Holocaust survivors is a powerful testament to individual humanity emerging from inhuman horrors.

Although writer-director Hazanavicius based the biopic on Wiazemsky’s memoir, Un An Après (One Year Later), Wiazemsky gets portrayed as a passive observer, a minor character in her own story.

When the violence comes, as it must, Sen stages his shoot-outs with the physical and emotional wallop of the best westerns, but he’s more interested in restoring the faith of law enforcement officers whose belief in justice has eroded.

Hirayanagi acknowledges that reinvention isn’t as simple as trading Setsuko’s messy stagnation for Lucy’s zany possibility. What Setsuko fears most is losing everything, but that may be her best option.

Robin uses well-timed jolts and gross-out moments to awaken his solitary characters from their stupor, to shock them into acknowledging that their existence isn’t confined to the soul’s protective shell.

The writer-director’s first feature is warmly affectionate and maddeningly vague, with half-formed characters, limp plotting, and performances of captivating delicacy, especially from Zosia Mamet as a novelist guided by uncertainty.

This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.

Ben’s carefully plotted healing diminishes the complexity of mental illness, and gives James’s sweet vision a bitter aftertaste. Filiatrault uses too-neat bookending in the place of dramatic resolution, so that the story of a man hanging on by a thread is nicely tied up in a bow.

Mama Africa is a rough sketch of Makeba’s complex life and her influence on world music (as well as folk, jazz, and Afropop), but this queen deserves a monarch-sized portrait that fully showcases her part in the tumultuous social, political, and cultural movements that reshaped the world around her.