Ben Croll

This is a film of details and detours, digressive above all, cast with non-professionals native to the region. It plays as an ethnographic travelogue, using a potboiler hook for lightly applied narrative structure.

It plays as an oral, musical history, rich in period research and detail, laying out its narrative and thematic concerns early and never really moving beyond them.

That Marre shoots his bumbling middle-manager with an extraordinarily familiar shorthand of handheld cameras and rapid zooms only sharpens the film’s ironic bite. This is “The Office: Genocide.”

As that battle settles into stalemate, “Moulin” maintains a somber keel, never curdling into bleakness or hagiography. With escape and release dim prospects, the film plays as a controlled study in self-control — unpacking a form of resistance divorced from action and a kind of fatalism born of genuine hope.

Immaculate and inert, Orphan plays like a Spruce Goose power ballad too leaden to lift.

In Fjord, as in his best work, he builds entire systems that grind his characters down.

Though Kreutzer never lets any adult character off the moral hook . . . she also refuses to shade these relationships with outright antagonism. Instead, they are all appraising one another, weighing others’ actions to balance their own ethical scales, and in doing so, trying to better understand themselves. That’s the same reason we turn to art.

At its best and worst, Butterfly Jam unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be.

Without much by way of variance, the film spins on and spins out, jumping from austere interiors in Mexico City to San Francisco and back again, putting forward a cogent political read that does little to flatter those looking for anything more.