Robert Abele

There’s so much to chew on in David Alvarado’s portrait of life, art and activism that “American Pachuco” plays like a joyful challenge to those searching for their own voice or meaning.

This movie’s nail-biting, sorrowful power comes from what internalized destruction looks like.

Mostly, Girls Like Girls wins us over with a singular type of first-film assuredness: a familiar story presented as the most personal reveal ever. If you can’t remember what it was like to try to tiptoe while swooning, your heart barely able to stay in your chest, you were never a teenager.

Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

Per usual with movies like this, spelling out the terror (the roots are in hobo codes and religious legend) becomes, regrettably, a shock absorber, not a facilitator. But the scares were middling to begin with because Øvredal — a game but overeager trickster — telegraphs his set pieces as if he were equipped with a flare gun and detour cones. Then again, it might be an attempt to distract us from thinking too hard about all the illogic in Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess’ screenplay

It’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].

The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of Silent Friend — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source.

The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.