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Dennis Harvey Film CriticCanadian filmmaker and photographer Louie Palu’s “Zero Position” offers a stark snapshot of war’s devastation in Eastern Ukraine. Shot in 2016, well before the current invasion but at a point when Russia-allied separatists had already occupied much of the Donbas region, this impressionistic documentary does not provide much in the way of contextualizing explanation, let alone political analysis.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticAmong the many social movements that arose in the 1960s and ’70s, one just about everyone on the liberal spectrum could agree on was anti-“nuke.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki left behind a lingering horror at the ways technological advancement might be turned to mass destruction. Power plant accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl seemed to confirm fears that this energy source’s risks outweighed its benefits.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticViewers before them had first-generation “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV.” But five Canadian lads turned out to be “kind of the only comedy group that reflected Gen X,” as fan Fred Armisen puts it in “The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks.” Reg Harkema’s documentary is a breezy, worthy overview of a collective career now approaching its 40th anniversary.While best enjoyed by the already converted, it provides enough showbiz insight and interpersonal drama to entertain newbies. It will provide both camps with an appetizer for the Kids’ limited-run reboot of their original sketch series, which new episodes (featuring an array of name guest stars) launch May 13 on Amazon Prime, followed by this doc a week later (on May 20).

Dennis Harvey Film CriticFew victims of the Holocaust left behind such a methodical and memorable record of their life as Charlotte Salomon, a native Berliner who died in Auschwitz at age 26. As if anticipating that premature end, she’d spent much of the preceding two years painting about a thousand gouaches composing the illustrated autobiography “Life? Or Theater?,” which fortunately survived the war.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticEven the smallest feature-length film is a considerable logistical enterprise, so it’s a bit flummoxing how little thought appears to have been put into “Choose or Die.” While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on. If some movies now seem designed to be consumed on phones, this one demands so little attention, for such scant rewards, you could probably watch it while vacuuming or doing yoga without missing anything important.Not that first-time feature director Toby Meakins or his cast do slipshod work.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticA whale hunt tradition in the Faroe Islands that’s long been condemned by animal rights activists is given evenhanded examination in Vincent Kelner’s “A Taste of Whale.” This well-crafted French documentary does provide some of the grisly “massacre” footage seen in prior indictments of the seasonal “Grindadrap,” or Grind. But it also lets locals weigh in about something they feel is a part of their cultural identity, while Sea Shepherd campaigners opposed to a practice they deem “monstrous” also get their say.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe “Bourne” movies revivified the espionage genre with their nimble, scrappy, down-and-dirty action. But they weren’t as widely imitated as one might have expected, which leaves “The Contractor” feeling like a relatively fresh chip off a not-so-old block. Chris Pine stars as a forcibly decommissioned U.S.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticNaomi Watts has had a penchant for highly physical roles unusual among female stars not particularly associated with action movies. It made her acrobatics the most special effect amidst so many CG wonders in Peter Jackson’s “King Kong,” and a vividly plausible victim of grueling crises in films like “Funny Games” and “The Impossible.” Of course, one can always get too much of a good thing, as when recent, regrettable “The Desperate Hour” seemed to reduce the hot-button topic of school shootings to a gimmicky “Watch this fearless actress run the gamut of emotions while JOGGING!”Fortunately, there is nothing gratuitous about the physicality demanded of Watts by “Infinite Storm,” which is based on a real-life incident that took place in New Hampshire’s White Mountains a dozen years ago.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticNot a nadir in recent horror cinema, but well below average — and sea level — “The Cellar” is a logy contraption whose basic elements seem all too obviously determined by international co-production requirements, rather than any internal logic. Toplining scream queen Elisha Cuthbert as a mother who unwittingly moves her family into a house of supernatural peril, this West Ireland-shot thriller, made in conjunction with Belgian interests, is technically polished.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticWhen “The Blair Witch Project” got the found-footage horror subgenre properly started in 1999, it was already asking for trouble that the protagonists were film students pointing their cameras where they shouldn’t. These days, prospective victims in such movies are likely to make us feel they deserve their fate by being professional self-promoters with such widely despised job titles as “influencer,” “YouTube personality” or “reality TV star.” Sharp objects may also be involved, but in horror cinema, few things prove more reliably fatal than narcissism.So we know the goose of bearded thirtysomething Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) is cooked right away in “Deadstream,” because he’s introduced in a bombastic montage of clips from the streaming series of which he’s the star and entire crew.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticA perfect movie for the moment — though it debuted in late 2020, winning the Grand Prize at Tallin Black Nights — “Fear” offers both seriocomic balm and finger-wagging just as another major refugee crisis roils the world. Bulgarian theater and film veteran Ivaylo Hristov’s latest feature brings to mind not just current Ukraine-related events, but wider European and global trends, as it depicts a border backwater rattled when a lonely local widow takes in an African man fleeing war.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticCurrent B-grade thrillers so frequently have too little plot — often not much more than a starting premise — that it’s almost refreshing to see something like “The Weekend Away,” which has many more narrative complications than it can pull off. Certainly not with sufficient credibility, suspense or atmosphere, and not in one hectic hour and a half.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticSome movies endure as a treasured soundtrack to which the film itself becomes a mere footnote. That seems likely to prove the case with “Creation Stories,” a biopic of Creation Records’ founder Alan McGee that duly draws sonic fuel from the stellar array of Britpop bands he was involved with.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticWith both title and central buddy dynamic tipping hat to “Superbad,” among other raunchy teen comedies, “Supercool” is not the kind of movie that wins prizes for originality. Nor is Finnish director Teppo Airaksinen’s first U.S.-shot, English-language project as outrageous as it thinks it is. Nonetheless, this energetic spin through high school antics redolent of everything since “Ferris Bueller” is colorful and amusing enough to entertain viewers looking for a familiar mix of bad-taste gags in a squeaky-clean suburban setting.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticGeorgian writer-director-producer Giga Agladze has been a musician, a documentarian and Caucasus regional director of the Transcendental Meditation-focused David Lynch Foundation. Yet none of those things has any obvious bearing on, or makes much sense of, his debut directorial feature—apart from Lynch being on board as a prominently billed executive producer.Shot in 2019 Tbilisi with a largely British cast, “The Other Me” has Jim Sturgess as a man whose sudden-onset blindness is sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes both.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe sense of a city as a complex, ailing ecosystem is rendered with unusual vividness in “All That Breathes.” Shaunak Sen’s documentary has no formal interviews, onscreen text or omniscient narrator to provide relevant stats on Delhi, where air pollution is reportedly twelve times worse than in Beijing, which ranks second on the global list. Instead, the environmental impact is felt on the microcosmic level of two resident brothers dedicated to urban bird rescue.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThings like drinking games and “RiffTrax” were invented for movies like “In the Forest,” which are very bad but need a little participatory help to become so-bad-they’re-good. This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots. Simultaneous with streaming-platforms release on Jan.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThough not mandatory, a stint of missionary service is common among young Mormons, with men and (to a lesser extent) women mostly between 18 and 21 sent to LDS outposts around the world for evangelical work by the thousands each year. They comprise the most public face of a church still regarded by many outsiders as secretive and strange, and thus are an object of natural curiosity, if also some popular ridicule.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticRace, class and cultural divides are probed with intriguing understatement in “God’s Country.” Julian Higgins’ first feature can be taken as a drama with thriller elements or a low-key thriller with atypical dramatic nuance, working either way as a quietly effective balance between genre, social issue and character study elements. Based on a James Lee Burke story, it stars Thandiwe Newton as a college professor whose fish-out-of-water status in rural Montana is exacerbated when she runs afoul of trespassing working-class hunters.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticUnstoppable force meets immovable object in “To the End.” Rachel Lears’ documentary inspires in its portrait of youthful activists organizing to push impactful climate-change policies into American political reality — and exasperates in the resistance with which that urgent quest is greeted on both sides of the entrenched-power aisle. Covering several years of fast-moving events, this Sundance premiere is too exclusively U.S.-focused to be particularly viable for offshore programmers, but its topicality should stir sales interest on home turf.Like the director’s last feature “Knock Down the House,” about the 2018 Congressional election, this one also throws a spotlight on New York state candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe fear of seemingly harmless strangers that’s heightened during our era of online “relationships” (not to mention COVID) is cannily exploited in actor-turned-writer-director Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil.” Building on the thorny couple dynamics of his prior features “Parents” and “A Horrible Woman,” this excruciatingly slow-burn thriller has a young Danish family befriended on holiday by a Dutch clan, only to belatedly realize these new BFFs might be hazardous to their health.Tafdrup’s squirm-inducing tale is premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, and should find ready berth among genre fans, with strong potential for remake bids. (Distribution rights have already been secured by horror streaming service Shudder.) At the same time, its all-too-palpable cruelty will repel some viewers, in the same way such prior atypical horrors as the original “Wolf Creek” and both editions of “Funny Games” did.