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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.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic“Free Chol Soo Lee” charts the complicated history of a wrongful-conviction victim who became a figurehead for both Asian-American and prisoners’-rights activists in the 1970s and beyond. Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s film benefits from ample archival material, as well as latter-day input from surviving interviewees. Even so, it’s a tale ultimately more sad than inspiring, because Lee’s case embodies the odds stacked against even an exoneree adjusting successfully to civilian life after debilitating years in “the system.” With its focus on a fairly recent if little-remembered U.S.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticDramatizing the lives of beloved writers is always problematic, because the act of writing itself is so inherently un-dramatic. Nonetheless, writer-director William Nunez’s “The Laureate” manages to eke a fairly engrossing tale from the complicated personal lives of creatives surrounding “I, Claudius” author Robert Graves (Tom Hughes) in England’s Roaring ’20s. Well-acted, nicely crafted and a handsome period piece within modest means, this isn’t the most novel, memorable or intellectually deep enterprise of its type.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic“Too much too soon” is a scenario that plays out in many life arenas, and it certainly does for the teenage protagonist swept into the professional sports world of “Tigers.” This year’s Swedish Oscar submission feature dramatizes Martin Bengtsson’s memoir of his brief, overwhelming stint in a leading Italian soccer club, whose pressures triggered a nervous breakdown. It’s a compelling tale, well cast and directed with vivid intensity by Ronnie Sandahl.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe second film submitted for Oscar international feature contention by Southeast African nation Malawi, following Shemu Joyah’s “The Road to Sunrise” in 2018, “Falsani: A Tale of Survival” offers an earnest depiction of struggle against poverty and corruption. Director Gift Sukez Sukali and writer Gilbert Moyo’s debut is technically competent if more haphazard in storytelling terms, articulating its social issues in terms alternately blunt and sketchy.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticEnding a year begun saving her baby from a gremlin in deliberately outrageous “Shadow in the Cloud,” Chloë Grace Moretz again suffers peril-fraught maternity as half of the title equation in “Mother/Android.” This sci-fi thriller, launching on Hulu Dec. 17, offers a more sobersided survival tale set in an imminent future where humanity’s artificial helpmates have turned against their creators.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticAfter the straight horror content of 2018 narrative feature debut “Dachra,” which was released in the U.S. just six months ago, Abdelhamid Bouchnak aims for a more complex, unclassifiable mix of fantasy and drama in “Golden Butterfly.” Tunisia’s Oscar submission title is a somewhat mixed bag whose occasionally arresting parts work better than the whole.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticBilled as a black comedy, Uruguay’s Oscar submission feature stays on the breezier side of that description, bringing a playfully light touch to a fish-out-of-water tale that might have gone as dark as something like “The Wicker Man” or “Wake in Fright.” Diego Fernandez Pujol’s second feature (following “Darwin’s Corner” eight years ago) has been a home-turf theatrical hit, though as an export item its pleasing but modest impact is more likely to attract home-format sales. Remake rights might also prove a viable commodity.Martin Slipak, whose harried, clean-cut Everyman recalls the likes of Paul Rudd or Ben Stiller here, plays ambitious young white-collar worker Claudio Tapia.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThose uncertain just how seriously Paul Verhoeven intended us to take the alternately earnest and lurid nunsploitation of “Benedetta” will be even more flummoxed by Mickey Reece’s “Agnes.” The prolific, idiosyncratic Oklahoma auteur’s latest is half exorcism thriller, half character drama of lost faith. But those two sharply differentiated parts add up to much less than a coherent whole, in addition to being too underdeveloped and tonally wobbly to satisfy in themselves.Unlike the squirrelly genre-bender that was the director’s last feature, “Climate of the Hunter,” conceptually near-random “Agnes” does not find its own singular terms to work within.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe flood of documentaries in recent years about high-risk climbing and mountaineering have offered plenty of vicarious armchair athleticism, to be sure.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe recent indie drama “Freeland” is about a fictive longtime Northern California pot grower whose life only becomes more complicated — and her business less viable — when the state legalizes the hitherto-criminalized industry. New documentary “Lady Buds” features several of that character’s real-world equivalents, women whose entrepreneurial (as well as agricultural) skills are transitioning to a very different era for the marijuana marketplace.Chris J.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticIn a fairly crowded field of contenders, “Drunken Birds” just grabbed the nod as Canada’s best international feature submission to the Oscars. The reasons why are almost immediately apparent on seeing Montreal-born Ivan Grbovic’s sophomore effort, co-written with cinematographer Sara Mishara.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticEighteen years ago Megan Mylan co-directed “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a memorable documentary chronicling hope and upheaval among seven young men who landed in the U.S. after surviving village massacres during that nation’s second civil war.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticPreviously filmed 45 years ago under its original title, leading Soviet-era Kyrgyz literary figure Chingiz Aitmatov’s 1970 novella “The White Ship” gets a handsome new screen treatment in Artykpai Sunyundukov’s “Shambala.” This tale of a boy’s troubled childhood in a remote Tengri Mountains region is the Kyrgyz Republic’s Oscar submission. Its scenic beauty and production gloss certainly invite international exposure.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThere’s a whole lot of ammo going blammo over the course of “One Shot,” an action movie couched as a battle in real time between Navy SEALs and insurgents on a U.S.-controlled, Guantanamo-style island detention facility, presented in what appears to be a single, continuous shot.Of course, as in other recent films like “Birdman” and “1917,” the “real time” is an illusion created by hard-to-detect editing together of several long, elaborately blocked individual shots — this movie was shot in 20 days, not 90 minutes.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticGallic horror specialists Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury stirred considerable excitement 14 years ago with their debut feature, the alarming home-invasion thriller “Inside.” They’ve struggled to duplicate that success since, and their English-language franchise bow “Leatherface” a decade later was poorly received, if somewhat undeservedly so.But they rekindle some enthusiasm with “The Deep House,” which was released in France this past June and now reaches U.S. audiences via premium cabler Epix, as well as digital platforms.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThough horror movies have increasingly gravitated toward jump scares and computer-generated FX, often the genre’s most unsettling exercises eschew such tricks for quiet, unadorned menace. That’s certainly the case with “Roh,” which was Malaysia’s submission for the best international feature Oscar last year.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticOffering a different kind of near-future dystopia, “Warning” lets the clock run out on humanity’s stint in the background, while in the foreground we examine ways technology might usurp our lives in the guise of “improving” them. This first feature for music video director Agata Alexander, credited as “a film by” producer Cybill Lui Eppich, is a refreshingly offbeat series of faintly interlocking stories that hang together better than most omnibus-type constructs.This is sci-fi cinema of a relatively subtle, intriguing stripe, without the usual emphasis on fantastical or action imagery.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticIn 2004, Banjong Pisanthanakun and then-collaborator Parkpoom Wongpoom kickstarted their directorial careers with “Shutter,” a supernatural thriller so effective it’s been remade (albeit to lesser effect) abroad three times to date.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThis weekend marks the much-noted 50th anniversary of “The French Connection’s” release. “The Manor” perhaps inadvertently stirs memories of another William Friedkin joint, 1990 horror “The Guardian,” which was so disliked by the director that he omitted mentioning it in his otherwise fairly comprehensive memoirs.