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Romain Gavras wastes no time in “Athena” informing the audience of the stakes. There have been three cases of police brutality within two months in the titular majority-minority community.

While watching Frederick Wiseman’s “Un Couple” — the legendary documentarian’s first fictional drama— a different literary giant comes to mind besides the ones whose mercurial marriage is depicted on screen. The film’s fickle love recalls a verse from Latin poet Catullus, undoubtedly familiar to anyone who studied the language in school: “what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.” The woman in question in “Un Couple” is Sophia Tolstoy, wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo, as embodied in the film by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu.

Quentin Tarantino never met a camera or microphone he didn’t love, and in Luca Rea’s documentary “Django & Django,” they love him right back. The title is a bit of a misnomer – it’s not really about Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western “Django” nor Tarantino’s 2012 “Django Unchained” that paid reverent homage.

Where to begin with “Freaks Out,” a Nazisploitation fantasy caper with circus trappings and a tin-ear for taste. The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.

Anyone familiar with the work of Mexican director Michel Franco, whether they be admirers or detractors, can attest to the “this is not going to end well” sentiment his sordid cinematic provocations instill. With a pensive angle, “Sundown” – a reteaming between the filmmaker and his “Chronic” star Tim Roth – upholds that tension of expecting the worst to come the characters’ way.

A journey of discovery rooted in questions about faith, fate, and mortality, “Miracle” offers up revelations like slow drips from a faucet, building to a staggering conclusion that synthesizes all of the film’s narrative ingredients. Part two of director Bogdan George Apetri’s Romanian trilogy, the film is self-contained as a piece, yet features characters from 2020’s “Unidentified” along the edges, expanding the tapestry of this world while germinating an entirely new story.

“The Peacock’s Paradise” is one of the worst types of films to watch and review. Ineffectual in its style, but inoffensive in its content and execution, Laura Bispuri’s most recent directorial effort fails to move beyond the rudimentary elements that comprise the average movie.

Guess it had to happen sometime, but it’s a shame that the previously-thought-to-be inexhaustible energy resource of Edgar Wright’s omnivorous, giddy cinephilia should finally be showing signs running out right now, just when a jaded, weary, pandemic-drab world could use it most.

Beginning with a dizzying one-shot that follows Judith – or is it Margot? – around a high-end clothing store before a fainting spell upends her shopping trip, Antoine Barraud’s “Madeleine Collins” is a laser-focused character study that literalizes a double-life, following Judith (a calculated Virginie Efira) as she attempts to balance seemingly having two husbands, two sets of children, two complete lives.

Near the town of Cerchiara, in a valley nestled within the Pollino massif of mountains on the border between the Calabria and Basilicata regions of lushest Italy, there is a hole. It’s not the biggest hole, but at the time of its exploration, it was the second-deepest.

A film about politics with a title like “Promises” all but comes with a get-out clause for failing to deliver on early hopes. And so it is with French director Thomas Kruithof’s lackluster second feature, which tries to pass gesturing vaguely at social ideas off as storytelling.

“I don’t like reality anymore. Reality is lousy,” teenager Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) says mournfully at a crucial, spiritually lonely moment in Paolo Sorrentino’s evocative new coming of age story, “The Hand Of God.” Sitting on a mountain, looking to the sky, the heavens, for answers, Fabietto should know.

The ghost of a legendary cowboy named Bronco Henry haunts “The Power of the Dog,” an evocative, sensory psychodrama set in the American West of the 1920s. While Bronco is long gone and never seen on the screen, his spirit is felt everywhere in this soulful exploration of masculinity and repressed love, one that is equal parts untamed and delicate and wholly gorgeous.

Daniel Gellar and Dayna Goldfine’s “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” begins at what is, by most definitions, the end: with Cohen’s final concert, in December of 2013. He roams the stage, growling out the title song in his trademark fedora and black suit, with all 79 of his years behind it, and it sounds like both a dirge and a celebration.

It’s late August, and while the leaves aren’t falling just quite yet, the Fall Film Festival season is upon us. As usual, the Venice Film Festival always starts with the Telluride Film Festival following on its heels just a day or two later.

The age of social media is a trap for contemporary writers and filmmakers eager to Say Something. From fusty old Facebook to Instagram to platforms most people over 25 couldn’t even name, it presents all manner of topical ironies and iniquities in society at large, all too easily open to commentary and critique by artists who needn’t look further than the device in their hand for research.

Sometimes – not often enough – a movie doesn’t play on a screen in front of you so much as it happens to you.

A short film set in a Glasgow supermarket has been selected for this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Following her brilliant and tender breakout feature “The Rider,” Chloé Zhao’s next move has been hotly anticipated – making moves at Marvel Studios as well as working on her followup film, “Nomadland,” starring Frances McDormand.

UPDATED with statement from Paramount: As the number of cases of the coronavirus swell in Italy to a reported 219 cases, the biggest number outside of China, Japan, and South Korea, the Venice, Italy local government has put a stop to all public gatherings including a halt to the upcoming production of Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible 7” in the floating city, according to sources.