Variety Critics’ Choice

Director Greg Zglinski’s espresso-dark humor and icy formal precision may nod to such experts as David Lynch and Lars von Trier, but Animals gleefully cultivates its very own kind of crazy in this unhinged adult fairy tale about a bourgeois Viennese couple attempting a restorative Alpine getaway.

In this unconventional, hypnotically paced American drama, set amid the modernist structures of Columbus, Indiana, critic-turned-director Kogonada is less interested in romance than in the characters’ overlapping and divergent worldviews and dreams, based on culture, environment and upbringing.

Five years after winning the Nobel prize, novelist Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martínez) gets an invitation to receive an award from his hometown. It’s been 40 years since he’s been back, despite using the city as the setting for all his stories, and his return provides both humor and poignant insights.

Skipping some of the more predictable clichés we’ve come to expect from the coming-out drama, Francis Lee’s sexy, thoughtful, hopeful film — about romance between an English farmboy and a Romanian migrant worker — advances a pro-immigration subtext that couldn’t be more timely in Brexit-era Britain.

What sounds like a routine episode of “ER” is complicated with rare depths of personal and sensual detail in French director Katell Quillévéré’s sublimely compassionate, heart-crushing heart-transplant ensemble, which boasts beautifully pitched performances from Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner.

An outwardly normal suburban couple who abduct, torture and murder schoolgirls must face their funny games in this genre-bending Australian thriller. Brave audiences will be rewarded, if that’s the word, with a harrowing ride that morphs from sharp horror to probing character study and back again.

In this wonderfully inventive outing from burlesque comedians Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, she plays a shy librarian looking all over Paris for her missing Aunt Martha (the final role of Amour star Emmanuelle Riva), while he plays a harmless hobo who pops up practically everywhere she goes.

A droll comic drama filmed in glorious widescreen black-and-white, this lovely tale follows a terminally ill barber (Gi Ju-bong) whose dying wish is to make a short film directed by his distant son. The offbeat crowd-pleaser will move many viewers to tears by the time Mr. Mo’s task is completed.

Every summer, Polish workers come to the Swedish countryside to pick strawberries, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. But this year is different as one of the foreign fruit-pickers’ kids is old enough to take an interest in the host family’s daughter, complicating the entire arrangement.

Inspired by the student demonstrations that sparked 2012’s Maple Spring, co-directors Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie apply the language of radical cinema to a tense, mournful and profoundly ambivalent portrait of four far-left activists who commit acts of vandalism and terror against the system.