Justin Chang

Sirat is a visually and sonically overwhelming experience.

It's full of majestic desert vistas and propelled by that thrillingly percussive score.

It's also a drama of extraordinary tension and eventually shocking tragedy, in which death has a way of striking when you least expect it.

I was often reminded of The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer, two classic nail-biters, both adapted from a Georges Arnault novel about a road trip from hell.

What separates Sirat from those two films, though, is its lack of cynicism.

Lopez is terrific as a father whose child has disappeared, and who's understandably wary and mistrustful of the world.

But even at his bleakest moments, Luis receives unexpected acts of compassion from his new companions.

At one point, Esteban asks one of the ravers if he misses his family while traveling on the road.

And the raver responds, "'I prefer this family.'"

That might sound like something Vin Diesel would say in a Fast and Furious movie, and as it happens, Diesel's driving skills might have come in handy here.

But Lachey's film is as sincere in its tenderness as it is unrelenting in its ferocity.

There's something powerful about the movie's belief that even as an apocalypse looms, kindness can survive and meaningful relationships can form.

Just because the world is pitiless, Sirat suggests, doesn't mean that people have to be.

Few filmmakers are as attuned as Joachim Trier to the inner lives of young people.

In superb movies like Reprise, Oslo August 31st, and The Worst Person in the World, he has probed the artistic dreams and frustrated desires of characters trying, and often failing, to figure out who they are.

Trier's thoughtfulness is apparent even in his more middling films, like the Jesse Eisenberg drama Louder Than Bombs and the supernatural thriller Thelma, both of which were keyed in to the profound ways our families can mess us up.

Complicated parent-child relationships are also at the heart of sentimental value, a new drama that many have hailed as Trier's best movie to date.

But I've seen the film twice now,

and although it's thoughtfully crafted and well-acted, it strikes me as one of Trier's lesser efforts, the kind of lofty, self-consciously mature work that often gets more praise than its richer, livelier predecessors.

Renate Reinsve, the radiant star of The Worst Person in the World, here plays Nora, an accomplished stage actor whose mother has recently died.