“I forgive” are the first words uttered by Vénéranda in Ben’Imana, but her ferocious gaze and the clamp of her arms across her chest tell a different story. At the center of a fine cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi brings Vénéranda’s resolve and all her painful contradictions to life in Ben’Imana, a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning.

Writer-director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s drama is set in the Rwandan village Kibeho in 2012. It’s the final year of the Gacaca courts, community tribunals focused on addressing the genocidal crimes committed, neighbor against neighbor, in the previous decade. Through the character’s complex and often tense relationships with her teenage daughter, her sister and her mother, as well as with other women in her village, Dusabejambo has crafted a story that’s both emblematic and achingly specific.

The person Vénéranda officially forgives in the opening scene is Karangwa (Aime Valens Tuyisenge), the man accused of murdering her siblings and other relatives. Of the eight children their mother (Arivere Kagoyire) raised, only Vénéranda and her sister Suzanne (a riveting Isabelle Kabano, who starred in Eric Barbier’s Small Country) survive. Suzanne’s fury is as explosive as her sister’s is contained. Contending to the judge (Adelite Mugabo) that Vénéranda “has no right to forgive on behalf of our family,” she’s determined to bring Karangwa to justice.

And she has no use for the community meetings that Vénéranda has begun leading, in her role as the district’s social affairs officer. Local women are invited to share still-raw memories, to grapple together with the kinds of things that would be immaterial to the courts. Their sessions are part of the country’s “Rwanditude” program, designed to reunite Rwandans after years of ethnic conflict and bloodshed.

Just as mentions of ethnicity are verboten in the courts, there’s no such identification in these gatherings, no way of knowing whether any of these women is Tutsi or Hutu, whether her husband was murdered or is in prison for murdering, until she stands to tell her harrowing story. (The film’s title is a Kinyarwanda word that emphasizes a collective identity, rather than the ethnic divisions of Tutsi and Hutu that Rwanda’s European colonizers encouraged and enforced.)

The younger generation, personified by Vénéranda’s spirited daughter, Tina (Kesia Kelly Nishimwe), and her boyfriend, a low-key photographer named Richard (Elvis Ngabo), has grown up without ethnic labels. But while Vénéranda holds herself as a model of forgiveness to women in the group, she can’t see past Richard’s Hutu heritage, and she turns a cold heart to Tina when she becomes pregnant and is kicked out of school. “Neither Richard or his family has harmed me,” Tina points out reasonably, while her mother fumes with shame and judgment, her inner turmoil finding expression in a baffling hypocrisy.

As harsh as she can be, Vénéranda is a devoted caretaker of her mother, who has lost her voice as well as her memory and is the regal, silent watcher of the unfolding family drama. Vénéranda also tends to her sister, whose health was taken from her, along with her husband and child, during the attacks. Suzanne is electric with anger even as her physical strength dwindles. “Can’t you stop your bullshit on forgiveness?” she hisses at Vénéranda, and urges her to reveal certain long-hidden truths to Tina.

What binds these two is the depth of what they’ve endured, the unspeakable brutality; what divides them is how they respond to it. Ben’Imana offers no simple definitions of courage, but rather a feverishly human group portrait of its possible expressions, with the exceptional triumvirate of Nyirinkindi, Kabano and the radiant Nishimwe forming the story’s broken but still hopeful heart.

Dusabejambo, working from a screenplay she wrote in collaboration with Delphine Agut, is attentive to her characters’ pain and their resolve, mirrored in the vibrancy of the setting. With strong contributions from cinematographer Mostafa El Kashef, production designer Ricardo Sankara and editor Nadia Ben Rachid, the movie is cinematic in an utterly unforced way, from the first images of gently rolling hills and the sound of birdsong to the bright interiors of Vénéranda’s home and the gentle, lilting score by Igor Mabano. Just as a brief piece of voiceover narration notes that a single word, ejo, means yesterday and tomorrow, Ben’Imana contains whole worlds in one very specific here-and-now.

Nearly 50 years on from “Star Wars” and the launch of a media empire (large or small “e”? You decide), the fandom has become its own galaxy of warring planets. But based on the success of the streaming series “The Mandalorian,” set around the title bounty hunter, we can all agree that his charge Grogu — green, wrinkled, big-eyed Baby You-Know-Who — is still adorable. Of the many “Star Wars” offshoots, this seems to be the sturdiest.

The brand is back together for “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which is a movie, a hoped-for franchise revival, a fourth season of sorts and an affable throwback. But it’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].

The expectations game was never going to help series creator Jon Favreau’s big-screen version, written with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor. Granted, this upscaled, agreeably rangy treatment of an adventure storyline that wouldn’t have been out of place on the show could have attempted more. Especially when it puts sci-fi icon Sigourney Weaver in an X-wing pilot uniform as a veteran of the Rebellion, but barely gives her anything to do besides secure Mando a job and keep tabs on his progress. (Gang, try harder. It’s Sigourney Weaver.)

Aimed squarely at kids of all sizes, “Star Wars” has become a glorified tour of a billionaire’s expanding playworld and “The Mandalorian and Grogu” wants the track well-oiled, not bumpy. The simple pleasures here of good vs evil, IMAX hugeness and composer Ludwig Göransson’s space-opera-hits-the-club score, go down easy enough to not be aggravating. It’s a lot.

But it’s not this reviewer’s position to tell you what “a lot” is — loose lips spoil scripts. When the moment comes at an appropriately dangerous time for our heroes, we sense the kind of thing that only movies can do well when they’re myths writ large: slow things down, shift momentum away from the tyranny of exposition and let emotion, humor, wonder and character co-exist. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” takes the series’ thematic underpinnings — what parenting looks like between a masked human loner and an otherworldly toddler — and deepens them.

The movie takes place in wonderfully detailed environments that evoke the earlier, beloved films. You’re not being pandered to, however; the payoff is a lovely echo. Elsewhere, the action set pieces are serviceably handled by Favreau. (One of them plays like, of all things, an homage to “The French Connection.”)

Otherwise, this is another hunt-and-retrieve narrative for the bounty hunter voiced by Pedro Pascal, physically embodied in armor by Brendan Wayne and, in combat, by fight choreographer Lateef Crowder. Still independent but New Republic-curious, Mando is tasked by Weaver’s Col. Ward to find a wayward scion of the slimy gangster Hutt clan, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), whose return will unlock some important information. Of course, things don’t go as planned, which for a while is interesting — are the Hutts like the Corleones, perhaps? — until it’s not, because then the dialogue would need to rise above the level of a middle-school play.

That being said, one of the movie’s strong points, absent its story deficiencies, is that, across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish famously says in “The Night of the Hunter,” a movie nobody will ever confuse with “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” But we all know summer fare like this is only ever as enjoyable as the monsters conjured up for conquering.

Memories of cinema past and present come rushing at you like 2001’s Star Gate sequence in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first return to cinema since 2016’s Neon Demon and his first project since dying for 20 minutes from a serious heart condition three years ago. Somehow, it was excluded from the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition in favor of films that look very much like 20^th-century television, but so far Refn’s film is the only suggestion at this year’s event that one of its key directors is even remotely curious as to what the real future of film might look like — as opposed to a  mess of known IP and AI recreations of people who’ve been dead for 50 years. It seems the French, who once disdained le cinema du papa, have a little bit of catching-up to do.

The film it most closely corresponds to is last year’s Resurrection by China’s Bi Gan, another awake-dream that aims to haunt rather than entertain (although the two things are by no means mutually exclusive). In terms of art, it brings to mind ballet, since so much of what’s important in that medium is hardly what you’d call storytelling in the Hollywood narrative sense. To expand on that further, it would be impossible to discuss the power of this film without mentioning Pino Donaggio’s phenomenal score. Bringing much-needed context to Refn’s style-overload, Donaggio’s achingly emotional soundtrack guides the film in a way music hasn’t since the early silents, or the heyday of Powell & Pressburger, and even, at a push, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger.

What’s it about? Whatever you like. The setting is a surreal futuristic Japanese city of the most unrealistic high-rise kind, and at the story’s core is Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is about to make a film with a younger influencer type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is obsessed with fame and obsessed with Elle, and the whole film draws quite heavily, in a similarly symbiotic way (whether knowingly or not), on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, which no genre director ever has ever not found endlessly fascinating. As they prepare for the shoot, Hunter meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former lover and now her father’s new wife. It’s a complication that obviously hurts, but Hunter is either slow on the uptake or, more likely, couldn’t really care less.

If we’re going to apply film-school formalism to a film that intends to live rent-free in your imagination whether you want it there or not, the “inciting incident” that the girls see a murder in a nearby tower block, and a young woman is defenestrated. It corresponds to the myth of The Leather Man, a tormented, Orpheus-like demon with piercing red eyes and razor-sharp diamond-studded gloves who stalks and kills young women in a bid to replace the daughter he lost to the underworld. We then jump-cut to a scene from a breathlessly exciting space movie, with Elle starring as the leader of an female sci-fi movie that looks like a fantastic space-opera version of Tarantino’s Fox Force Five and which serves as a reminder of Refn’s past interest in remaking Barbarella.

Things get more puzzling and more interesting — depending, of course, on your tolerance for ambiguity — with the arrival of Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI on the trail of The Leather Man, avenging mistreated women wherever he sees them, and drawn like a moth to the dress shop where he used to shop for his now-missing daughter. Private K isn’t at all connected to the main story, but as in Refn’s Thailand-set horror-thriller Only God Forgives, there is a sense that, somehow, justice can be willed into life in the east, and there is a sense that — perhaps — Elle has somehow summoned Private K into being, as the father she will never have.

How does it all fit together? Well, it does and it doesn’t, and Refn leaves you alone to figure out the true significance of The Leather Man and his two fabulously gnomic assistants (Ms. S and Ms. T). The genius of Her Private Hell is that, like a kind of visual ASMR, it offers nothing really concrete, just a lot of satisfying triggers and sensory associations. The actors feel that energy too, and the performances almost dare you to follow them, experimenting wildly with their characters in ways that make only the most subliminal kind of sense.

Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema; where once critics used to applaud Luis Bunuel for casting two actresses as the same character in 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, now they castigate Christopher Nolan for putting Elliott Page in The Odyssey.

Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side.

Title: Her Private Hell
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Distributor: Neon
Running time: 1 hrs 49 mins