In the hot, dry climate of Northwest Nevada, a mother drops off her daughter in town, urging her not to come home anytime soon. Cleo (Elsie Fisher) looks away as her mom gives her an unearned dressing-down, cruelly reminding her that she is not above her surroundings. She waits until her mother has already driven away before she responds with futile adolescent anger.

Cleo is effectively on her own for the rest of the film, with her mother never once appearing. Even when Cleo goes missing later in the film, the audience is never formally introduced to her mother. Instead, first-time director Fergus Campbell drops us directly into Cleo’s world — no parents, no rules and every authority figure is obscured, like the unintelligible adults in Peanuts cartoons. From the film’s hand-painted opening title sequence to the occasional intrusion of illustrations throughout the story, Sparks is the kind of microbudget indie that film festivals were made to showcase. Every frame is crafted with care and love for the cinematic form.

When a book on Jean-Luc Godard pops out of a cigarette machine, Cleo knows where she wants to go. She immediately disappears into the fantasy of 1960s Paris, a place she sees as the birth of a truer form of cinema, outside of American conventions. Luckily for her, she’s soon introduced to “The Crop,” a group of rebellious teenagers who believe the local reservoir is a time portal. The group’s de facto leader, Antoine (Charlie Foster), is just as enamored of Paris in the 1960s, despite knowing nothing of the French New Wave. Once he meets Cleo, he’s instantly obsessed with her, driving a wedge between him and his best friend and secret lover, Max (Denny Mcauliffe).

The rest of the group is much more chill, fascinated by the idea of time travel but content where they are. The original “Crop” includes the emotional Antoine, brutally honest Max, goofy Trip (Simon Downes Toney), laid back Kane (Thomas Deen Baker) and soft-spoken Casazza (Julia D’Angelo). Then there’s Odette (Madison Hu), who is secretly in love with Cleo, but mostly keeps it to herself. It’s Odette who introduces Cleo to “The Crop” and sets the story into motion.

With its queer love triangle and multiple scenes of “Crop” boys hooking up with each other, Sparks feels like a modern successor to the early films of Gregg Araki. Nowhere and Totally F***ed Up easily come to mind as we watch the kids party in the empty parking lot they call home, supplied with beer acquired with fake IDs. Similar to more recent indies like Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall and Luke Gilford’s National Anthem, Sparks blends classical rural imagery with a more ethnically and socially diverse worldview. Watching these films has been exciting, as they breathe new life into American independent cinema.

Campbell’s script has both stylized and naturalistic dialogue, giving us a group of teens who feel painfully real in their inconsistency. When Cleo goes missing, it’s unclear whether she actually time-traveled or is simply having a mental health crisis. It could go either way.

Foster gives a star-making performance as Antoine, an idealistic faux beatnik who can’t seem to accept that the object of his affection is just as clueless as he is. Fisher, who broke out in Bo Burnham’s directorial debut Eighth Grade, is the heart of Sparks, once again playing a girl who is struggling more than she lets on. Like many young women, she puts on a brave face, hoping her confidence will take her wherever she needs to go.

At a slim 76 minutes, Sparks pulls you in tight and never lets go, every frame bursting with teen angst and longing. It’s the kind of film that inspires young people to tell small, meaningful stories outside of the Hollywood machine. This critic hopes Sparks is seen by every teenager who needs it. Fergus Campbell has made something very special; I can’t wait to see what he does next.

The bustling street scenes and seaside images that open and are interspersed throughout Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 are not period-movie re-creations. They are real archival images shot by the British occupying forces at the time and that the filmmaker restored and colorized for this movie. An intriguing way to get around budgetary limitations, perhaps, but also a subtle rebuke to the idea that Palestine was sitting barren and uninhabited before the creation of Israel and its supposed blooming of the desert. The whole movie could be seen as an attempt to push back against some common historical misconceptions. The title says it all: We hear so much about 1948 — whether one thinks of it as the post-WWII establishment of Israel, or the Nakba (“catastrophe”), as it’s known to Palestinians — that the crucial period before it is often ignored.

Jacir’s absorbing film takes place during the 1936–39 Arab revolt, which was a response to British rule and the colonial authority’s partnership with newly arriving Jewish refugees from Europe. Indeed, the British are the primary villains here, favoring the newcomers and regularly humiliating the Arabs; the Jewish settlers go mostly unseen save for some archival footage showing them arriving on ships. The locals at first regard the newcomers with curiosity, but soon rumors spread of settlers arming themselves, burning villages, and taking jobs away from workers. Caught between town and country is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young well-educated villager who takes a job in Jerusalem working for Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), a wealthy businessman and publisher who often entertains British officials at his parties. At night, Yusuf goes back to his village, where his family is regularly brutalized by the local authorities, led by the snarling protomillenarian Captain Wingate (played by Robert Aramayo, whom some will recognize as the young actor who scored an upset win at the BAFTAs last month for I Swear).

As the gentle Yusuf, Anaya doesn’t quite have the charisma to pull off such a passive character. He spends much of the film observing, and his initial inaction is supposed to be frustrating — but we can’t quite read curiosity or compassion or fear or much of anything in his eyes. Even when he eventually joins the resistance, we can’t get a handle on the character, largely because he hasn’t been given much shading or dimensionality; his expression barely changes throughout. The supporting cast, which includes such legends as Saleh Bakri and Hiam Abbass, is tremendous, but in a way their presence highlights Yusuf’s inadequacy as a protagonist. We spend more time wondering about them than we do about him. Jeremy Irons shows up as General Arthur Wauchope, Britain’s notorious high commissioner for Palestine, who oversaw the collective punishment of Arabs during the revolt and the massive transfer of land to the settlers, and he makes a perfectly smug, patronizing official, pretending to appease both sides while clearly favoring one.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion. This results not just in a dilution of the drama, but it also leads to confusion: When the narrative picks certain characters back up, we may have forgotten who they were. And the decision not to show the Jewish settlers, while understandable — Jacir wants to focus on the Arabs’ struggle against the British, who were the prime movers behind the events of 1936 — feels like a misstep. Not for reasons of both-siderism but because by consigning the other side to the shadows, the director undermines her thesis: The film posits (accurately) that the British were manipulating and exploiting these settlers and playing them off the Palestinians, but because we never see the settlers, we never actually see this process in action.

Palestine 36 is worth seeing, but it also feels like a compromised work. Jacir, the talented filmmaker behind Salt of This Sea (2008) and When I Saw You (2012), had to ditch many of her locations after October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. Something similar happened to Cherien Dabis and her excellent epic Palestinian drama, All That’s Left of You, which premiered at Sundance last year. There’s something to be said for the persistence of these artists in grinding through and realizing such elaborate historical films in the face of enormous, unforeseen, catastrophic logistical challenges. At a time when our movies feel as though they’re getting smaller and more meaningless, it’s refreshing to see works of such sweep and ambition, whatever their flaws may be.

Seven-time Oscar nominee Richard Burton continues to have an intriguing afterlife, four decades following his death. At this year’s BAFTA awards, a movie about his early life, Mr. Burton, earned a nomination for best British Film. Mr. Burton, directed by Marc Evans, was also one of the audience favorite films at January’s Palm Springs International Film Festival. It opens in theaters this week and, aided by a strong cast, should appeal even to audiences who have fuzzy recollections of the once notorious actor.

The film begins with a quotation from Elizabeth Taylor (who married Burton twice after a scandalous, heavily publicized affair that began during the shooting of Cleopatra in 1962). In it, Taylor states that Richard never would have found fame and fortune without the efforts of his adoptive father, Philip Burton (superbly played by Toby Jones in the film). Richard (Harry Lawtey of Industry) was actually born Richard Jenkins, the son of a Welsh miner who abandoned the family after the death of Richard’s mother. Richard was then raised by his older sister and her husband, but his talent was spotted by his teacher, Philip Burton, who recognized the young man’s appreciation of literature and drama.

Philip Burton was himself an aspiring writer who penned some dramas for the BBC and had a number of contacts in the theater. But the film suggests that he felt disappointed by his progress and may have compensated in part by playing a mentorship role to Richard. Whether he also felt a physical attraction to young Richard is treated subtly and never definitively answered in the film.

Opening scenes contrast the comfortable but modest living conditions of Philip, who resides in a boarding house owned and overseen by a sympathetic landlady (trenchantly played by Lesley Manville), and the tension in Richard’s household. His brother-in-law demands that Richard drop out of school to contribute to the family finances; the boy resists following his father into the mines but gets a job at a clothing store instead.

Eventually Burton comes up with the idea that Richard can move into the boarding house and return to school, but this may require Burton adopting Richard as his son. Richard is comfortable with this arrangement, and Philip suggests that Richard may have an opportunity for a fellowship to study acting at Oxford. But when Richard’s father and fellow students suggest that Philip may have something more than a paternal interest in the handsome young aspiring actor, Richard flees in terror.

It is to the film’s credit that it refuses to come to any definitive conclusion about Philip’s interest in Richard. There was never anything overtly untoward about their close bond, and until the end of his life, Richard continued to express gratitude for Philip Burton’s mentorship. Yet it may be significant that we never see any hint of Philip’s romantic or sexual interest in women. Richard did leave Burton’s household for several years, but when he had his breakthrough role in Stratford in 1951, portraying Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Philip returned and (at least in this telling) helped Richard to a triumphant opening night.

Richard Burton quickly moved on from there. He earned his first Oscar nomination in 1952 for My Cousin Rachel, and in 1954, he starred in the first Cinemascope epic, The Robe. (Other memorable roles included Becket and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his finest collaboration with Taylor.) Burton also continued acting in theater, and the 1964 production of Hamlet, in which he starred under the direction of John Gielgud, remains perhaps the most phenomenally successful production of the play in modern theatrical history.

Since unknown backstories behind startling successes always compel, Mr. Burton has a lot going for it. Lawtey doesn’t quite match Burton’s thrilling vocal delivery (who could?), but he convinces us of the young actor’s talent and potential instability. But it is really Jones, in one of the finest performances of his long career, who holds our attention throughout the movie. The subject of mentorship is not treated frequently onscreen, but Mr. Burton may be remembered as one of the definitive explorations of the theme. All the technical credits help to ground the film — cinematography by Stuart Biddlecombe is especially striking — but it is the performances that truly mesmerize.