Alan Scherstuhl

The film is a wonder of desert skies, slick tunnels, bumptious fence- and wall-climbing, and occasional staged reveries.

Goldfine and Geller pace and structure The Galapagos Affair like the true-crime tale that it is, its mysteries rich and involving, its characters enduring in the imagination long after the film has ended.

Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.

The performances are strong, the imaginary visions are suggestive and fleeting, and the film as a whole is swoony, tender, skittish, a little scary — in short, this is what young love feels like. More Meyerhoff, please!

The Attack is most avowedly "about" terrorism. But that's a subject, not the subject. The film, an arresting and upsetting one, is also about love, trauma, and trust, both within one particular marriage and within entire cultures.

First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.

Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut.

The movie's packed with minor incidents, all fresh, compelling, and funny. It also boasts two lengthy scenes that are touched with something greater.

Raising Bertie charts nothing less than what it’s like to try to grow up free in the prison capital of the world.

Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.

Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood.

The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged.

A marvelous film, stripped of false urgency.

This superb, suspenseful film, completed in 2009, opens as a playful comedy of vacationing couples and awkward romance, one that might be set in the French countryside, but by the end has become a moral drama likely to corrode your certainties.

Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.

A Most Wanted Man is simply a complex tale superbly told, with time for nuance and to soak in its mysteries.

Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.

What surprises (a little) and fascinates (a lot) are the town-to-town commonalities Counting invites you to appraise.

Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.

This isn't a film about the Civil War; it's about the minds of white folks so removed from plantation life that they feel they have no stake in it at all. It's not about back then — it's about being.

The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.

There’s nothing fussy about any shot of Nobody’s Watching, but there’s also no shot wasted, and no shot that doesn’t communicate something vital about the city or her protagonist.

If White Reindeer's satirical elements feel off the rack, that's because what they're satirizing in our real lives is, too.

McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.

The horror's a long time coming, but Goldthwait and company make the waiting worth it.

Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What's beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great contradiction of superheroic fantasy: jolly do-goodism and its brutalizing sadism.

Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.