Bill Stamets

The masterful script deals with telling words.

Key action points are edited with finesse, but the denouement, with its dutiful hail of gunfire, is heartless and mechanical.

Ida reaches spiritual depth through affecting performances rendered in sublime black-and-white compositions.

This saga of romance works with an unromantic style.

Poetic Turkish tale. Nuri Bilge Ceylan shot this entrancing black-and-white story in his hometown, from a story written by his sister and with a cast of friends and relatives. [20 Oct 1998, p.37]

This thoughtful film is designed with taste. Music is minimal. Cuing a little Nine Inch Nails at the end, Poitras enables “citizenfour” to commit an act of reverse surveillance on the NSA.

The Missing Picture is a wrenching yet tender memoir by Rithy Panh about life and death in the time of Pol Pot.

Level Five (1996) is a poetic if occasionally opaque film essay on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

Despite our narrow angle on Nepal, Manakamana peers into lives at close range.

The Past is an understated study of two marriages in transition.

Observant with mannered edits, Jem Cohen’s modest story delivers a character sketch and a traveler’s essay.

This moving, Oscar-nominated documentary is an odyssey of a tragic observer.

Dispiriting as Blackfish is at times, it offers beautiful advocacy for orca freedom. Anecdotes and data indicate these mammals are highly sensitive and social. Treating them as we do for our entertainment and profit is unconscionable.

Stylistically, this saga of survival never aims for urban neo-realism. Yet, as sentimental humanism, it shows laudable taste in dodging the usual indulgent touches and turns when lost kids find their way.

At Berkeley earns credit for documenting a distinctly articulate community.

This is vicarious cinema at its best.

Murmelstein answers his accusers in The Last of the Unjust. Over a compelling three hours and 38 minutes.

[A] diverting documentary.

Jim Jarmusch stocks his latest low-key indie with more than his usual characters in low-velocity drift. The Akron-born auteur infuses the title couple of Only Lovers Left Alive with his taste for culture, if not cuisine.

[Kirby Dick's] new documentary enrages, yet makes its case in an even-tempered manner.

Hicks may devote too much time on hospital errands and bedside moments as Terry’s health declines. But he succeeds at honoring the career of one man who is helping another’s.

A Touch of Sin is humanist critique of the country’s turn to capitalism.

The first-rate Italian comedy Reality — which fakes Pope Benedict appearing in St. Peter’s Square — likens consecration to elevating an “everyman” to pop celebrity.

A diverting tutorial with this takeaway: “Let’s be puzzled about what seems obvious.”

May errs in styling this human interest saga.

Resisting screen rules is Godard’s forte.

Morales trafficks in familiar formulas of an everyman in a bind with evil men. What sets Graceland apart are the conflicted values of its characters.

An obliquely clinical love story.