Christopher Gray

Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism.

The film questions the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting.

The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.

If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.

The film confirms that the ruthless knack of the wealthy and powerful to remain so is a universal impulse.

Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.

Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.

As Mati Diop mourns Senegal’s lost men, she honors their grief and affords them tremendous power all at once.

What's most stirring about Céline Sciamma's film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne's feelings for one another.

The film is an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.

Much like its subject, Avi Belkin’s documentary knows how to start an argument.

By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.

The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.

The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

Even after the film (quite entertainingly) explains itself, it never feels like more than a howl of frustration and cynicism.

The documentary shrewdly illustrates how media savvy can turn a fledgling protest into an international cause célèbre.

The portrait it paints of its Marines is appropriately discordant, redolent of the twitchy frustration caused by a long stint in a sparse landscape with a hazy mission.

The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes.

Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.

The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.

Hale County dwells on the beauty of the everyday as it recognizes the fragility of individual lives.

As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.

Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.

James Foley’s film suggests that any semblance of capitulation on Christian’s part is a win for Ana and women at large, even if that momentary triumph leads to a further sacrifice of Ana’s independence.

Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.

No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.

The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.

It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.

Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.

The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.

It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.

A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.

We come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect that allows the complex, funny, and indomitable personalities to shine through.

Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.

If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.

Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.

Though some of Spettacolo's tension is superficial, the stuff of any let’s-put-on-a-show narrative, its latent anxieties are myriad and profoundly resonant.

It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.

Logan Lucky is both a Robin Hood fantasy and a uniquely Soderberghian lark, an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.

Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.

The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.

When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.

The director’s apparently frank and intimate relationships with the RBSS’s heroic journalists help sustain City of Ghosts‘s undeniable urgency, which culminates in a final image of appropriate, irresolvable anguish.

Dan Stevens navigates the film’s literal and thematic alleyways with the same enthusiastic befuddlement that convinced many to soldier through Legion‘s more impenetrable stretches.

The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.

Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.

David Leveaux's film cannily incorporates elements of spycraft and sheer trash into a familiar formula.

Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland's film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.

The Thomas Vinterberg film's sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.

Devos's impressive debut bores into the mourning process and its piquant combination of emotional numbness and sensory vulnerability, rigorously avoiding finding an easy way out of this quagmire.

Feras Fayyad's film is broadly concerned with portraying the titular Syrian city as a community of neighbors and colleagues.

Azazel Jacobs’s film takes some shrewd steps to update the comedy of remarriage for the age of the smartphone.

The film's rough-hewn naturalism belies an exquisite sense of pace and a sneaky breed of gallows humor.

Director Michal Marczak's film finds a unique vitality in its densely constructed environment.

Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.

The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.

The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.

Each of Table 19‘s faint glimmers of grace are overwhelmed by elements of general spatial and narrative incompetence.

The film circumvents bleakness with a thoroughgoing commitment to understanding and intimacy.

Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.

Fifty Shades Darker takes the Dark Knight approach to franchise maintenance, taking pains to assure you that its protagonists are serious about their passions.

Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.

Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.

As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.

Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.

It does astounding work animating the mind of its young soldier, but it runs into technical difficulties whenever it tries to grasp the bigger picture.

Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.

It forgoes its promise of twisty adult thrills in favor of a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.

By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.

Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.

The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.

A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.

Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait that asserts its subject's sense of purpose even as it seems to slip out of his grasp.

It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.

Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.

Maris Curran never reconciles the film's impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.

By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.

Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.

The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.

The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.

The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.

Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.

Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.

The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.

The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.

Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage and low humor with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.

Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers's drama into a broad comedy.

It's too busy skipping through subplots to do much more than gloss over such heady issues as the fundamental subjectivity of truth and self-identity.

It takes its literalism to such an extreme that, at points, it's difficult to determine whether or not the film is operating with a semblance of irony.

Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.

A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.

It starts off as a dynamic parable about faith before wilting into a glum and rather disingenuous paean to the family.

Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.

The script labors to give the film a strong sense of place, but strange lapses confirm a sense that the city isn't a character here.

It's a bizarre and retrograde spectacle, as clueless and incurious about friendship as it is about the rudiments of composition and screenwriting