Christopher Gray

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.

Miguel Gomes combats austerity with expansiveness, leavened by doses of frivolity and scatology.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.

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.

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.

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

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

A stunning work of war reportage nestled within a creaky study of ideological purity.

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

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

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

Though J.P. Sniadecki doesn't elucidate any broad structural motive, his film gradually adopts an engrossing rhythm among its clatter of steel and ambient chatter.

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

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

Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.

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.

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.

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