Christopher Gray

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.