Clayton Dillard

It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.

Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.

Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.

It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.

Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.

So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.

Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).

It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.

It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.

Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.

The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.

The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.

Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.

The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.

Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”

Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.

If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.

Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.

The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.

Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.

With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.

This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.