Danny King

D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.

Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.

Foroughi’s movie surveys how the mounting external pressures in Ava’s life bring her to a near-breaking point, and the director has devised (with the cinematographer, Sina Kermanizadeh) an explosive visual grammar to approximate the depths of Ava’s isolation and pain.

An existential whirlwind even when it seems sitcom-flippant, Sunshine sees Denis continuing on an elevated cinematic plane.

For all the sharp-witted conversations and pinpoint performances, Gemini most impresses as a piece of clean, confident visual storytelling.

The more microscopic and incidental the movie gets — as in this candlelit conversation — the grander its cumulative force becomes.

The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown.

The director’s stylistic obsessions (harried close-ups of cell-service signal bars) and thematic integrity (witness the overworked 9-to-5 crowd banding together in solidarity) elevate the cheap-paperback plot without tipping the movie over into pomposity.

A hybrid documentary distinguished by emotional tenderness and compositional elegance.

Moshe relates his tale of can-do vengeance with an unfussy clarity and an obvious fondness for the oaters of yesterday’s Hollywood — an affection that, as in Burden, imparts a winning sincerity.

Collaborating with DP Elemér Ragályi, Török also invests the movie with strong visual motifs, perhaps most prominently a consistency of shots that peer at characters through everyday barriers (windows, curtains). The resultant sensation of uncomfortable prying underlines the boiling suspicions that power the plot.

Birney and Audley have an impressive visual sense — the smart framing and thrifty, ingenious production design (by Peter Davis) at times suggest a Wes Anderson–directed installment of Between Two Ferns — and also the good sense to lean on Birney’s nuanced physical performance.

Levine and Van Soest (who are both white) deserve credit for eliding or treating obliquely a number of seemingly obvious narrative beats.

The central couple’s unforced benevolence is hard to resist; the bespectacled John, in particular, exhibits remarkable comfort in front of the camera, his frizzy white hair and knowing reaction shots lending him a kind of quizzical charisma throughout.

In the end, Rocha succeeds at communicating the restless spirit — if not quite the underlying substance — of the movement he documents.

Leave it to Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) to make a science fiction movie that consists of little more than scenes of two characters talking in plushly appointed living rooms.

His endeavor is one not of major strife but of minor flashes of magic.

The longer exposure to this universe opens up its cruelty and indifference.

There is in Sully — as there is in Sniper — a purposefully conflicted reckoning with the very tenets of American heroism.

When the movie just sits with the characters on front porches or in backyards, Mackenzie's generous, hands-off approach with his actors — most of the conversation scenes play out in long takes with minimal camera movement — yields poignant rewards.

For the Plasma finds genuine, almost innocent-seeming delight in its own swerves in style and rhythm.

There is serious pain in this movie — pain that endures throughout the years — but also a sincere love for life lived, and life remembered.

Kimberly Levin's Runoff deals with an old-as-time moral quandary — how far will you go to protect your family? — but the movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.

Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.

Though an accomplished farce, The Overnight is most interesting when confronting its genuine emotional stakes.

Whether laughing, crying, mumbling to himself, or projecting a valiant stoicism, Gulpilil — beneath a white beard and a blanket of shaggy hair — commands the screen in close-ups liable to run for minutes at a time.

What makes L for Leisure more than just a collection of clever, well-photographed jokes is the utter sincerity embedded within the constant sarcasm.

Aside from a showy opening (a tracking shot that snakes through a club, cribbing freely from Carlito's Way, Boogie Nights, etc.), the movie satisfies mainly due to its affecting ensemble and considerable emotional intelligence.

In Songs From the North, the South Korean–born, U.S.-based filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoo takes her camera to North Korea and, through a purposeful mix of on-location footage, poetic intertitles ("Is North Korea the loneliest place on Earth?"), and archival media, creates an empathetic snapshot of a country that is almost never depicted in such an accessible light.

An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).

Guedes's complex performance leaves no doubt regarding the fragility of Veronica's psyche.

The cumulative impact of the delayed story revelations and Chun's startling vulnerability is both an elegant gut-punch and a furious indictment of a society that treats its victims with inexcusable aggression and hostility.

The Homestretch is ultimately a humane accomplishment.

A compelling look at the pitfalls of being a grownup, Where We Started will resonate with anyone who's ever clicked with the right person at the wrong time, or who's wondered what it might be like.

The Age of Innocence remains a consistent spellbinder, laying bare its inhabitants’ follies and furies with a tender touch and a vigilant quietude that accumulates into a grand force.

Unforgiven is a stark western in slow motion, obsessed with reflection, not action.

If this movie about the grip of the next life has a mantra, it's this: "Love is stronger than death!"