Danny King

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.

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

This combination of intimacy and remove — the startling emotional jolt of seeing a family in mourning stare toward you in silence, an image of the felled patriarch hanging on the wall behind them — characterizes Davies’s enthralling thirty-year-old debut feature, an autobiographically informed but hardly event-reliant memory piece.

Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy.

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

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

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.

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.

The majority of American Honey has Arnold working overtime to make her movie seem important or scandalous.

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.

Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Fanny has a stagy sensibility, but Auteuil displays flashes of genuine, old-school craft.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.