Dave White

The approximately 270-minute running time becomes a hushed demand for the viewer to sit with historical cruelty and listen as its victims teach to the future, its effect a cumulative cry of warning for today.

Toni Erdmann is a thoroughly confident and impeccably executed comedy of oddball family functionality.

Formally, Tsai’s approach is as spare as possible while still maintaining a loose sense of narrative.

Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari take familiar tropes of contemporary Iranian cinema and rework them with refreshing twists.

By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costa’s conscientious cinema lives in a fully humane space. Material deprivation and unrelenting night provide a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where there’s no buffer of irony, no distancing effects.

Tea With the Dames, from director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”), is as cozy and satisfying as its title suggests.

The result is one of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness.

McQueen is formally traditional, and guided by a respectful approach to a complicated man. It’s lovingly told, even as it refuses to gloss over ugliness.

Téchiné intuitively favors movement over chatter, and he directs his young actors toward intimate, yearning performances.

Diaz has made an epic-length small film about the powerless, one full of moral urgency that he chooses to elongate and slow down to a crawl. It’s a quiet consideration of grief and mercy, of control taken and freely given up.

A thrilling, sprawling sensory overload that simultaneously enchants and overwhelms.

If Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, sad, mordantly funny dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the bad name it deserves.

In spite of an excessive, metaphor-bash of an ending — forgivable when everything else on screen is this frenziedly fun — In Fabric seduces like its bias-cut main character, then taunts you for your desire.

What Ray & Liz offers is the opposite of exploitive or vengeful enumeration of parental failure. Billingham finds grace for his ruined family, even if he refuses to save them, and it feels like an act of forgiveness.

With this determination to eschew simple explanations, to avoid being reductive about the cause and effect of an artist’s work and life, and to remain true to the cloudy circumstances surrounding Pasolini’s murder, comes a troubling directorial decision to turn the man’s death into a symbol — of what is unclear.

It is by turns scatological, hilarious, art-referential and, ultimately, moving.

It Comes at Night is not a horror film, though it is horrifying, mining the depths of paranoia and fear when unknown forces intrude on domesticity and create desperate rats out of otherwise reasonable human beings.

The filmmaker’s outsize, and sometimes unnerving, stylistic choices jump into the frame and vanish just as quickly.

It begins in a lush, green garden, but High Life, the quiet, bracing and ultimately moving first English-language film from acclaimed French director Claire Denis, is the antithesis of a creation story.

Undine allows for the magical while keeping its eyes firmly on the painfully real, making a valiant, full-hearted attempt to break the bonds of history.

It’s Dyrholm’s performance that anchors everything.

“Civil War” strikes that admirable balance: serious-minded action that never forgets to indulge in serious fun.

It’s a life — and now a film about a life — built from disparate strands of experience, but one that makes sense exactly because she is Grace Jones, and being Grace Jones means synthesizing Grace Jones from all available material.

For Dupieux, there seems to be no moral here at all, other than perhaps that life is a trajectory of mishaps and easiest for people who don’t linger over the fallout of their actions. This isn’t necessarily surprising for a filmmaker who once wrote and directed a movie about a sentient tire that commits serial murder.

Their initial meeting, as orgiastic as it can possibly be, is shot by first-time cinematographer Manuel Marmier without pornography’s genitalia-focused aesthetic tropes, and with as much intimate and magical lighting as any old-fashioned musical sequence.

Kim’s not interested in tidy resolution, and has a strong affinity for missed connections between people who know each other very well. That’s the greatest strength of Lovesong.

Boutefou’s performance in this delicate but wild environment is coiled and tense, but one that balances interior pain with a graceful delivery. She embodies rage, bitter amusement, longing and an emotional knowledge that comes only from decades spent with one very difficult person.

In addition to listless direction from Sonnenfeld, and an overall feeling of cheapness and carelessness, Nine Lives also suffers from incoherence.

[A] brash, bruising comedy.

A respectful, reserved, and charming documentary.

Layered images, un-erased pencil strokes, odd color blocking, jagged edges, heavy lines, painted frames with visible brush strokes, juxtapositions of marker, crayon, and charcoal, collage techniques, photographic effects, a set of psychedelic human lungs: this is is low-budget ambition firing on all cylinders.

As a document of a special creation, Maria by Callas is very nearly enough, thanks in no small part to that generous helping of footage where she fulfills that very destiny. It’s a powerful reminder that private walls can stay put when she’s singing Bellini’s “Casta diva,” that the music is more than enough, that we can let the mystery be.

A Ciambra is intimate and documentary-like, approaching and then backing away from larger issues of marginalized and immigrant communities, showing rather than preaching, and most importantly, prioritizing Pio’s adolescent face and the way his eyes scrutinize his surroundings as they constantly look for opportunity, weak spots to break through.

It speaks the language of climbers everywhere, but in the process reduces its very real historical innovators to two peevish regional managers in a sniping session, a dry duel set in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

This impulse to do less, to avoid excess, is admirable — something the current wave of Conservative Evangelical filmmaking could bear to emulate — but in the end it reads as timid, eventually making “Last Days” feel small and insignificant, hobbled by its own restraint.

What Whannell wants most to do is torment and eventually pulverize most of the people in his narrative orbit and make you laugh while he does so.

“Girl” might be the most inadvertently appropriate analog to life in 2017’s increasingly unstable world, by suggesting that it may very well become necessary to co-exist with ongoing terror, especially if the only other option is walking directly into the path of a flesh-eating pack.

Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.

An atheist’s inverse Balthazar, Wiener-Dog witnesses and experiences suffering but cannot transform that pain into anything substantive, nor can she redeem those around her.

The failure of Catfight lies not with the leads, then, but with wasted opportunity.

This is filmmaking that demands to be noticed, if not always trusted.

Thanks to Kore-eda’s characteristic practice of thoughtful scripting and gentle direction, the metaphors, though too numerous, land gently and effectively.

Cannan and Adam approach the outlandish crime as a puzzlement, all but wondering aloud how two celebrities could be stolen from public life and turned into a dictator’s puppets.

If Swiss Army Man were a silent, scoreless effort, presented as otherworldly slapstick, or if it had employed Lil Jon to yell some obliquely connected, thematic exhortations and non sequiturs, it might have reached the heights of its music video predecessor. As it plays out, though, it smells a little too much like teen spirit.

Subject matter alone makes Pick of the Litter, if not especially memorable, a gently lovable outing.

This is fan service as painstaking as any Marvel installment, and you’re expected to bring your well-studied knowledge of deep bench characters and all your reserve emotional commitment with you. As a reward for those loyal fans, Downton Abbey offers an envelopment in gorgeous and exacting period detail.

Halston is at its most naturally energetic when highlighting career triumphs. It’s packed with archival footage remembering past glamour, and moving contemporary interviews with models like Pat Cleveland, whose own ascendance in the fashion world as one of the first African American models to make a name for herself, went hand in hand with Halston’s paradigm shift.

What saves Tallulah from American indie sameness and its allegiance to neat resolution are its three lead actors and Heder’s apparent skill in bringing out their best work.

In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. Mysteries are allowed their ambiguity.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle is the Christmas tentpole release that aims to please and succeeds, a funny family entertainment product that subverts more expectations than it was obligated to contractually.

An ugly and frequently hilarious descent into all things repellent, the debut feature from director Jim Hosking plants itself firmly in a world of filth and shock.

McConaughey dives headfirst into the well here, howling all the way, and his committed performance is one to admire even if it’s not one to like.

Grillo is exactly the right man for this role, the thoughtful tough guy who can pull bullets out of his own body and who always looks like he needs a shower, but who can’t stop for such indulgences until he knows everyone else is safe. And the ensemble around him forms a tight, empathic unit. We want the Purge to keep going; we also want this crew to smack it down hard.

If the film had simply been the man talking about his cultural influences, that would have been enough, a survey in beauty from a man who knows how to translate that ineffable idea into a shoe that sprouts feathers.

The major problem with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — the fifth installment in this dinosaur series, and the second of a prospective trilogy — is that the makers treat the action and suspense sequences in the way most of us go to the dentist.

Presented with a moral universe where annihilation is all, it’s difficult to invest in the film as anything more significant than a breathless series of punishing vignettes.

Brought to life on screen, Wilson is a fractured, heartsick, funny adventure in mundane misery.

Same Kind of Different as Me works more effectively when its talented cast is given freedom to engage on an interpersonal level and its various political subtexts are sidelined.

Masterminds is kinder to its characters than most comedies about the bumbling and under-educated, and that’s Hess’s strength.

Director Jon M. Chu has a lighter touch than “Now You See Me” director Louis Leterrier. The latter’s “Transporter” pedigree made sure there was plenty of rugged action, but Chu’s résumé boasts “Jem and the Holograms,” “G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” and more than one film in the “Step Up” franchise. The man knows his cartoons, and that’s a good thing.

Framed like a phantom in black shadow and silvery silhouette by legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (“The Right Stuff”), Heigl slices through this silly little universe, consumed with her mission, bigger than all of it.

For the millions of true believers out there, however...the film provides a blissfully melancholy roll call of pleasures.

Hillsong — Let Hope Rise stands out against that harsh tone of much recent Christian indie cinema by being a winning, friendly, and at times moving film.

Content with dipping its toe into a social issue without risking much, what’s most revealing in The Jesus Music is what’s left out.

The Mulleavys have what it takes to continue in film if they decide to pursue this path, with a firm, confident hold on light, texture, color, mood, sound, and physical space. So if Woodshock is, ultimately, unsatisfying, it’s not because they haven’t put in the time to immerse you in their obsessions.

It’s impossible to watch Bad Santa 2 without getting the sense that people who knew how to do their jobs were studio-noted out of their minds and forced to run a futile obstacle course hampered by budget restrictions, shortened shooting schedules, and general carelessness.

As handsomely mounted, TV-movie-quality cinema goes, “Light in Darkness” is at once the best looking, most coherent, and least histrionic of the franchise.

Its pulls back from the original film’s cruelty and comeuppances for non-believers, yet its non-Christian characters are still parodies of human evil: greedy, bitter, violent, and out to prove that “God is dead.”