Dave White

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

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.

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.

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.

A wonderfully humane, funny, and moving chapter in Varda’s documentary phase.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A respectful, reserved, and charming documentary.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

“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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

It’s a story of closed borders in Europe, and foot-dragging immigration bureaucracy in safe countries, together spelling ruin for countless displaced victims.