David Ehrlich

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.

Lapid’s film is too fresh and intransigent to know how well it will age over time or hold up to repeat viewings, but on first blush it feels like a powerful howl that’s hard to hear clearly, and harder still to get out of your head.

If On Her Shoulders struggles for an ending, perhaps that’s because we have to supply our own. People like Nadia can’t fix the world, but this vital documentary is proof that it’s heroic enough just to be heard.

Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

By sprinting through 50 years of features so fast that each of them ultimately feels like a single frame rattling through a projector, they blur De Palma’s body of work into a moving truth that none of his individual films has ever crystallized with such clarity: The movies are real-life; the great filmmakers are the ones who never let you forget that.

For all of its innumerable pleasures, however, The Forbidden Room can feel like too much of a good thing—premiering at Sundance, Maddin’s latest plays like a robust film festival unto itself.

Lee often seems unsure of whether he's directing a comedy or a civics lesson, and the film only finds its wings in the moments when he realizes that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

In focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, it finds enough fleeting joy to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward.

Wenders’s reverent enthusiasm for his subject is evident throughout the film, and he details every chapter of Salgado’s life with an acolyte’s inability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.

Lingui can only exist in the face of great hardship, and Haroun’s surprisingly cathartic film honors the tradition by celebrating the fact that it still does.

This is an important and compulsively watchable portrait made by someone who understands the brute power of broadcast media and the people who make it for all the world to see, but it can only afford Mike Wallace with a little moment of truth, and the satisfaction of playing his part in the greater continuum of things.

Split into three parts that reflect an infinite pattern of crime, punishment, and cultural recidivism, Predators fixates on our shared complicity in continuing that cycle with every click.

This is the rare movie that’s redeemed by its unchecked nostalgia.

This visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama.

Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.

Newton’s film knows that people are always going to be letting themselves (and each other) down, no matter how hard they try, and Nicholson’s unforgettable turn makes it impossible for us to forget it.

If Jerry Rothwell’s film version of The Reason I Jump is far more effective and self-possessed than most documentary adaptations of “memoirs” tend to be, that’s largely because it sees Higashida’s book as a lens instead of as a subject, and refracts various other people through it in recognition of the rare tale that’s less important than how it’s translated.

Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

Crucially, these characters are so believable that every scene has an internal logic and justifies itself.

Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful.

I can’t say whether Hong has suffered any of the creative self-doubts that animate his latest heroine, but the film he’s made for her feels as revealing as the one she then makes for herself. Free your art, your art will free you in return — a nice idea, but one that the uniqueness of Hong’s career makes easier to admire than it is to internalize.

If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.

A master chef preparing an entire feast inside a pressure cooker, Spielberg shoots The Post like every shot was delivered to the studio on a deadline, and the result is a film that combines the spartan clarity of hard journalism with the raw suspense of an Indiana Jones adventure.

The film’s hyper-naturalism is its raison d’etre, and Being 17 is at its best when it leans into that approach.