David Rooney

The movie arguably takes a little too long to kick in, but once its sense of danger — devious, disturbing, wryly amusing — is established, it never stops.

There's no such thing as a sure bet in career jumps, so the elegant execution, the incisive grasp of character and milieu, and the stealthy but sure arrival of pathos are extremely gratifying.

Strong performances from the four leads, plus the film’s unsettling visuals and crafty use of score, sound and strategic silence make it both a tough watch and impossible to look away from.

If the film is as disorderly in its structure as the messy family history it surveys, time spent with these wonderful subjects makes that seem sweetly appropriate.

Valadez and Rondero again mix grit and lyricism, this time to trace the coming of age of a boy growing up in a climate of lurking cartel violence. The new feature doesn’t match its predecessor’s distinctive spell or cumulative power, but its undertow of menace is expertly sustained, and its dread buffered by hope.

The best thing this movie does is boost visceral analog action over the usual numbing bombardment of CG fakery, a choice fortified by having the actors in the airborne cockpits during shooting.

It’s an affectionately told story of Canadian innovation, loss of innocence and of unlikely bedfellows making entrepreneurial magic.

As courageous as the platoon members are, Warfare is not to be confused with a movie about heroism; it’s a movie about hell that leaves you shaken.

This is a film of transporting grace and compassion, cerebral but never cold. It’s no small compliment to say that After Yang seems almost like an American sci-fi movie that Ozu or Kore-eda might have made.

Chinese writer-director Zhang Lu’s minor-key drama will be too muted and elusive to break beyond festivals, but its melancholy spell stays with you.

There's a beautiful, multi-tiered exchange among artists happening in Junun.

Co-directors Julia Halperin and Jason Cortlund (Now, Forager), working from Cortlund's script, keep us guessing not only about the intentions of Sinaloa (Sophie Reid), but also about the path of their absorbing, mostly low-key thriller, which builds atmosphere, psychological texture, an ingrained sense of place and a needling undercurrent of dread.

A companion piece of sorts to First Reformed, this is another bruising character study of a solitary, burdened man who processes his most intimate thoughts in a journal, living with his guilt until he’s handed an unexpected opportunity for redemption.

Tedeschi’s film is a declaration of love for the Beatles, but what distinguishes it is its curiosity about the America of that time, beyond the bubble of the four Scousers who can hardly believe they’re drinking cocktails in Miami.

Exhaustively informative and powerfully emotional.

There’s a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart’s accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you.

The film is anchored by incisive characterizations rich in integrity and heart, and by an urgent simplicity in its storytelling that's surprisingly powerful.

The very personal nature of Taylor’s involvement with these magnificent creatures makes this quite an affecting account of their threatened survival.

It’s a minor work for the director and its emotional heft feels softer than usual, but even his lesser films can be compelling, and Beer is never less than transfixing.

The Ballad of Wallis Island breaks no new ground, but it’s an unexpectedly pleasurable, funny-sad watch, full of sweet, soothing music.

This is a gentle, reflective portrait that seldom gets personal and yet somehow feels quite candid.

Blue Moon is a deceptively modest project, but it’s beautifully executed and fascinatingly nuanced despite being quite straightforward in terms of plot.

It’s a pleasurable enough watch — nicely acted and with a gentle rhythm tuned to the main characters’ searching paths as they drift in and out of each other’s lives over 30 years — though ultimately, it lacks weight.

Eliza Hittman's second feature is very much the work of a filmmaker with her own distinctive voice, combining moody poetry with textural sensuality to evoke the dangerous recklessness that often accompanies sexual discovery.

Almost as much an art piece as a film, this playful Prohibition-era tale is visually inventive and initially amusing but, at feature length, becomes somewhat wearing in its cacophonous eccentricity.

Alternately haunting, inspiring and dreamily meditative, this is a visually majestic film of transfixing moods and textures.

Through all this, Byrne’s high-wire act remains riveting, scrutinized for long stretches of the film in DP Christopher Messina’s probing closeups. It’s a bruising performance, digging deep into the intense pressure and isolation that can sometimes accompany motherhood.

One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.

While the filmmaking is raw, undisciplined and groaning under a cargo of self-conscious quirks, it scores points for originality and wacky creativity

Exhaustively tracking the five-year battle to overthrow California’s ban on same-sex marriage, they distill the dense legal process into a lucid narrative while illuminating the human drama of the plaintiffs, and by extension, the countless gay men and lesbians they represent.

Led by an almost unrecognizable Simon Baker as a jaded cop, Limbo weaves in themes of racial inequity, broken individuals and fractured families to build quiet potency.

This is a ruminative film of minor-key rewards, driven by an impeccably nuanced performance from McKellen as a solitary 93-year-old man enfeebled by age, yet still canny and even compassionate in ways that surprise and comfort him.

There’s uncustomary warmth here and a sensitivity to the characters’ vulnerabilities that often is missing from this director’s work.

It’s a Gothic horror nightmare heaving with sumptuous visual detail, groaning under the weight of portentous dread, writhing with both convulsive violence and sweaty eroticism and leavened by sly hints of fiendish camp.

What’s remarkable about The Blue Trail and makes it such a delight is that despite all the oppression in the air, it’s a movie filled with hope and faith in human resilience at any age. The closing image will make your heart soar. And no, it’s not the one you were expecting.

For both diehard and casual fans, Marshall's entertainingly packaged film delivers a nostalgic tour back over the decades that shines a deserving spotlight on the group's artistry, an element too frequently overshadowed by their phenomenal chart reign.

The film might be conventionally structured, but the singular ebullience and warmth of its resilient subject make it highly entertaining.

It's the humanity and compassion invested across all the principal characters that makes this contemplative examination of the terrible weight of taking a life so commanding.

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

Till is more effective as an intimate portrait of devastating loss than a chronicle of the making of an activist. But the film has a powerful weapon in its arsenal in Danielle Deadwyler’s transfixing performance as a broken woman who finds formidable strength within herself.

There’s a light touch in evidence, balancing the bleakness with odd lyrical moments and unexpected humor and tenderness that infuse the gentle drama with a bracing freshness.

The maturity of the directorial voice is evident in its clear-eyed, rigorously unsentimental assessment of a shattering situation.

Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer chiller fully acknowledges a debt to The Silence of the Lambs in its chronicle of a young female rookie agent pulled into the FBI manhunt for a killer wiping out entire families. But the movie is also its own freaky trip, a darkly disturbing experience pulsing with an evil that’s unrelenting in its subcutaneous creepiness.

With nary a likable character in sight until the late arrival of some unearned emotion in the closing scenes, this is a posey, abrasive drama, though one that's stylishly made and acted with more conviction than the script merits.

Much of this might have been formulaic in less artful hands, but Kore-eda has an unfaltering lightness of touch, a way of injecting emotional veracity and spontaneity into every moment.

The filmmakers' reluctance to over-explain character motivations has mostly kept their films out of the mainstream and will continue to do so here, but there's no shortage of impressions that resonate. And the performances of both Reynolds and Mendelsohn are fortified with deep feeling, working in admirable tandem.

The seductive fluidity of the camerawork, as much as the punchy performances and muscular writing, keep Malcolm & Marie compelling even when it risks becoming an extended exercise in style.

This is a serious-minded, well-acted drama that shows just as keen an interest in character, specifically the integrity of two men from vastly different cultures who provide the story of brotherhood and survival with its racing pulse.

Wild Tales opens and closes with a bang, and at its best is a riotously funny and cathartic exorcism of the frustrations of contemporary life.

There's visual command and a compelling intimacy to the storytelling, plus intellectual engagement in the reflection on who gets to claim nearness to God.

The movie — like the performances of its small ensemble — works best when the director gets out of her own way, forgetting her aversion to clean, conventional narrative and giving the material breathing space to resonate.

Urchin would be nothing without a gifted, vanity-free actor (the lead is the son of Stephen Dillane) who has clearly dug deep into the milieu of addiction and homelessness and is willing to go anywhere the script takes his character — from rapturous highs to desperate lows and all their consequent indignities.

The unselfconscious naturalness of the nonprofessional cast yields no shortage of sharply observed moments.

What distinguishes Borten and Wallack’s screenplay is its refusal to sentimentalize by providing humbling epiphanies to set Ron on the right path and endow him with empathy.

Joyously re-creates the brief but resplendent reign of the legendary freakadelic drag troupe.

The Promised Land is a terrific story driven by skillful writing and strong performances. There’s an art to bringing vitality and modernity to historical drama, and Arcel shows a firm grasp of it.

If The Nightingale doesn’t quite fulfill the high expectations for Kent’s sophomore feature, it still shows a director with a muscular handle on her craft, though in this case she could have used a script collaborator to address the weaknesses.

There's admirable frankness, intelligence and sensitivity here. Additionally, the film is a thoughtful, funny reflection on the gains and losses of growing old.

This is an enormously satisfying watch for haunted house movie fans, favoring sustained anxiety over big scares and practical effects over digital trickery.

This is a looser, grittier film than their work of late, and while it’s more successful in the sequences of bold theatricality than in the faux-cinéma vérité of the surrounding scenes, the mix is nonetheless an interesting one.

Amplifying its force with thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be grossly over-simplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” But Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a unique union, fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable — even when it’s broken.

Even if Project Hail Mary at times leans into the sentiment to an almost saccharine degree, the movie’s natural sweetness is disarming. And it’s impossible to imagine an actor more adept at striking that tricky balance than Gosling, whose low-key comic timing has never been better.

An original, unexpectedly affecting tribute to two distinctive comic performers.

A slow-burn haunted house movie becomes a disturbingly effective allegory for the ravages of dementia, which spreads like insidious rot from the afflicted into the family members witnessing her deterioration in Relic.

At just a fraction over an hour, the film doesn't match the narrative scope of Mangrove or Red, White and Blue. Nor does it have the enveloping intimacy of Lovers Rock, the only Small Axe entry not based on a true story. But its understated celebration of resilience and hope makes the compelling snapshot very much in keeping with the deeply personal nature of this project for McQueen.

The film reflects on issues of aging and autonomy with a mostly light touch, its protagonist making a strong case for the enduring spirit of elderly folks too often infantilized by both society and their loved ones.

Love Lies Bleeding is a hallucinatory trip down the darkest byways of Americana. It’s too blunt to be as unsettling as Saint Maud but it will leave no one indifferent.

When it’s cooking, which is most of the run time, this is a smart, sophisticated and incisively acted adult entertainment that savages the crumbling institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down in a bitter reckoning that seems irreversible — until a window of hope and healing gets cracked open.

Visually, intellectually and emotionally, McDonagh’s film is one to savor.

Simultaneously deadpan and dour, somber and surreal, this is a haunting meditation on the manipulation of memory to anesthetize pain, crafted with a meticulous attention to visual and aural composition that makes for arresting viewing.

Keep On Keepin' On is both tender and joyous, a moving account of the mutual nourishment of artistic mentorship and the rewards of accentuating the positive in whatever life throws at you.

Propelled by Mads Mikkelsen’s shattering performance as the blameless man whose life threatens to be destroyed, the film is superbly acted by a cast that never strikes a false note or softens the impact with consolatory sentiment.

Tonal inconsistency, lethargic pacing and a shortage of fresh insight dilute the storytelling efficacy of this quartet of loosely interconnected episodes involving ordinary people pushed over the edge.

Minor-key and subdued to a fault, the drama nonetheless builds emotional involvement by infinitesimal degrees through its acute observation of characters and social context and its ultra-naturalistic performances.

One of the chief rewards of 28 Years Later is that it never feels like a cynical attempt to revisit proven material merely for commercial reasons. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have returned to a story whose allegorical commentary on today’s grim political landscape seems more relevant than ever.

It shows Audiard once again drawn to resilient people in punishing situations, and its arc from the opening images of death to its final notes of hope and wholeness is quite moving.

For a three-part piece, it gains a gorgeous fluidity from the gossamer ribbon of melancholy threaded through it. Like Paterson, it’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.

A riveting first feature of startling maturity and intelligence.

There's never a false note in the performances of Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten, who make ideal accomplices for the talented writer-director.

This is a work of unfailing restraint, which makes its stealth emotional heft all the more remarkable.

This is a beautifully crafted work and an acute evocation of its period both in look and attitude, and it’s no less deeply absorbing for being somewhat muted in tone.

Richly human in focus, the drama steadily cranks up its political and emotional charge.

It’s not hagiography when the subject’s generosity of spirit infuses the entire doc.

At a little over two hours, Red Rocket suffers mildly from prolix stretches, and just like The Florida Project, it could have used some tightening. But it’s a pleasure to put yourself in Baker’s capable hands as he ambles through his loose story with its affectionate, slyly humorous character observations and immersive sense of place.

While the strong ensemble cast is Their Finest's most valuable asset, the movie also looks quite handsome on what appears to be a modest budget, and includes some delightful glimpses of how screen effects were achieved way back in those handcrafted days.

An immersive plunge into the chasm separating the servant class from the rich in contemporary India, the drama observes corruption at the highest and lowest levels with its tale of innocence lost and tables turned. If there's simply too much novelistic incident stuffed into the overlong film's Dickensian sprawl, the three leads' magnetic performances and the surprising twists of the story keep you engrossed.

One of the captivating paradoxes of Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s lovingly assembled chapter of queer history is that while it never downplays the marginalization, persecution and physical danger of being a trans woman of color making a living through sex work, it gives equal time to the resilience, the sense of community, the proud sisterhood and shared survival skills.

Endowed with captivating simplicity, gentle humor, rich humanity and infectious generosity of spirit.

Finally. After "The Phantom of the Opera," "Rent" and "The Producers" botched the transfer from stage to screen, Dreamgirls gets it right. Bill Condon's adaptation of the 1981 show about a Motown trio's climb to crossover stardom pulls off the fundamental double-act those three musical pics all missed: It stays true to the source material while standing on its own as a fully reimagined movie.

While the sense of closure that the film seeks to provide perhaps inevitably remains elusive, it covers another vital chapter in queer history, sadly still relevant in the ongoing frequency of violence against trans women.

One of the aspects that makes Super/Man so satisfying is that for a biographical film in which tragedy and loss play such a central part, it’s rich in evidence of hope and kindness, gratitude and the resilience of the human spirit.

Sorkin has made a movie that's gripping, illuminating and trenchant, as erudite as his best work and always grounded first and foremost in story and character.

While there are a lot of names, facts and intriguing assertions to absorb here, Gibney and editor Michael Palmer weave the dense narrative into a brisk, gripping and fascinatingly detailed thriller, enhanced by Robert Logan and Ivor Guest's suspenseful score.

This melancholy, insightfully scripted coming-of-age drama is moving without being manipulative and makes an assured calling card for writer-director Karen Moncrieff.

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

The film navigates an abrupt turn when it explores an elaborate untruth in the subject's own life. But while that shift could have been smoother and its conclusions more coherent, this is nonetheless intriguing stuff.

Gerard Johnstone, a first-time writer-director from New Zealand, demonstrates a sly command of deadpan humor along with an assured grasp of seasoned horror tropes.

More or less playing straight man to Keough's comically unflappable liability, the incandescent Paige conveys the disappointment, even disdain, of Zola for a woman she believed was a friend, but also subtly introduces notes of poignancy as she figures out ways to stay safe in the stickiest situations. Her self-possession is a thing of beauty.