David Rooney

The Robin Hood-like renegade hero of the Antipodean common man, Ned Kelly gets a ripping reinvention in director Justin Kurzel's feverish punk Western, a raw rebel yell of a movie that combines visceral violence with a kind of delirious, scrappy poetry.

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 contemplative drama about a tough ex-cop tying up the loose ends of his life and taking his terminally ill wife on a farewell journey is pure poetry.

Essentially, this is a film about existential emptiness, and yet it’s beautiful and alive, as filled with humor as it is with melancholy.

By the director’s standards, this is a sober and distinctly mature film, centered by the unwavering composure of Servillo’s De Santis. But it’s not without the customary creative arias, the witty humor and visual delights that have distinguished Sorrentino’s best work.

A delectable riff on transformation, desire and sexuality that blends the heightened reality of melodrama with mischievous humor and an understated strain of Hitchcockian suspense.

Even at its most sorrowful, Marjorie Prime is suffused with warmth, the core of it emanating from Smith in two complementary iterations of the same character.

Monsters and Men is a robust ensemble piece in which every performer finds subtle shadings in characters fully embedded in a realistic milieu. It's a smart, urgently relevant movie that marks an impressive upgrade from his acclaimed short films for writer-director Green.

The film's smart craftsmanship is ultimately less noteworthy than its humanizing, prejudice-challenging immersion into the lives of people who inhabit L.A.'s low-end drug and sex industry.

The story in itself is first-rate. However, it’s the very measured handling that makes it distinctive.

Dowd's graciousness and enthusiasm, and the enormous respect afforded him by industryites on record here, make this a thorough and satisfying acknowledgement of one man's unique contribution to popular music.

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

For all its wit, its lively talk and deceptive lightness, this is arguably the writer-director’s most affecting work.

Smart, seductive and bristling with sexual tension, Challengers is arguably Luca Guadagnino’s most purely pleasurable film to date; it’s certainly his lightest and most playful.

Kent and editor Simon Njoo show maturity and trust in their material, expertly building tension through the insidious modulation from naturalistic dysfunctional family drama to all-out boogeyman terror.

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.

It's short, sweet and effective, tying together the divergent threads of the decades-spanning Small Axe project on a note both poignant and personal.

Essentially a two-hander though enlivened by incisive secondary character turns along the way, it's a drama made with tremendous feeling, an unhurried, contemplative tale peppered with nail-biting set-pieces.

The drama really sparks into high gear once the trial gets under way, a shift signaled by arresting cathedral-like shots of the Old Bailey's Neo-Baroque domed ceiling accompanied by the dissonant strings of Mica Levi's sparingly used score. The transition also gives the excellent principal cast ample opportunities both for impassioned oratory and amusing disruption.

It embraces the strange remoteness of myth and Middle Ages lore on its own terms and creates something quietly dazzling and new.

While Parallel Mothers doesn’t match the intricately interwoven layers of Almodóvar’s top-tier work — All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Pain and Glory — and some of its key plot disclosures can be seen coming, that doesn’t make the melodrama any less gripping or emotionally satisfying.

The threat posed by women who think for themselves to the absolute power of men is a central theme in this starch-free tale of Tudor intrigue, its protofeminist perspective seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric without a hint of the didactic.

The Brutalist is a massive film in every sense, closing with a resonant epilogue that illustrates how art and beauty reach out from the past, transcending space and time to reveal a freedom of thought and identity often denied its makers.

The directors allow ample space for somber reflections without ever detracting from the fact that Tina, fundamentally, is a celebration, a unique survival story.

Chronicling an ignominious chapter in queer history, Great Freedom is also a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental.

The visceral fireworks of the characters’ arguments and the disintegration of trust among them are observed with unsettling intimacy in the script and in the emotional honesty of the performances...This is terrific stuff.

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.

Which Way is the Front Line is more than a chronicle of a life and a brilliant ten-year career cut short at age 40. It’s also a strangely beautiful insight into one man’s distinctive way of looking at and experiencing war.