Deborah Young

The three main characters are all vividly sketched.

David Lynch, The Art Life will entrance the director’s fans and, who knows, inspire budding, out-of-the-box creators in an artistic coming-of-age tale, told in his own words and deliberate tones.

In her first leading role, Kolesnik is as irresistible as an energy bar, exploring the Insta-queen’s shallow depths with cunning sincerity. Rather inevitably, she overshadows the rest of the pro cast.

Conceptually staggering.

It is all the more heart-wrenching for being realistic. Its portrait of child labor brooks no sentimentality and no cliches.

It’s a dreamy, unexpectedly rigorous debut that starts frustratingly slowly but ends with an emotional bang.

Emir Kusturica's epic black comedy about Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1992 is a three-hour steamroller circus that leaves the viewer dazed and exhausted, but mightily impressed.

At times fascinating, at times not, its in-depth look at the administration, campus, students and faculty offers an insider's view into the way American academia functions.

Following the fizzle of his coming-of-ager Goodbye Berlin (Tschick) last year, Fatih Akin bounces back and bounces high with an edge-of-seat thriller inspired by xenophobic murders in Germany by a Neo-Nazi group.

Though Asante is no stylist or and no very deep psychologist, she is adept at reaching an audience through direct storytelling.

Leni Riefenstahl and her controversial legacy are examined in fascinating depth in the new German doc 'Riefenstahl' by Andres Veiel.

A beautiful example of how a memorable film can be made on a shoestring.

Despite a few potholes of ennui along the way, pic has enough entertainment value to cross borders and titillate auds with its plentiful nudity and uninhibited sexual mores.

Lasse Hallstrom's breezy, fast-paced, somewhat loose-ended account of how he (Irving) did it offers a surprisingly layered vehicle for a maniacally conniving Richard Gere, backed up by a superb Alfred Molina as his accomplice.

Apart from its historical interest, this tragic tale of religious extremism and misogyny is a very good film able to catch audiences up emotionally.

Though Sun Children lacks the visual lushness and poetry that made Children of Heaven so seductive, its condemnation of child labor and the inaccessibility of basic education to the poor comes across with great force.

Cinematically erudite and very playful in its use of music, Enea skillfully toys with expectations to keep the viewer constantly off balance.

The film’s near-perfect calibration between family drama and black comedy recalls the director’s earlier features, Paris of the North and Either Way (remade in the U.S. as Prince Avalanche), but this is the one in which Sigurdsson really projects a distinctive voice.

Radha Mitchell stirs memories of complex Allen heroines from Annie Hall on down, even if the action is dispersed via a larger ensemble cast which he currently favors.

Despite some dead time and teenage moments, the film is lifted up by its belief in the imagination.

Malgorzata’s command of her medium makes the film a pleasure to watch.

Both Redford and Fonda are charming, delicate and convincing as Addie Moore and Louis Waters, the couple who find each other at the tail end of their lives. They are directed with sophistication and without a drop of melodrama or sentimentality by Ritesh Batra

The film’s simple, lower-class setting is met with equally direct camerawork, lighting and editing. This feels like the farthest Farhadi has come from his stage work and the sometimes unconvincing dramatic elements that occasionally creep into his films.

The story is narrated, off and on, by tag-along Wilson, but Garcia Bernal is in full control of the film.

Slow and surprisingly talky, the three hours of the film do not exactly fly by, and the experience is similar to plunging into a long novel (the hero is a budding novelist) laced with philosophy, religion, politics and moral puzzles. The final sequences are worth the wait, though, bringing together the story’s many threads and offering the classic closure of a young man coming to terms with his identity.

Make of it what you will, this off-the-wall film essay entertains hugely while it makes the audience squirm in their seats.

The climactic final scene at the wedding hall begins as grotesque and humiliating, then slowly the threads come together, while Burshtein mischievously plays with perceptions about whether the unfolding miracle is a fantasy or not.

Radiates a warm humanity and uplifts the spirit. Subtle rather than sentimental, it lacks easy tears though attentive viewers will find it lacerating enough.

Halfway between fiction and documentary, Last and First Men is a visionary work about the final days of humankind that stretches the audience’s ability to imagine not only an immense time frame reaching over billions of years, but huge steps in human evolution.

This is less a film about terrorists than an intimate portrait of boys growing up in a toxic environment. All the non-pro actors turn in natural performances, but the dark, brooding Rachid gets under the skin in the main role.

The final half-hour is a joy to watch, as turning points follow in rapid succession.

Guilty (Talvar) is a gripping thriller and police procedural.

Using a simple storytelling style that grows stronger with each passing scene, Dry Season draws the viewer into its small two-character drama set in post-war Chad, while it offers a deep reflection on injustice and frustrated revenge.

Side-stepping what could have been a cheap, morbid peek into the lives of two beautiful teenagers who were born joined at the hip, Indivisible strikes out on its own path, sounding an exhilarating note of freedom for its protags.

Guillermo Nieto's hand-held camerawork mimics Julia's nervous energy and keeps the audience locked up along with her, working in symbiosis with Federico Esquerro's forcefully realistic sound design.

Though Sorrentino’s vision of moral chaos and disorder, spiritual and emotional emptiness at this moment in time is even darker than Fellini’s...he describes it all in a pleasingly creative way that pulls audiences in through humor and excess.

Tale of Tales combines the wildly imaginative world of kings, queens and ogres with the kind of lush production values for which Italian cinema was once famous. The result is a dreamy, fresh take on the kind of dark and gory yarns that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, only here they're pleasingly new and unfamiliar.

Wise beyond its years, like the teenage protag Gelsomina, Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) is a wistful but no-tears swan song recounting the disappearance of traditional rural life-style in Italy.

Constructed like an eerie, metaphorical thriller, this tense, riveting character study offers viewers nearly two hours of emotions with a stunning pay-off no one will be expecting.

It’s hard not to leave the film shaken.

For audiences willing to embrace ambiguity and let the characters and images weave their spell, this masterfully shot film played by the director’s stock cast is a treasure.

Rachel Weisz’s arresting, combative Lipstadt, a shining woman warrior, is a role she will be remembered for, while as her antagonist Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner) makes a spookily stubborn, thoroughly despicable, but still human Irving.

It shows the maverick filmmaker once again at the height of his expressive powers. Its stripped-down narrative and uncompromising repetitions will not be tolerable to everyone, but audiences willing to stick out the punishing but dazzling last half hour will walk away with a lot.

Both touching and universally understandable, the theme is how an untimely death destroys the fragile fabric that binds a family together.

Gianfranco Rosi (Below Sea Level, El Sicario: Room 164) brings humor and sensitivity to his filming of the strange denizens who live and work around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s huge ring road.

Three hours long yet anything but leisurely, the doc is charged with energy, anger and disappointment.

Fatal Assistance is a chilling indictment of how billions of dollars in aid were squandered or lost, and how aid and politics are inextricably linked.

Filmmaker and actor Elia Suleiman uses his own face and body to express the soul of Palestine in his films, and nowhere more so than in his droll new comedy, It Must Be Heaven.

Falardeau, who made his mark with the Oscar-nominated teacher-student tale Monsieur Lazhar, again brings real tenderness to his portrait of a man in trouble.

How this outspoken film, Bustamante’s most gripping to date, will fare domestically is an open question (it has not come out yet in Guatemala). It had a blazing bow in the Venice Days sidebar (Giornate degli Autori), where it easily grabbed the best film prize.

An uncompromising drama from one of Iran’s most outspoken directors.

Mary Shelley is a luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensations of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal. But above all it is a film about ideas that breaks out of the well-worn mold of period drama (partly, anyway) by reaching deeply into the mind of the extraordinary woman who wrote the Gothic evergreen Frankenstein.

With great delicacy, [Maryam Touzani] shows how Moroccan society censures a woman who gives birth outside marriage — not a terribly original theme, but here it is made heartrending by the superb performances of Lubna Azabal and Nisrin Erradi in the lead roles.

It packs an unsettling message of empowerment very rare in the social injustice genre.

In his second outing as a director, top thesp Sergio Castellitto (also playing the surgeon) takes the viewer on an emotion-filled ride and brings a violently masculine perspective to the story. However, it is Penelope Cruz who gives the film's knockout performance.

A visually exalting, emotionally horrifying view of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime.

Charming, smart and funny.

Okada both wrote and directed Maquia, which showcases her ability to depict complex relationships and project delicate character arcs.

There is much to appreciate in Poitras’ low-key, down-to-business approach which employs instinctive editing choices, and not her own persona (she never appears onscreen), to build the most revealing portrait of Assange and his WikiLeaks staff in the public domain.

In his most accessible and spontaneous picture, ranking Iranian helmer Jafar Panahi reveals unsuspected comic gifts barely visible in his dramatic festival winners "The White Balloon," "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold."

Lacking the astounding social complexity of his Academy Award winning drama A Separation, here the gears are not so hidden and a sense of contrived drama leads to some tedious sections. But all is forgiven when the final punches are delivered in a knock-out finale that leaves the viewer tense and breathless.

Though shot from the Palestinian P.O.V., the Dutch/Palestinian Film Foundation co-production is remarkably balanced, offering a convinced message of hope for the future.

Rather miraculously, picture succeeds in painlessly educating its viewers about global politics and economics while it describes contemporary Africa with freshness and clarity.

The story is scarce to non-existent, but Kim Min-hee in the main role keeps the audience awake, waiting for her next socially uncensored outburst of truth.

Though it abounds in the kind of sardonic humor intrinsic to life’s absurdities, the film is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. In a nutshell, quiet desperation prevails.

Where journalism leaves off, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) begins. It takes a unique documentary filmmaker like Gianfranco Rosi to capture the drama through the periscope of his camera focused on the small Sicilian island of Lampedusa.

Perhaps the most striking thing about David Gordon Green’s Stronger is how it refuses to turn its subject into a hero or even a small-time symbol of courage, as one might legitimately expect of a survivor story, even while the world is clamoring to put him on a pedestal.

Van Dormael's intriguing script is more than matched in his flamboyant direction of this 2-hour-plus tale, heroically edited by Matyas Veress and Susan Shipton into a fluid, generally understandable narrative.

Starless Dreams (Royahaye Dame Sobh), shot in a juvenile correctional facility for girls under the age of 18, is the perfect example of how powerful simplicity can be, when it’s underpinned by compassion for its subject.

Though it sounds like an offbeat idea even for horror fans, the tech work is so well done that it could disarm unwary buffs attracted by the campy title.

Feeling more spontaneous and improvised than ever, this tale of chance encounters at a big film festival is easy on the eye and strewn with humorous gems, as it wryly reflects on the festival business and its denizens.

Kim Ki-duk is back in fighting form in Pieta, an intense and, for the first hour, sickeningly violent film that unexpectedly segues into a moving psychological study.

If the title MS Slavic 7 fails to ring a bell, its abstractness conveys the industrious intellectual labor demanded by this witty one-hour Canadian film.

Though grippingly shot and paced, its realism makes it not an easy watch. However, one never questions the horrific circumstances in which the protag finds himself and the ending provides a bitter sort of closure and enough salve on the wounds to make the story palatable.

Both intensely exciting for its cinematic inventions and terribly uninvolving on emotional and dramatic levels.

Part let's-get-it-together band saga and part road movie, the story arc is awfully familiar, but that doesn't stop it being a rollicking romp.

Though shot in the most classic of idioms, the film commands attention with its mesmerizing performances and lively cross-cutting between key moments in the hero’s life.

Gomes is a director poised between ironic narrative and experimentalism pure and simple, and his films (often described as strange, lyrical and hypnotizing) divide audiences into the visionaries and the unconvinced.

A gripping drama -- almost a mystery -- about ordinary people from Japanese master Kore-eda Hirokazu connects to viewers, despite an ambiguous ending that feels overly complex and arty.

Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity. One wishes for a more emotional and convincing ending.

Southpaw sticks to tried-and-tested genre rules, yet an edgy cast — led by formidable leading man Jake Gyllenhaal — keeps the story in sharp focus.

Ayouch’s most personal feature film, it infects the audience with its passion and the unshakable belief that a person who has self-confidence and self-expression can really change society.

Though they have little to add to familiar genre themes, Uthaug and the screenwriters make the most of the unique location, which lends itself to jaw-dropping vistas from every camera angle.

The famous dreamlike lighting and mise-en-scene are always perfect in capturing human foibles. But the offbeat sense of humor that characterized the trilogy is less evident than ever.

The film has its own fascination that rises above the type of music being played and sung.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

It’s a timely topic shot around picnic tables with friends and tramping through vineyards from Tuscany to Piedmont, as thought-provoking as it is informal.

Several impressive action scenes sustain the tension and electrify this overlong, often hard-to-follow story.

Brings peaks of violence and suspense to the vivid story of a young East European prostitute-turned-cleaning lady intent on carrying out a mysterious mission in Italy.

Timely and thought-provoking, if a bit rambling.

The film itself is not very deep, but for a comedy it has some striking moments, like its canny description of how public opinion can turn.

Unshaven and twinkling-eyed, Sharif is professionally light and entertaining in the title role.

The special effects are quality fun, the humor only a little Japanese, and the story boasts the offbeat genre twists Miike lovers clamber for.

The story of Mohamed, who leaves behind his normal life for the money and excitement of piracy, is illuminating, even if he is never a terribly sympathetic character that the viewer can warm up to.

An inspired mix of realism, humor and metaphor.

A flashback to the playfully tender East Euro cinema of yore with a forceful if predictable punch in the closing reel, Rajko Grlic's Border Post marks a virile comeback for the Croatian veteran after his weak-kneed "Josephine."

The strength of the film is its appealing characters brought to life by strong actresses.