Deborah Young

It is a searing and topical indictment of racial prejudice and hatred in America that makes for uneasy viewing and is not easily forgotten.

Magnificent in its simplicity and its relentless honesty about old age, illness and dying, Michael Haneke's Amour is a deliberately torturous watch.

Tensely action-packed and muscularly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, this tale of an elite U.S. army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad is a familiar story in new clothes, targeted at the young male demographic.

In Collective, Nanau's observational style of filmmaking reaches emotional depths.

This small film is a thoughtful addition to his parables about happy and unhappy families (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), studded with memorable characters and believable performances that quietly lead the viewer to reflect on societal values.

While there are implicit references to the horrors of the Soviet and post-Soviet state and to the 20th century in general, this monstrously overflowing film seems to aim even higher.

The film’s methods are boldly unorthodox and its constantly alternating moods and shifts in tone from drama to humor, joy to tragedy can be disconcerting. It’s not a film for all audiences, but despite its eccentricities it is always watchable, thanks to strongly drawn characters and the soul-stirring poetry of its imagery.

The film’s minimalist aesthetic makes little concession to the usual forms of cinematic expression and extends to the set design: living spaces devoid of furniture, the nondescript hotel room, the typical street scenes. The two actors are similarly inexpressive, their faces blank as though personal interaction was a major risk.

A fine cast brings the believable, sometimes humorous characters to life and gradually draws the viewer into a well-crafted, well-paced story.

The imagery is epic and dreamlike at the same time, the battleground covered in mist, grain stubble, snow.

The Look of Silence is perhaps even more riveting for focusing on one man’s personal search for answers as he bravely confronts his brother’s killers.

Never talking down to his audience, he rather pulls them up to an intellectual level where other filmmakers fear to go.

Amazingly, Panahi turns the utterly simple, economical format of a camera inside a car into something relevant to his own artistic state and full of eye-opening insights into Iranian society.

What comes out of this unlikely comparison between astronomy and history is a totally new perspective, something broader, with glimpses into deeper meanings.

Scorsese's heartfelt love letter to Italian movies up to 1961.

Blurring the confines between documentary and fiction, it takes the empathetic viewer on an incredible journey that can be almost as painful to follow vicariously from a theater seat as it must have been on the pilgrims.

An extraordinary ride through Bollywood’s spectacular, over-the-top filmmaking, Gangs of Wasseypur puts Tarantino in a corner with its cool command of cinematically-inspired and referenced violence, ironic characters and breathless pace.

A remarkable first feature from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Town is a strikingly original, vibrantly sensitive look at an extended family living in a remote Turkish village.

Elusive and elliptical as it is, this is one of the most accessible films in Oliveira's recent repetoire.

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

Maoz doesn't seem to worry about losing some puzzled viewers along the way with comprehension issues. For those who reach the end, the story makes perfect sense.

A long, leisurely drama directed with self-assurance.

Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.

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.

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.

A taut, involving drama centered around the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, About Elly confirms director Asghar Farhadi as a major talent in Iranian cinema whose ability to chronicle the middle-class malaise of his society is practically unrivaled.

Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in Caught by the Tides, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.

A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.

Takes the refined work of Iranian helmer Abbas Kiarostami up another notch to ever more metaphoric ground.

10 dazzling and perceptive snapshots of women with which femmes everywhere can identify.

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

In Drug War, Hong Kong genre master Johnnie To gives a superlative lesson on how to give an updated, thoroughly engrossing twist to the classic cops-and-robbers chase.

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.

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.

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.

An atypically told, but typically big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, Close Your Eyes is a passionate and engaging reflection on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.

This enjoyable French pic welds together drama, melodrama and comedy.

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."

The pièce de résistance of unabashed culinary cinema, Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu serves up a French country idyll in romantic 19th century sauce for audiences whose tastes run to the fine wines and 12-course meals.

Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning. It will certainly appeal to his festival fan base but neophytes beware: It takes patience to get to hidden truths, and even so they are about as clear as a Zen koan.

[A] dark yet humanly luminous story.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi pursues his exploration of guilt, choice and responsibility in a superbly written, directed and acted drama that commands attention every step of the way.

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.

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.

The film is a mirror and a warning.

A film whose lightness of touch rides a wave of family conflict to perfectly balance smiles and tears.

Expectations are fully met in Park Chan-wook’s exquisitely filmed The Handmaiden (Agassi), an amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by.

The intriguingly elliptical narrative and the use of highly aestheticized cinematography and music draw the viewer into a web of genocide and a series of shocking events

Saad has an absolutely sure hand in directing Badhon and guiding her into higher octaves of the role as the drama grows and grows.

This bittersweet peek into the human comedy has a more subtle charm than flashier films like the director’s child-swapping fable Like Father, Like Son, but the filmmaking is so exquisite and the acting so calibrated it sticks with you.

Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.

It’s hard not to leave the film shaken.

As a tyro auteur, Tanovich has a heavy-handed way of delineating characters and situations that makes this well-meaning film awfully familiar at times.

Few Iranian films have tried to realistically depict both the urban middle and lower classes, and fewer still with the complexity of story telling and depth of characterization in Asghar Farhadi’s impressive third feature, Fireworks Wednesday.

It's hard to walk away unaffected from this heartfelt, well-researched, feature-length documentary.

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.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

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

A very honest film from a great Japanese artist.

A tense documentary with multiple layers of meaning.

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 not very subtle in presenting its thesis, the story is generally suspenseful and well-told by young HK actor and director Tsang (Soul Mate).

Perhaps the most ambitious film to date by Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda.

Although at first sight this dramatization of a 1962 strike at a factory in the U.S.S.R. may seem a long way from the interests of contemporary audiences, it is surprising how much resonance the film has with the political struggles of our own time.

More uneven but ultimately more effective than filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s previous anti-war film.

Though the message comes across loud and clear, the four tales suffer from being narratively uneven, making the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time seem long indeed.

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.

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

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

A rare example of indie filmmaking produced outside the Thai studio system, Blissfully Yours takes the good-humored nonsense of director Apichatpong Weeasethakul's first feature, "Mysterious Object at Noon," several steps further into the realm of non-communicative minimalism.

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.

The fast-moving story goes deeper than a pure thriller, as Wang Jing focuses on the faces of his characters in all their anxiety and human dignity.

Its bursts of lightning-fast swordplay interrupt long, still stretches of misty moonlit landscapes and follow a pure literary style more than current genre expectations.

Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

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.

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.

Has a terrible fascination that glues viewers to the screen. At the same time, audience patience is tested.

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

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

Takes the viewer on a mysterious and sporadically fascinating trip into the darkness of the human heart and Thai legend.

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.

An unforgettable journey through hell under the earth, where Satan is worshipped as king. Straight-as-an-arrow filmmaking raises this docu above the crowd.

Closed Curtain is a moody, intellectually complex film that requires good will and brainwork on the part of the viewer to penetrate and enjoy.

As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

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.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

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

A riveting Argentine thriller spiked with witty dialogue and poignant love stories.

Steering away from exaggerated drama and concentrating most of the scenes on the little girl and her mother Ane (emerging Spanish actress Patricia Lopez Arnalz), 20,000 Species of Bees (20.000 especies de abejas) opens audiences up to a new understanding of trans kids, especially the idea that it is not the child who needs to transition, it’s the family and society who need to change their perceptions.

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.

The film has its resonant moments, notably a wedding and a funeral. But it is by no means the jewel in the crown of a series that most recently has included electrifying docs like At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

An impressively mature directing debut from Italian actress Valeria Golino, who crafts an often engrossing character study around an assisted suicide activist.

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.

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.

On his third feature after "Tower" and "How Heavy This Hammer," Radwanski hits his quiet stride here, and the directing matches Campbell’s intuitive approach. Ajla Odobasic’s delicate, fast-moving editing reflects Anne’s uncertain hold on reality, while the open ending lets the viewer decide whether Anne or reality wins in the end.

It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.

As it explores the limits of human endurance, the pic should suck even landlubbers into a whirlpool of gripping adventure, overblown ambitions and sheer human folly.

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.