Deborah Young

After watching Maysaloun Hamoud’s sparkling, taboo-breaking first feature In Between (Bar Bahar), audiences will have to seriously update their ideas about the lifestyle of Palestinian women in Israel.

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

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.

Though not every moment is fascinating to watch, most moments are, and adult audiences should find its frank presentation of the diversity of intimacy thought-provoking and possibly therapeutic.

Singh shows a confident hand as he works with the material on multiple levels of narrative and symbolism, keeping it interesting and in focus throughout. His greatest strength, however, is Randhawa’s powerful portrayal of the shepherdess, a role that could launch a career.

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

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.

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.

Refusing to offer easy answers or perspectives, Dormant Beauty is directed in such a way it doesn’t need to take a clear-cut position on the question, because like all the director’s work it has no concern with convincing people of anything, but a great deal of interest in illuminating contemporary Italian society.

A spellbinding love letter to Hong Kong and the movies.

Though it has far less outright violence than Gomorrah, whose oppressive criminal atmosphere it shares, Matteo Garrone's Dogman is just as intense a viewing experience, one that will have audiences gripping their armrests with its frighteningly real portrayal of a good man tempted by the devil.

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.

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

It is irresistibly laugh-out-loud and feel-good.

An acid portrait of contemporary Austria (and by extension, the whole middle class) as unspeakably dull, violent and stupid. The film itself, miraculously, is just the opposite: vibrantly inventive, aesthetically rigorous, sardonic and occasionally quite brilliant.

The subject is horrifying but the screen is hard to look away from, as the situation becomes a powder keg of tension.

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

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.

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

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.

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

An extraordinary feeling for nature and the seasons of life pervades Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), an ambitious reflection on our responsibility to others from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.

Kidnapped (Rapito) is one of Marco Bellocchio’s most successful films, both as a taut thriller that will capture audiences with his terribly human drama, and as a masterful reflection on the themes that the Italian director has worried and revisited over a lifetime of filmmaking: the Catholic church as an anti-liberal indoctrinating machine that steals children’s souls, the frailty of personal identity, and the struggle for liberation on an individual and societal level.

A funny-moving story enjoyably retold with classic British understatement and just the right twist at the end.

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.

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.

In this fast-moving, densely plotted black dramedy, a faux scandal raised by an ambitious web TV editor comes close to destroying a number of lives, offering a masterful panorama on urban, middle class China.