Deborah Young

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.