Derek Smith

Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.

A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.

Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.

It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.

David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.

The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.

The interjections of quotidian reflection give a fullness and emotional resonance to a film that can, at times, be borderline oppressive in its depiction of war’s brutality.

The film’s devotion to the belief that kindness can be a balm for almost any hurt is deeply moving.

The film’s unique blend of deadpan and absurdist humor, and its tendency to occasionally push the boundaries of good taste, shows that Emma Seligman is comfortable working on both ends of the comic spectrum.

This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.

The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.

The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.

Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, writer-director Goran Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror.

It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.

Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s film is understated in its attunement to the challenges of trying to escape a stagnant existence.

The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.

This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.

The film poignantly draws a straight line from the economic anxieties of the past straight to the present.

Tom Harper’s film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.

The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

Jay Maisel’s former home suggests a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been completely sanded down.

One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.

Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.