Eddie Cockrell

Lanthimos’ point seems to be that everyone has their own private weaknesses, but after a Lynchian first act in this strange world, he avoids any mainstream dramatic or satiric elements.

As interesting as all this is, and as challenging and perilous it must have been to capture these images, Jirga’s elliptical approach to plot and selective use of subtitles does the finished product no favors.

The cast is clearly what sells the experience, but it all goes down easy through the combined efforts of Ward’s perceptive direction, the nuanced editing of vet Nick Meyers, and Bonnie Elliott’s warm, crystalline camerawork. Melinda Doring’s meticulous, crowded-but-not-cluttered production design settles everyone right in.

“Oftentimes these connections are neglected or rejected,” sings Lloyd early on to complete the couplet, “but every now and then the universe succeeds.” So, in its sincere and refreshingly scrappy way, does Stuck.

The Forest of Lost Souls is a nasty and impressive little thriller that goes about its business with ruthless cinematic efficiency.

Goldstone is nothing if not a focused, unified piece.

The film is an energetic, candy-colored romp through genre tropes that manages to take its subject matter seriously while poking fun at itself at the same time.

A harrowing ride that morphs from discrete horror to probing character study and back again in a vivid yet admirably restrained 108 minutes.

Writer-producer Rishi S. Bhilawadikar’s too-busy script nevertheless scores legitimate points about the complexities and paradoxes of the visa application process, the resulting limbo in which many legitimately productive immigrants find themselves, and other frustrating and soul-searching issues facing ethnic communities.

Girl Asleep is an exuberant example of imaginative filmmaking that takes its cues from imagination and talent — with nary a focus group in sight.

The film overstays its welcome by punctuating his story with ill-advised dramatic fantasy sequences that are meant to illustrate the anguish of a gay man in mid-century America, but come across as heavy-handed and mean-spirited.

It’s not so much the destination but the physical and emotional journey embarked on in this thoughtful, culturally authentic road trip.

Enough of Yancey’s ambitious narrative has made the final cut to reflect an arrestingly original spin on trendy genre tropes.

Deeply involving and emotionally searing, The Daughter reps a confident and profoundly moving bigscreen debut for established theater director Simon Stone.

Charlie is the vessel through which de Heer navigates these turbulent waters, and the script was developed during sessions when the actor would throw out ideas and the director would structure the results. It is to both men’s credit that amid the suffering, there’s a ray of hope for Charlie in the end.

Director Bert Marcus’ Champs is the moviegoing opposite of a prize fight, a slick but not particularly stylish documentary that actually becomes more focused and energized in the late rounds.

An often capriciously mixed cocktail of war film and cross-cultural family melodrama, The Water Diviner marks an ambitious if emotionally manipulative directing debut for Russell Crowe.

The aural landscape here is key, as Wilson’s strategy is to create a visual theater of the mind in which the majority of the action is heard and not seen.

The Final Member finds hilarity in humanity.

Not so much harrowing as achingly reflective.

An entertaining profile of the self-avowed participatory journalist and his tumultuous life and times.

Exercising admirable restraint in its expose of ingrained racism in the Romanian educational system, absorbing docu Our School follows the sad yet resilient journey of three Roma children over four years as they grapple with prejudice and stereotyping.

Filmed over the course of nine months' worth of night shoots, the resulting coverage is hypnotically immersive.

A cumulative feeling of urgency and you-are-there world-beating are key to the picture's seductive appeal, though lack of informed dissenting opinions reps an unfortunate editorial choice.

What elevates the picture above the norm is a series of remarkably candid and eerily prescient interviews.

Topolski and his story are so engaging that the resulting discord of voices and agendas can't drown out the voice of the little guy questioning the system.

Helmer Douglas Mackinnon does what he can to make the most of emotional bullet points and gloss over the lack of connective tissue.

Overly plotted erotic drama.

Longtime fans of Walker's warm, sepulchral baritone, startlingly evocative songwriting and lushly imaginative instrumentation will rejoice at this revealing documentary.

A genuine and tangible fondness and respect for the characters and their eccentricities.

Sixty years after World War II, descendants of a prominent Nazi responsible for implementing Hitler's policies in Slovakia reignite debate over their heritage in emotional docu 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him.

The serious subject of forced female circumcision becomes the stuff of predictable melodrama in God's Sandbox.

A mildly diverting, largely inoffensive teen laffer that's long on cartoonish high school hijinks but short on dramatic concentration and crucial story details.

Debuting helmer Vicente Amorim provides a determined forward movement, which, while lacking in cultural explanation, gives the saga uplift and punch.

This unaffected charmer treats a hot-button contempo issue with old-fashioned grace and benevolent wit, rendering it a sure-fire word-of-mouth crowd-pleaser.

Joyously funky documentary.

Has the frustrating feel of a rousing, epic oater sadly compromised.

A blue chip cast is wasted in the painfully unfunny ensemble comedy Niagara Motel.

"It's the ultimate Dogme movie, before the birth of Dogme," is how 79-year-old Lithuanian-born independent mainstay Jonas Mekas describes peaceful, enthralling assemblage encompassing home movie footage from last three decades of his life.

Consistently silly and intermittently laugh-out-loud funny spoof.

Picture raises pithy questions sure to provoke animated discussions pro and con. Credit Davenport for a mostly unbiased presentation that presents her own disenchantment in a balanced manner.

Todeschini has the most physically demanding role, with a gaunt face and ravaged body that utterly convinces of the brutality of the ailment.

A labored screwball comedy about disenchanted people of privilege yearning for fulfillment, pic is full of leaden hijinx directed and played with all the subtlety of a myocardial infarction.

A sibling survivor story of uncommon personal and political breadth.

Crowd-pleasing, darkly comic joyride.

The star plays Doyle as just rough enough around the edges to warrant the character's setbacks, but not so unpleasant that the twinkle in his eye is extinguished.

Superbly modulated yet unrelentingly grim, Mirage builds upon a remarkable performance from young Macedonian newcomer Marko Kovacevic to tell the tragic tale of a talented schoolboy driven to violence through neglect and manipulation.

Thesping is pitch-perfect across the board.

Sure, it's all been done before, but seldom with this degree of vigor and panache.

Continuing the late-career renaissance of historically urgent, politically engaged fiction filmmaking that began with 1999's "The Legend of Rita" and 2004's "The Ninth Day" German vet Volker Schloendorff stumbles slightly, but doesn't fall, with Poland-set Solidarity saga Strike.

An extraordinary performance by vet thesp Yolande Moreau in the title role.

A beautifully atmospheric vessel that will seem infinitely deep to some and chafingly dry to others.

Though treading a firm, clear-eyed line between education and exploitation, the well-acted and technically proficient drama -- too chaste to scandalize, too dark for general audiences -- works as a mobilizing tool for its cause.

Links narrative fiction filmmaking to avant-garde with vision and authority.

A vibrant, immediate treatise on love and cultural identity in a complex new world of fluid borders and deep suspicions in the stunning new Czech drama Up and Down.

A savvy sequel that should speak to anyone who's let that one great love slip away.

Although the outcome is public record, picture is undeniably gripping as it reveals a distressing degree of voter complacency.

As engaging and stimulating as the man himself.

Calculated yet undeniably skillful melodrama.

The writer discovers a people physically and psychologically worn down by decades of dictatorship, sanctions, war and occupation.

A humanistic, warts-and-all battle of wills between a dissolute father and an emotionally ravaged daughter.

Part mob-trial thriller, part "dese 'n' dose" extended standup routine, character-rich pic plays like vintage Lumet, mining the grim comedy from life-and-death legal wranglings in the manner of "Dog Day Afternoon," "Prince of the City" and "The Verdict."

Helmer Bruce David Klein's near-reverential treatment is a nice contrast to the rough-and-tumble of tour life.

Stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature.

Picture's cliched underlying story of restless youth plays as too naive for an older audience and too provocative for teens.

Laugh-out-loud funny, tartly off-color and ultimately touching.

Impeccably crafted but dramatically turgid.

A tonal triumph of true-life storytelling told with equal measures of tension and redemption.

Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.

What begins as a moderately interesting set of interconnected mysteries involving race and identity soon grows eye-rollingly laborious, not to mention increasingly derivative of Christopher McQuarrie's "Usual Suspects" script.

A natural for kidfests, pic is a fine example of old-fashioned story-telling and also will dance wherever detailed character development and leisurely-paced drama are appreciated.

Timely and entertaining concert documentary.

Confronts an incendiary topic head-on with grace, style, compassion and exquisitely practical wit.

Too often depends on salty, adolescent one-liners that provide shock value guffaws but grow cumulatively wearisome.

Unaffectedly hip and affably manic, Down & Out With the Dolls picks up where "Singles" left off.

Fans of the Grammy-winning musician will revel in the proximity to their idol, though second pic from talented helmer Thomas Riedelsheimer plays a tad long to those unfamiliar with his, or her, work.

An atmospheric and cumulatively impressive feature-length debut from Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel.

Admirably idealistic but dramatically awkward.

An Argentine writer dying of AIDS searches for a medical cure and some human warmth in the hospitals and S&M clubs of Buenos Aires in dignified, thoughtful drama A Year Without Love.

Fiction writer and debuting helmer Mary Kuryla is clearly after a Big Statement on abuse and strength of character, but falls short by creating a self-destructive monster in lieu of a sympathetic protagonist.

It will garner critical huzzahs from those it lampoons, which will broaden the duo's (Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy) fan base.

A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.

Intense but inscrutable tale involving a woman's gradual remembrance of a long-suppressed trauma.

The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.

Undeniably powerful on the bigscreen.

Unflaggingly genial and universally funny.

It often resembles John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence," but just as often devolves into a series of bravura acting exercises strung together by an increasingly sketchy narrative theme.

Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.

Promising frosh helmer Felix van Groeningen exhibits a fresh eye, though his script is full of too many self-consciously Tarantino-ish verbal digressions that serve to distract from the story, and self-conscious quirks he mistakes for character development.

An uncommonly resonant sports drama in which a talented yet troubled gymnast comes to terms with a turbulent past.

Will be of keen interest to fans but plays to the unwashed as cringingly pompous.

Stunningly played story of faith vs. family.

The miscalculated and overlong Julia proves a startling misfire for "The Dreamlife of Angels" writer-helmer Erick Zonca and dependably fearless actress Tilda Swinton.

Recent history once again intrudes on the present-day lives of working Czechs in the masterful multicharacter drama Beauty in Trouble.

Noteworthy for its detail and evenhandedness.

Glacially paced, self-consciously acted and narratively risible.

The trio is so individually and collectively charismatic that the film eventually neglects fully fleshed-out narrative in favor of sublime characterization.

A rueful yet gentle fable about the price of individuality and the value of dignity that preserves the intellectually stimulating spirit of Kieslowski's best work while tapping into a universally understandable vein of low-keyed absurdist comedy.