Elise Nakhnikian

The obstacles and opportunities that Patti encounters are often rote, but her struggles and triumphs are detailed with a gravity that honors and elucidates her feelings.

Finding the drama and humor in everyday situations like these isn't easy, but Avedisian makes it look as natural as swinging on a vine.

The central characters' dogged refusal to cede their places on a team that keeps trying to reject them is a moving display of heroism.

The film reveals the erudition and shrewd self-awareness that Jim Osterberg drew on to become Iggy Pop.

It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.

The film's ruefully honest tone is periodically drowned out by the blare of stagey coincidences.

Like the work it illuminates, the doc feels formally impeccable yet utterly unstaged, a vivid distillation of a distinct and precious life.

Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.

It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.

Despite the occasional cliché, this film mostly feels as messy as life, and as movingly complicated.

The film's horror is spookily and movingly expressive of the tenuous position of women in 1980s Iran.

Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.

It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.

It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.

The film's episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.

The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.

The allure of the road not taken and Saoirse Ronan's performance exert a powerful pull.

The film functions as a love letter to Pakistan, despite the misogynistic culture it exposes.

In this picaresque documentary, the lightly comic musings of a likeable, somewhat nerdy Indian-American actor go surprisingly deep.

A Bourne movie turned just askew enough to be funny, American Ultra trains a bemused eye on a trope ripe for a ribbing.

It has generous lashings of Aardman Animations' trademark warmth, visual inventiveness, and satisfying Claymation tactility.

Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.

A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.

A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.

Highly polished yet never quite slick, it devolves now and then into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters.

The cumulative effect is cheerily life-affirming, a bracing infusion of macaque-style joie de vivre.

The chemistry between Pacino and his cast mates gives this lightly amusing contrivance surprising emotional resonance.

True to its title, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical novel has the loosely structured, unfiltered feel of a young person's diary.

An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.

Like its predecessor, the film is a charming example of what great actors can do with mediocre material.

The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.

Paolo Virzì's Human Capital gives the tired trope of cutting between overlapping stories a welcome shot of adrenaline, using it not just to compare and contrast tangentially related stories, but to show how people caught up in their private dramas can overlook or misinterpret the people around them.

The film isn't preachy, but its indie-movie artiness sometimes get in the way of its noble mission, making us think more about the techniques being used than the effects they're meant to create.

Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.

The documentary is hesitant to show the great work that resulted from Hayao Miyazaki's "grand hobby," never including clips from the classics referred to throughout.

It's mercifully free of the ruin-porn shots that turn so many contemporary films about struggling cities into self-consciously arty exercises in the romanticization of decay.

The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.

Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.

The actors create emotionally coherent and sympathetic characters from a collection of often contradictory, monumentally irresponsible, or just plain improbable actions.

It intriguingly invites us to think about the mundane forces that can drive a seemingly ordinary guy like Mohamed to do something so desperate and cruel as piracy.

The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.

The film is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes, but it's also a witness to the limits of that power.

Nabil Ayouch's film allows us see how young suicide bombers--"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them--might deserve our pity.

The film gets too caught up in the semi-farcical comings and goings of the two Sophies and Ethans to explore any of the issues it raises about relationships very deeply.

The film's segments move seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.

In Lucía Puenzo's film, things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.

This is a study of a man who's hard to like, harder to dismiss, and impossible to pigeonhole.

A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."

Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment.

Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.

This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.

The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.

Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.

From its title to its closing caress, Mads Matthiesen's film skates perilously close to the cliff's edge of mawkish sentiment.

It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.

A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.