Elise Nakhnikian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

There's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The film’s visceral pleasures often work at cross purposes with the cerebral message of the manifestos.