Elise Nakhnikian

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.

As is often the case in films like this, Seventh Son is at its weakest when it tries to leaven its brink-of-disaster gravity with a little nerdy humor.

The film is a study of grief that drowns in a cold bath of grim self-pity.

Empowerment porn for those who long for the Cold War's clarity of purpose and American dominance in this murky age of terror.

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.

If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the universal mysteries and verities of life, The Color of Time is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger's family album.

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 film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.

Israel Horovitz's film is basically a three-character play without a single character you can believe in.

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

It comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft of this movie soon after graduating high school.

The film is rife with tired food metaphors and plot twists so predictable you see them coming like travelers on the poplar-lined street that leads to the dueling restaurants.

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.

Even at 74 minutes, the documentary comes to feel arduous in its recycling of the same points and imagery, the filmmaking as plodding as its subject is polished.

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.