Eric Hynes

Plays like a gothic prequel to David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," one in which human flesh is viewed as both horrific and erotic terrain.

It’s a film defined by momentum, by the spectacle of an unformed young man rapidly becoming someone.

Brazilian filmmaker Júlia Murat's first narrative feature is a mesmerizing, slow-build marvel.

The unveiling is unnerving, and suggests that some dangers are now permanently beyond our control.

It's a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity.

With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.

he wild-eyed Celedón and stealthily empathetic Saavedra introduce a farcical element to this otherwise mournful milieu, but the tonal clashes yield something genuinely cathartic, if also ultimately irresolvable.

Alice Rohrwacher's debut fictional feature is an uncommonly insightful portrait of nascent womanhood, assisted in no small measure by Vianello's disarmingly naturalistic performance.

What elevates the film is a pervasive, palpable sense of loss — between lover and beloved, young and old, stage and screen.

Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that’s realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific (we spend as much time ogling colorfully patterned dresses as we do admiring Gurira’s endlessly expressive face), yet unmistakably archetypal.

Majewski's film is a dazzling master class in visual composition.

Armed with archival footage and wrenching interviews, filmmaker Chad Freidrichs revisits one of our nation's darkest hours - and emerges with a scrupulous, revelatory consideration of the varied factors that turned a worthy plan into a horrific, state-sanctioned nightmare for a generation of working-class African-Americans.

Attenberg shares with the Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth" a weakness for overgrown innocence and deadpan perversity.

The most "Naked City"–worthy aspect is the film's temperature, fixed precisely between cool posturing and broiling anomie. Its vision of contemporary Thailand is recognizable as another society undeserving of redemption, but worthy of poetry.

Miller’s ace in the hole is the hulking, regal Harper, whose round face vacillates between childlike mirth and lung-stomping sadness. His casual charisma not only commands our attention and affection, it sidelines every social or thematic concern to this singular, tentatively aspiring life.

Mike Eley’s gorgeously saturated cinematography helps elevate the boys’ struggle into the realm of the heroic, but it’s the two young stars — one a whirlwind and the other a quiet protector — who make this only-slightly tall tale into something towering.

It’s a human-size tragedy, one that shows how deadening it can be to remain subject to those who give us life.

The only time a subject directly addresses Takesue, it's with a doozy of a query: "Why are you taking my story to USA, New York?" The answer is as complex as the film itself, and as simple as deciding to not look away.

Truthfully, watching septuagenarian whores spank mildly titillated johns and test-drive sex toys has never seemed so ho-hum - or so oddly familiar.

Uniting Sacha Baron Cohen's daredevilry with Werner Herzog's bombast, Brügger aims to expose "the evilness of North Korea" with a gloriously incoherent, kazoo-and-whoopee-cushion–inflected stage show starring a self-proclaimed "spastic."

The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.

The first major motion picture to come out of Congo in decades happens to be one of the best neonoirs from anywhere in recent memory.

What Lost Bohemia lacks in aesthetic presentation - first-time filmmaker Astor seems to have gathered footage without much forethought - is made up for by an intimacy familiar from home movies, revealing eccentric neighbors at their most frank and endearing.

There are subtler, more allusive films about stormy conflicts of the heart, but A Burning Hot Summer wisely knows when and how to surgically slice directly to the bone. It's a bad romance of the highest order.

What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.

From the sun’s surface to the deep earth, Hawaiian volcanoes to Detroit’s decay, Mettler explores the different ways that we experience and define time, using his own documentary as a mind-bending demonstration of its mutability.