Eric Hynes

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

Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.

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.

Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.

Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.

A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.

This boppy biopic pushes a wealth of outrageous incidents while never making anything resembling a point.

Amid its celebrations of black power, ambitious Afros and fly female trombonists, the film serves as a rousing testament to the singular blessings of music education, since there's nothing inherent or automatic about kids learning how to groove.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

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

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.

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.

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

Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.

The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.

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

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.

Farmiga persuades as a kooky monster of a matriarch, while Javier is an ideal vessel for Duchovny's laconic line readings (he's grown into an even more deadpan Bill Murray). Goats may cover an all-too-familiar terrain, but at least it grazes it well.

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.

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.

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

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

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

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.