Ernest Hardy

For anyone who wants to see wildly inventive, peerless filmmaking that's oblivious to market-place formulas, Beau Travail is an absolute must-see.

Leigh and his solid cast make sure that inside jokes translate to a broad audience, and that their rendering of the back-stage drama is smart, engrossing and often very funny.

The roles of affect and artifice in mediating the realities of racism, homophobia, and poverty are perhaps the true subjects of Shirley Clarke's landmark doc.

One of the things that makes Traffic so very good is the wry humor that's laced throughout the film. It's a funny movie.

To watch Sevigny's Lana slowly thaw to Brandon is to see the transformative, heartbreaking power of romance in a way that Hollywood is rarely able to capture anymore.

It's both surreal -- and wholly accessible.

Without forcing the material into facile uplift, Bloodworth-Thomason still edges it into the realm of inspirational, never overplaying the anguish or soft-pedaling the bigotry at the heart of the story.

Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.

A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.

Though a little long, the film takes us right inside both the creative impulse and the margins of American life. Its triumph is to show those two things as being deeply, wonderfully connected.

Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.

But for all its bleakness, Nightmare is a film that demands to be seen. In unflinching terms, it captures the hellish existence endured by the many so that the few may wallow in privilege.

All these years later, the film is far more infuriating than it is exciting.

A deceptively simple film, gingerly peels layer after layer of sharp insights into the dynamics of familial love, using compassion and droll humor as its tools. Its strength is that it manages to tap genuine emotion without succumbing to sentimentality.

Results in moments of real beauty that make you grateful Chappelle chose an aesthete for directing chores. And yet, in terms of content, the film doesn't quite reach the bar set by its historic predecessor (Wattstax).

Moodysson's movie, one part mash note and three parts scathing piss-taker, is hugely compassionate toward the well-meaning fools in his tale, but he doesn't suffer their nonsense gladly; his film is, in large part, about grown-ups needing to grow up.

Tough and relentless, dazzlingly researched and crafted. At its core is compassion for those who are angry, violent and uneducated.

Victor Vargas has the look and feel of a neo-realist masterpiece, yet captures New York with a burnished authenticity not seen since the glory days of ’70s American cinema.

It does what the most powerful films and music have always done, which is to spark contemplation of our own lives and choices, and our place in the world, while also stoking compassion and empathy for lives far removed from our own.

Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.

It's utterly rousing watching the women master their instruments and then push past the birth pains of their new business enterprise, and it's completely wrenching as their individual backstories unfold.

One of the funniest, shrewdest, smartest movies in recent memory.

Drumming doesn't quite have the skills to finesse the varying tones demanded by his textured script...and he could have taken one more pass on smoothing out character arcs, which are too truncated to be believable in a few cases. Still, the ensemble cast is fantastic, and Drumming is a talent to watch.

What could have been an impossibly bleak viewing is actually made more unnerving through DeFriest's droll humor and acceptance of his fate — rather than being Zen-like, he's prickly and dark, with such dazzlingly high native intelligence that you mourn for potential needlessly wasted.

Stays with you, though, not because of its political content, but because of the unexpected emotional punch that's thrown near the end.

Tragic, funny and deadpan dark, it's easily one of the best films of the year...It's the brutally unsentimental, intelligent, unflinching heart at the film's core that makes it a marvel.

It’s the captured conversations about everyday lives and struggles that pin you to your seat.

Deceptively rambling, shrewdly ragtag documentary.