Ernest Hardy

What saves the film—and grandly—is Nance’s wildly ambitious visual imagination. Teetering somewhere between film school precocity and impressively assured audaciousness...It’s almost hypnotic in its style and genre promiscuity.

Schwarz's juxtaposition of the human cost of the drug war alongside the glamorization of its henchmen and their brutality is sobering, even depressing.

What makes High Art remarkable is Cholodenko's refusal to put her characters or story through a filter, her unblinking willingness to dive right in.

An unassuming little film that packs a huge emotional and artistic punch.

Informant is riveting as it slowly assembles a damning profile of its subject. It's also timely.

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.

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.

MTV, comic books and gangster flicks are all in Lola's cinematic family tree; it's a heady, breathless ride.

Poignant, funny, and proof of Basquiat's magic.

A gorgeous dreamscape of a movie...one of the most exhilarating experiences of pure cinema that will be offered this year.

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.

A dark, biting comedy-- funny, smart and full of unpredictable twist and turns.

A smart, seamless commentary on race, class and the expectations (or lack of) that are often attached to them. Kennedy is helped greatly by deep currents of heart and humor that pull you into the unfolding tale, and to the edge of your seat as the countdown to opening night begins.

What makes Kuchu work as taut agitprop, and ultimately to devastating emotional effect, is that Wright and Zouhali-Worrall allow the enormity of the film's political concerns to be telegraphed through the stories, experiences, and astute analysis of ordinary queer folk and their hetero allies.

At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.

Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.

Simultaneously hilarious and deeply informative thanks to the vibrant personalities at its center.

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

In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.

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

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.

Where "American Beauty" was smug and obvious in its dissection of suburban life, Judy Berlin is hilarious, heartbreaking and -- in its graciousness -- unlike any American film we've seen in a long time.

It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.

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.

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.

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.

A dark film that raises more questions than it answers -- and it's meant to.

Entertaining as it often is, Outside Providence feels as if it were a collection of installments from an unusually raunchy television series.