Farran Smith Nehme

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder.

At some point in her 50-year career, Rampling became one of the world’s great actresses. Driven by her and Courtenay’s work, and by director Andrew Haigh’s limpid style, the film is devastating.

Tamhane’s quiet techniques build to pure, cold fury.

Each scene is breathtaking, such as a long shot of a river at a key moment, and an unforgettable soccer game played with no ball. Timbuktu deserves every accolade it gets.

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country’s brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide’s perpetrators, The Act of Killing puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning. Leviathan stays absolutely gripping, right up to the O. Henry twist that slams the film shut.

A groundbreaking, highly influential film, A Man Vanishes is a fiercely brilliant piece of work, but it's more intellectual challenge than pleasure.

“The past is past. I don’t want to remember . . . the wound is healed,” says Kemat, an Indonesian man who survived the massacre of more than 10,000 people at the Snake River in 1965. As this documentary shows, nothing could be further from the truth.

Yet while Nemes criticized “Schindler’s List” as “conventional,” all that’s new here is the hyper-realistic technique: Saul’s quest is not very far from the girl in the red dress.

Often extremely funny, always thoughtful, the movie transcends its static nature to become a deeper picture of modern Iran than any news story could offer.

Both actresses are extraordinary, but Kulesza — bitter, sarcastic and tragic — carries the movie’s soul.

The filmmaker doesn't speculate about why these men are talking, but he leaves you with an excellent guess.

As Viviane, Elkabetz is fascinating, wielding an incredible variety of contemptuous looks.

The cast is excellent, particularly Timur Magomedgadzhiev as a conscience-stricken co-worker, but it’s Cotillard who’s in nearly every scene. Desperate, downtrodden, but grasping at each shred of hope, Cotillard — who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s “La Vie en Rose” — carries the whole film.

Less tiring than a three-hour tramp through the halls, and considerably less expensive than a plane ticket, National Gallery gives the feeling of having seen everything there is to see.

More than a thriller, Phoenix is a ghost story, made plain in an extraordinary shot of Nelly’s terror at a passing train.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

Beautiful to look at, with its burnished interiors and magnificent Turkish steppes, this long film builds to a powerful conclusion. Ceylan’s characters grind each other to a powder while hardly raising their voices.

Panh’s technique achieves things a conventional documentary could not, as when he pans across dozens of the clay figures jumbled in a box, in a shot that calls up both the toys of childhood, and graves.

About Elly shows that the ethical dilemmas of ordinary adults can, with this level of talent, become as gripping as any thriller.

The sharpest, least sentimental and possibly the best version of Austen yet.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

The surreal images, offbeat jokes and pointed human-rights allegory make this an altogether different experience from most American animation. It’s dreamy, poetic and not to be missed.

These elisions give an odd feeling to a film so long in the making. Crewdson's work ultimately begins to seem less enigmatic than he is himself.

This is the sort of movie that gets called “hallucinatory,” but it is strongly grounded in the New York in which 99 percent of us live. Fleischner gets his uncanny effects simply by showing what this city looks like to a child who has a different filter.

Petzold raises questions of honor and builds the romance with an absolutely rigorous lack of sentiment, moving Barbara to a sweeping finish as emotionally satisfying as any this year.

The closing subtitle says that no one was ever prosecuted for this madness. The pure-archive approach leaves a taste of despair; civic governance, it seems, can’t even promise not to kill you.

This sounds like a comedy, and in its slow, deadpan way, that’s what The Treasure is; the film is an unusual mixture of joy and cynicism.

Kaili Blues has the kitchen-sink feel of a new director eager to try every art-film technique in the book, but the film’s beauty and inventiveness are riveting.

If The Past doesn’t equal the masterpiece that preceded it, it’s still an exceptional film from a man who is clearly one of the best working directors.

Farhadi brings keen discernment to this unraveling marriage, and a third-act revelation packs a wallop.

More likely to play well with older children, due to its split-up story line, Ocelot's creation is like nothing else they are likely to see animating the multiplex.

The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives. The view of art is richly intellectual, sometimes enthralling. But I confess, I liked Museum Hours best for answering a question I’ve always had: What is that guard thinking?

He may be saddled with an overly ironic title role, but Bystrov is terrific. His cowboy squint and dogged intelligence are enough to give you hope for Russia, although the movie certainly won’t.

The friction between a couple of still-struggling artists sounds rather depressing, but in fact the film is often funny; it shows that love is present in even the couple’s harshest exchanges.

The Soviet era is more interesting than the NHL years, but still, the film is entertaining even for ardent nonfans.

The results are remarkably intelligent and entertaining, even for someone who (like this writer) finds Cave’s music rather dirge-like.

Hamer’s style is what might happen if Ulrich Seidl liked people, with immaculate balance in each shot, but the emotions in focus, as well. 1001 Grams is wise about both grief and the need for romance.

Brazilian director Anna Muylaert’s deft, funny film is set in São Paulo, but the class distinctions shown have no borders.

A Hijacking is Lindholm’s second feature as director; he’s also worked with such austere Danes as Thomas Vinterberg of Dogme 95 fame. What he’s learned, it seems, is how to strip away distractions, and let character become suspense, as well as destiny.

Director Grímur Hákonarson excels at building tension through long takes, and the actors are excellent.

You may or may not connect Brinkley to a certain presidential candidate, but, either way, this is one of the most entertaining documentaries to come along in some time.

A sudden lurch into trippy abstraction at the end simply doesn’t work, but for the vast majority of the time this is a strong and original film.

This enigma-delivery system from a sharp mind has enthralling moments but becomes a bit enervating in its self-seriousness. By the end, the whole thing feels more academic than mind-bending.

Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is the purest, boldest re-imagining of silent cinema yet.

Ethical objections to Milgram’s work are presented as killing the messenger; well-known issues with his methodology appear not at all. The movie’s an intellectual shock tactic, but it succeeds.

Lifetime movies have their pleasures, and so does this film. Chief among them is the cast, a group of over-45 actresses who really are better than ever; in the cases of Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah, remarkably better.

What makes the movie so delightful is that Wadjda isn’t trying to make trouble; she’s just being herself. A shot of the system of wire hangers attached to her radio so she can pick up Western music stations sums up her can-do attitude.

The on-camera experts make intelligent, earnest points, but the Web means there’s no such thing as a real ban. Indeed the movies have always been available, as two former neo-Nazis point out.

Pigeon, in its deadpan, hyper-composed way, is often paralyzingly funny, and there is compassion for the gray-faced souls wandering through it.

Hollywood has been yukking it up over North Korea and its comical-looking leader for some years now. There’s nothing funny about either, and Mansky shows why.

The adventurous souls who stick with it, however, will find head-spinning images and a cumulative impact that does, in fact, amount to a story.

Meier's tight focus on her primary characters pays off: Seydoux brings a strong array of emotions to a highly unsympathetic part. And Klein, whether plugging his ears with cigarette filters or suddenly embracing a woman he barely knows, is heartbreaking.

The film fragments into an emotionally devastating parable about what enforced silence does to an artist.

The young, novice actors are charming, but they haven’t completely mastered the art of natural-sounding dialogue.

It only seems plotless. Momentous things happen, one of them tele­graphed in a single heartbreaking shot. The sense of time and place is so intense that Jules’ way of life seems to be disappearing even as we watch him.

Not everyone will be in tune with the movie's sick sense of humor, although it's sometimes hilarious.

Despite a too-tidy wrap-up, it’s a humane film, one that sees the war as a tragedy for the Afghans, not just Western soldiers.

The seething passions of Flaubert’s characters are absent, except when Rhys Ifans (as a greedy merchant) or the splendidly ruthless Marshall-Green are in the room.

Director Lenny Abrahamson’s latest film has its roots in the notorious death of a teenager outside a Dublin nightclub, later detailed in Kevin Power’s novel “Bad Day in Blackrock.” The pensive, gray-tinged What Richard Did unfolds this downbeat tale in long scenes, but seldom feels slow.

This is the penultimate film of Albert Maysles, who died on March 5, and Iris has a bit in common with “Grey Gardens,” his masterpiece. Apfel, unlike the Edies of that movie, is sane — so much so that the movie’s main flaw is lack of conflict. Iris’ marriage to Carl, who turned 100 during filming, is incredibly sweet.

White God has been compared to “The Birds,” but there are also echoes of “Lassie Come Home” and even “Dirty Harry.” Director Kornél Mundruczó goes big with allegory, violence, drama and sentiment, and the results are riveting.

Lanzmann, for his part, begins the interview with a sharp, probing manner; by the end, the filmmaker’s questions and body language are conveying something altogether different.

Much of the plot stretches credulity, but the way it's constructed keeps tension high.

What this means is that at times the pace of Beyond the Hills is nerve-wrackingly slow. But Mungiu has his own way of creating suspense, and he has a gift for making a known outcome as shocking as a twist.

This is mostly a sad and bloody tale, as the Panthers are decimated first by the machinations of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and then by dissension in their own ranks.

The wry situational humor leaves less of an impression than the near-perfect sense of the heat-drenched wistfulness of summer.

The story is ornate but easy to follow. It's the dreamy look and sound of Tabu - half old, half modern - that give the film its haunting strangeness.

Solomon and Genovese remind us that all witnesses can be unreliable, in one way or another. The emotional impact comes from the gentle way the film reveals Kitty Genovese as a loving, vibrant person, and not as a symbol.

Trouble is, while the social milieu is nicely realized, other parts of the drama are not. Too often Burshtein cuts off a scene prematurely, darting away just as the crucial moment of emotion or confrontation appears.

The Law in These Parts more than accomplishes its goal of provoking a discussion about imposing laws on people who have no say in making them.

If the movie has a star, it may be cinematographer Oleg Mutu, the Romanian who lensed “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Even when the pace wanes, the images are still gripping.

The actors bring emotional authenticity to the aftermath of trauma, but despite that and the handsome cinematography, there is also a persistent phoniness.

The swooping shots and the way the lack of dialogue amplifies ambient sounds are stunning. Story-wise, The Tribe is yet another art-film wallow in cruelty, not nearly as unique as its looks and its world.

This is, by some distance, the best movie of the three, and it showcases the impeccable symmetry of his compositions, while retaining his compulsion to wag a finger in your face.

Archival footage is combined with somewhat affected-looking re-enactments, but the film achieves its purpose: to remind us that we still have thousands of bombs, and neither they — nor we — have gotten that much smarter.

For a long stretch this movie plays well. Quiet moments, such as when Victoria plays a piano waltz and reveals herself to have a concert-level talent, have a feel for urban yearning. Costa is appealing; it’s a pleasure to watch her brush her teeth in real time.

Darci Picoult’s script renders all of these characters, if not always sympathetically, humanly and fully.

The movie reveals some of the most stunning landscape cinematography imaginable, while everyone on the isolated ship waxes philosophical — as who would not?

The film is nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, and it doesn’t deserve to snatch the prize from the towering likes of “Ida,” “Timbuktu” or “Leviathan.” Yet in its gaudy, predictable way, Wild Tales is enormous fun, and the consistent wit of the quiet stretches shows there’s more to Szifrón than shock tactics.

Agreeable this film certainly is, but the shagginess never seems to take shape.

In a way, this marvelous movie does show that the Mekons have declined, because they’ve become the one thing punk rockers never ever want to be: lovable.

Such is literature’s power that the cast is more at ease portraying ancient Romans than speaking as versions of themselves.

The evidence Jarecki amasses against the drug wars in The House I Live In is more than strong enough to withstand any excess rhetorical zeal.

Terry’s talent is so magical that you may wish there were longer snippets of his playing. Still, this is a wonderful portrait of two artists strengthened by friendship.

A Touch of Sin is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.

With ravishing landscapes, violent political allegory and a glacial narrative that takes an abrupt left turn in the third act: Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja resolutely checks every 2015 art-film box.

Brooklyn Castle is an engaging tale, and the principal is wrong: These kids are much more lovable than the Yankees.

The remarkable performances from the central trio are what carries the film.

What a trippy delight it is.

If Like Someone in Love frustrates, it also has ineffable grace in the framing of Kiarostami’s long, languid shots, the changes he captures in the light, and the way the actors’ smallest movements become fascinating. This enigmatic study of identities built on social deceit offers more than easy answers ever could.

It’s a sympathetic portrait of an artist whose heart lay more with new work than old glories, right up to the end.

Lore is the sort of movie you’d already expect to rip your heart out, but that doesn’t diminish the tragedy when it does arrive.

In short, the crows are pests, but the movie shows them great affection, as do the humans who discuss the ways they must accommodate the crows. After a while it is impossible not to admire the birds’ intelligence and resilience, and see that perhaps it’s the other way around: The crows are the ones putting up with us.

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

It’s a slickly plotted ticking-time-bomb thriller with a crisp look and one standout debut performance, by Hitham Omari as a ruthless leader of a terrorist cell.

Its tactile feel for the dirt and labor of a farm, and tender regard for the young protagonist, are immensely endearing.

A remarkable attempt to portray what might turn soccer-playing boys into fanatical murderers.