Godfrey Cheshire

The film is not one for any viewer who’s never heard of Assange. Indeed, it’s best suited to audiences who are familiar with the basic Wikileaks saga and thus prepared for Poitras’ much more intimate and nuanced view of events and personalities that the mainstream media tend to present in more reductive terms.

One of the strongest aspects of The Student is that, while its view of Venya’s beliefs is decidedly skeptical, it doesn’t ridicule him or suggest that others are immune to his Biblical zealotry.

[Almodóvar] may share Catholic roots with Hitchcock and Bresson, but this film’s concern with guilt, transference, fate, mystery and (more obliquely) faith connects intricately with his native culture as well as the ideas expressed in his previous films. Building on his previous work while also charting a new course, it is suffused with the casual confidence of an established master.

Orson Welles once described his approach in “Citizen Kane” as “prismatic,” and while there are many differences in subject and style between that cinema milestone and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter” the two films share a multi-faceted formal playfulness and an essential intellectual seriousness that make them similarly bracing, original and thought-provoking.

It is also something decidedly novel: a wildly original art-house comedy.

Dawson City: Frozen Time is a rather clunky and uninspiring title for a film that’s both revelatory and deeply fascinating.

It almost cries out to be a Mike Leigh film starring Jim Broadbent and other members of the director’s stock company.

The pleasures of watching There Is No Evil—a title that grows more piercingly ironic as the film progresses—are considerable.

One thing that’s fascinating in the story’s second half is the amount of expertise and effort that’s expended on searching for Alyosha.

One can’t watch this film and not think of events in the world today. How did the German nation get so caught up in the Nazi mythology that it plunged willingly toward its own destruction? Obviously being seduced away from a clear comprehension of reality into self-regarding mass fantasy was a big part of it.

As [Farhadi] does to such masterful effect in “A Separation,” here he constructs a story that keeps revealing new thematic and psychological layers, ones that often come to light through the shifting of perspective from one character to another, a technique that deepens our sympathy for the people we’re watching to the point of our realizing that, as in Renoir, “everyone has their reasons.”

A sharply crafted drama that has elements of noirish suspense, the Danish-Swedish coproduction, which is distinguished by exceptionally fine performances by its three leading actors, offers an incisive, penetrating look at the psychological disorientation and dilemmas of people caught between cultures.

The satisfactions of José as a whole offers are considerable, and they begin with the human element. Like the Italian neorealist classics from which it descends, the film has a keen appreciation for the lives of people who maintain a stubborn dignity and resolve under the challenges of poverty and other hardships.

Watching it, the film’s intelligent, well-crafted story and beautifully drawn characters seem to suggest literary roots.

A tremendously absorbing film, a documentary that plays like a first-rate thriller hinging on key issues of the Cold War and African decolonization.

Some descriptions of The Salesman call it a thriller, suggesting a Hollywood-style suspense film. It’s not. It’s a psychological and moral drama.

This kind of story has been told endlessly in dramatic movies and TV shows, but rarely has a film offered characters like these telling their own stories.

Rasoulof gets terrific performances from all of his cast, but particularly noteworthy is Sohelia Golestani's work as Najmeh, which captures the woman's subtle, gradual transition from defender of her husband to an ally of her daughters.

The director has said that the “classical” (her word) style of the earlier film, with its elegant, distanced compositions and paucity of camera movement, is typical of her work; the ragged, edgy, mostly handheld approach of Don’t Call Me Son (flawlessly executed by cinematographer Barbara Alvarez) is a departure.

Whatever Jia shows us and wherever he takes us, we’re always aware of being in the hands of one of the contemporary world’s great filmmakers.

The fact that it was made by her nephew, actor/filmmaker Griffin Dunne, gives it a warmth and intimacy that might not have graced a more standard documentary.

In focusing on the years when the band became the first ever to mount several world-spanning tours, it offers two things at once: a history of the Beatles during the years of their initial success; and a tribute to the group’s powers as a live act.

Talking with the residents of these different worlds, and contrasting their different lives, is where the film’s heart and greatest insights reside.

An intimate epic, Testament of Youth has great historical sweep yet remains focused on the human vicissitudes experienced by Vera and her circle.

Filmmaker Ira Deutchman offers a compelling biographical portrait of a highly influential New York movie theater owner and independent film distributor that is, by extension, a study of the importance and complexities of creative film marketing.

The new film combines the filmmaker’s distinctive stylistic verve and droll wit with the talents and charisma of Mexico’s leading international movie star, Gael Garcia Bernal.

As in Farhadi’s films, the success of this kind of drama depends not on its thematic depth but on its surface execution. And every aspect of the execution on display here posits Jalilvand as among Iran’s most assured directors to have emerged in this decade.

Ultimately Leviathan may divide viewers between those who find its possible meanings too numerous and inchoate and others who welcome the challenges of helping create its meaning.