Godfrey Cheshire

Beyond the political implications, this is a terrifically dramatic and very emotional film; understandably, some of the interviewees struggle to maintain composure when recalling their past trials.

The screenwriters’ way of describing this world’s fall from grace due to the lures of money and luxury has the power and inevitability of classic tragedy. It could be Greek or Shakespearean, though it is palpably modern and Colombian.

To be sure, cancer may not sound like an inviting cinematic subject, especially to families and individuals who—like this writer—have been faced with its sometimes-overwhelming trials. Yet the effect of Hope is anything but depressing; it’s reassuring proof of art’s ability to comfort as it clarifies.

Emotionally charged, viscerally exciting and consistently enlightening, Gabe Polsky’s Red Army is a sports documentary like no other.

Deserves to become a serious art-house hit in the U.S. thanks to its skill in deftly overcoming the form’s usual deficits, for a result that feels as amazingly cohesive as it is relentlessly clever and entertaining.

Farhadi’s orchestration of all these elements is complex and viscerally kinetic; few viewers will experience it without holding their breath at some point.

That they (the Dardennes) are able to discern this Christian concept even in the tale of a desperate fanatic of another faith is what makes Young Ahmed one of their most extraordinary masterpieces.

What gives Socrates its special distinction are the precision and excellence exhibited in all major areas of its making, from direction, writing, editing and cinematography to the two standout performances by young actors that anchor its drama.

While the issues it engages are timely and important, the film’s claim to fame really comes from its terrific accomplishments on every front, from writing and directing to acting and cinematography.

As delightful as it is surprising. The surprises begin with the fact that the Iranian master’s last work is, of all things, essentially an animated film.

I’ve been trying to think when there was a historical drama I found as electrifying as Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. It may have been Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” which topped my 10-best list a dozen years ago.

A searing drama about a European refugee crisis that resonates with similar crises in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and yes, America’s southwestern border, Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year.

A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists.

I Am Another You is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story. The more Wang pursues her subject, the more depth and complexity she finds in it, and we share her sense of discovery.

A fascinating and fastidiously complex study of one man’s moral choices at a crucial juncture in his life, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is a thoroughgoing masterpiece which offers proof that Romania’s cinematic upsurge remains the most vital and important national film movement of the current century.

Easily the most astonishing and important movie to emerge from France in quite some time. While its style deserves to be called stunningly original and rapturously beautiful, the film is boldest in its artistic and philosophical implications, which pointedly go against many dominant trends of the last half-century.

A brave, revelatory, and beautifully realized film, it is easily one of the year’s best and most important documentaries.

In my view, it’s one of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made.

Terrestrial Verses, one of the most brilliant and provocative films to emerge from Iran recently, has qualities that link it to both the modernist formal traditions of post-1979 Iranian cinema and the more recent trend of social and political asperities aimed at the authoritarian repressiveness of the Islamic Republic.

An account of rodeo riders on a South Dakota reservation, it is so fact-based that it almost qualifies as a documentary. Yet the film’s style, its sense of light and landscape and mood, simultaneously give it the mesmerizing force of the most confident cinematic poetry.

This expertly made, highly dramatic film achieves must-see status for the inevitable light it sheds on the persistence of toxic racial hatreds not just in Hungary but worldwide.

Even measured against the Iranian and international cinematic treasures of the ‘70s, Aslani’s vision is still breathtakingly distinctive, an incisively devastating social critique embedded in a complex tale of intrigue, greed, oppression, and murder. The film is also, and perhaps most strikingly, a stylistic tour de force.

Easily the most important film anyone has released this year, it is a documentary that deserves to be seen by every sentient citizen of this country – and indeed the world.

Like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Louis Psihoyos’ “The Cove” in years past, the film makes a powerful case less through argument than by using cinema’s most basic tool: visual proof.

Author is a particular kind of documentary: a first-person account of the creation of a myth by its creator. As such, it poses all sorts of questions about the intersection of art, celebrity and psychological disturbance in our media culture, but it also gives us Laura Albert as a shape-shifting artist of astonishing talent, resourcefulness and originality.

Post-Revolutionary Iran’s first masterpiece and one of the most exhilarating films in cinema history.

While the documentary does conjure up the whole sex-drugs-rock ’n’ roll ethos of that fabled time with great flair and pungency, it also movingly probes the hazards and costs of the overindulgence and self-deceptions the era’s lures often entailed. In essence, it serves up the myth and a necessary corrective to it simultaneously.

Ultimately, Futuro Beach is a film about displacement and identity, love and its costs. Its considerable satisfactions, though, come mainly from the way the story is told, which spells nothing out, and in fact is so reticent that the viewer is constantly drawn into the creation of meaning.