Guy Lodge

Its trick is to generate considerable suspense while withholding nothing from the audience. Its pleasures are not profound ones, but there’s enough dimensionality up on the screen to compensate. [2013 3D Release]

Authoritative and dense — though never dull — at over two hours, Citizen K is the prolific docmaker’s most rewarding feature in several years, attaching his typically methodical research to a cheerfully slippery, charismatic human subject who, even on the side of right, is cagey in the face of investigation.

Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.

It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives Small Things Like These its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.

Director Shô Miyake’s measured, unsentimental adaptation of a memoir by Keiko Ogasawara — who turned professional despite the difficulties of lifelong deafness — turns out to be somewhat aptly described by its own title, though none of those adjectives quite conveys its rare and delicate grace.

An intelligent, restrained but warmly intimate cinematic conversation with the Sixth Generation Chinese trailblazer.

The film keeps its good-evil borders compellingly supple, at least until a wobbly finale that requires Sarah to act like the Hollywood heroine she has so strenuously avoided becoming. It’s a minor blot on a film otherwise propulsively alive with prickly politics.

Many things are simple in The Fence, an unusually sharp-cornered and rhetorical work from this typically elliptical and sensuous filmmaker, but the rage swelling beneath its still, mannered surface is not.

The Student is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.

Dark River isn’t quite as bracing or as unexpected as the director’s previous work.... Still, there’s scarcely room here for improvement at the level of craft or performance; in particular, it’s gratifying to see leading lady Ruth Wilson headlining a big-screen vehicle worthy of her flinty brilliance.

A wise, graceful but viciously felt study of middle-school best friends whose bond becomes a burden the further they recede into adulthood, it resorts neither to buddy-movie cliché nor melodramatic angst in portraying the ways we outgrow our friends, and they us.

Gomis’ latest is far from the miserablist issue drama that synopsis portends, instead weaving a sensual, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disturbing urban tapestry with threads of image, sound, poetry, and song.

Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.

The film — in tandem with Lacoste’s lovely, unguarded performance — works as a magnified study in coping, charting the stages of his jumpstarted growing-up alongside the more meandering course of his grief.

The film is a relatively unfamiliar fit for its prolific helmer, given its sharply evoked period milieu and restrained, classical storytelling. He wears it well: After a slowish start, Wife of a Spy unmasks itself as one of his most purely enjoyable, internationally accessible entertainments.

Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.

This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.

Exit Music covers the spectrum with grace, good humor and no emotional filter: It’s an unabashed tear-jerker that earns its saltwater through candor rather than undue manipulation.

Franco’s script teases out the character’s tangled ambiguities with immaculate control: even as the story proceeds in the lowest of keys, our nerves never settle.

Superb, skin-prickling performances by the three principals contribute invaluably to the pic’s stern believability, with Findley utterly wrenching as a dedicated mother pushed to frank irrationality by others’ neglicence.

Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.

Simón’s sweetly sorrowful ode to lost family imagines what might have been, while acknowledging that not all memories can be passed down between generations — some die deliciously with us.

Celebrating youthful experimentation and midlife renewal alike, Judy Blume Forever strips its subject’s work of any dated aura of danger, inviting everyone to the party.

We’re in schlock corridor here and Soderbergh runs with it, cellphone in hand; under the buzzing suspense mechanics, however, a cautionary note on the perils of disbelieving women is just audible.

Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.

In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.

This handsome debut feature from Swedish-Sami writer-director Amanda Kernell robustly blends adolescent fears that resonate across borders and generations with a fascinatingly specific, rarely depicted cultural context: Sweden’s colonial oppression of the indigenous Sami folk.

Marrying glossy mainstream genre aesthetics to probing, elaborately conceived speculative storytelling, this is a notably ambitious and auspiciously well-realized first feature for Hloz: the kind that appears to be flaunting his capabilities for even bigger international and Hollywood assignments.