Inkoo Kang

The cast is uniformly impressive in their naturalism, but Lewis, Diemir and Lemire — who have the luxury of actually looking like teenagers — are especially so for their young age.

Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.

A winsome mix of funny, harrowing, and smart, it's most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior—and who refuse to blame themselves for it—somehow exceedingly sympathetic.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

Introducing is a remarkably moving portrait of a 40-something woman forced to reevaluate her relationships and her sense of self in the face of a chronic illness that leaves her sometimes unable to speak or control her movements.

Especially in a year so devoid of serious female-led dramas, it's invigorating to see a feminist crowd-pleaser with the force of moral righteousness on its side. But Big Eyes is good, not great. What keeps it from excellence is its reluctance to explore the very questions it raises.

The Paw Project is robustly persuasive, with Conrad compellingly framing her crusade as a battle between a right-thinking vet and a deep-pocketed industry group that purportedly represents her.

With the risks to both the filmmaker and his subjects on full display, it’s an impressively exciting and strikingly novel approach in chronicling a humanitarian crisis that has yet to receive its due.

The wonderfully versatile Brewer, who’s in virtually every scene, pulls off essentially three “characters”: Alice, Alice as Lola, and Bizarro Lola. It’s a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot twists make narrative leap after narrative leap.

The men are slightly forgettable, but the woman is not. Far from the flawless fembot in “Ex Machina,” Vikander’s slight gawkiness is highlighted here, allowing her to look like a real girl, absolutely the right decision by Kent.

Raya and the Last Dragon occasionally crawls, but most of the time it’s got urgency and momentum to spare. Just as impressively, it builds to a deeply moving climax whose resolution is unexpected yet consummate. This is a film that knows how to soar.

A few of the self-referential gags get recycled one too many times, but an exuberant buoyancy — and the belly-laugh-a-minute pacing of the jokes — makes 22 Jump Street a hilarious highpoint of an already quite funny summer season.

The film boasts all the cinematic strengths we’ve come to expect from the animal-focused nonfic label... But director Mark Linfield’s film is also distinguished by its fascinating focus on the rigid but not immutable social hierarchy of the macaque world, as well as a smartly structured story of repression, rebellion, and triumph.

San Francisco may be waging war against its most vulnerable residents, but if you can enjoy its beauty, as Jimmie and Montgomery do for a magical few days, its unique picturesqueness makes it easy to love.

LaBeouf is so revelatory as both writer and actor that the film defies cynicism about its second purpose as celebrity image management. It just makes you excited about the work.

Whatever Proxy lacks in narrative cohesion and psychological realism, it makes up for in its compelling fever-dream quality and its probing questions about the darker side of parenting.

Wildlife is a confident and compassionate first film. But with its protagonist mostly relegated to waiting and observing, its main raison d’être is Mulligan’s masterful turn as a thirtysomething woman coldly testing her abilities to see what she’s capable of, while terrified that she won’t be able to provide a good life for her son.

Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.

Like Wilson’s cornball “California Girls,” Love & Mercy is by no means a complicated portrait, and yet it’s a curiously satisfying one.

The film bustles along through a series of reveals – a storytelling technique that can lose an audience’s sympathy or suspension of disbelief pretty fast, but which works flawlessly here because the filmmakers and the performers know exactly who their characters are and what kind of world they live in.

The film’s compassion for everyday Americans...along with its energetic determination to entertain, enlighten, and infuriate make it a laudable surprise.

Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one's identity, albeit an essential one.

The four main actors, all uniformly excellent, can wrap their tongues around Simien's verbose dialogue, but some of the minor actors have a harder time, resulting in several jokes falling flat.

Drunktown’s Finest shouldn’t be viewed simply as an anthropological curiosity, though, but as the promising debut of a gifted filmmaker who wants to show the beating and hurting hearts of the people behind the headlines.

Crowe’s beauty-seeking, but exoticizing camera is slightly outmatched by his performance, which anchors the film with regret tinged with hope. But what continues to haunt after the credits finish rolling are the film’s explorations of the trauma of life after war: The brutally quick political shifts, the lingering shame of committing vicious and dishonorable acts, and the bitter knowledge that there’s no such thing as lasting peace.

This uneven but funny and engrossing drama is less about Victoria than about time itself: how it slows down in the bleary middle of the night, how it speeds up relationships between strangers when no one else is around, how capacious it is in containing the most unexpected of swerves and stumbles.

Long Shot feels like something new, too — a brogressive rom-com that mixes inconvenient boners and aerodynamic cum with extensive observations about sexism and a rare romanticization of the male helpmate.

First-time director Jen Rainin’s portrait of Stevens, Curve‘s achievements and blindspots, lesbian progress during the Clinton era and the uneasiness with the “lesbian” label among many queer women today is accomplished, resonant and deeply moving.