Jay Weissberg

Once a sense of rhythm is grasped, things fall into place, and audiences will exit the cinema debating their favorite scenes, recalling a wealth of graceful, humane interactions.

the director proves especially skilled with her cast of newcomers (of the thesps playing the sisters, only young Iscan, from “My Only Sunshine,” is a veteran), whose powerful individualism as well as their vibrant bond together are perfect vessels for the script’s message.

Less accessible than recent "Cafe Lumiere," picture will appeal strongly to fans.

Thanks to her smart narration — clear, impassioned but never polemical — and the astute way she allows exceptional footage to play out to its full extent, The Waldheim Waltz has a sense of urgency made more pressing given political developments not just in Austria but Poland and Hungary as well.

In Jackson Heights is a classic example of Wiseman’s affinity for this type of subject, full of community organizers and advocacy meetings in which citizens and aspiring citizens learn to use their civic voices. In truth, the camera lingers longer than necessary in these gatherings, but the film has rewards on the macro and micro levels.

Surprises always come at the end of Pablo Larraín’s films, when everything suddenly comes together and the audience sits in the cinema feeling both illuminated and floored. Neruda is no different, representing the director at his stunning best with a work of such cleverness and beauty, alongside such power, that it’s hard to know how to parcel out praise.

With enormous sympathy for all, Al Mansour captures the isolation of Saudi women and their parallel lives of freedom at home and invisibility outside.

Both as film and as history, State Funeral stands as a canonical work.

The film’s significant humor comes from amusingly implausible situations coupled with rapid-paced droll dialogue; its equally sizable heart derives from the script’s respect for society’s outcasts and Jensen’s way of nimbly endowing every character with their own emotional backstory, all in need of healing.

Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.

Fernandez (“Used Parts”) has a masterful handle on narrative, structure and character, skillfully blending them all in a tale with atmosphere to spare.

With consummate artistry and the self-assurance that comes from experience, master helmer Marco Bellocchio continues to play with form and content with an originality that make younger directors look like they’re grasping at ephemeral straws.

Striking a careful balance between narrative and atmosphere, the writer-director paints a vivid portrait of a light-filled summer when a little girl has to face the loss of her mother and integration into a new nuclear family

Erlingsson’s genius lies in how he puts it all together with such witty intelligence, arranging beautifully shot picaresque episodes around a central figure who lives the ideals of the heroes she has hanging on her wall, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

Like all well-done adventure tales, especially those with an intimate human focus and an expansive, epic vision, “Theeb” works on multiple levels.

What “Nostalgia for the Light” did for the desert, The Pearl Button is meant to do for water, but the deft melding of past and present that characterized Patricio Guzman’s earlier film becomes muddied here by the Natural Science 101 voiceover and an unsatisfying bridge between two rather disparate subjects.

While the film is perhaps longer than necessary, and the adult characters could use some fleshing out, this is a satisfying sensorial work.

Stunningly shot and marvelously edited to capture the rhythms of the game, the pic transcends its subject much in the way Roger Angell’s essays on baseball offer rare pleasures even to those uninterested in the game.

[A] concise, clearly told and deeply effective documentary.

Getting swept up in the immediate excitement is entirely understandable, but ignoring the less savory elements, such as ultra-nationalist rhetoric, is problematic at best.

In every sense, I Am Love is a stunning achievement.

“Evil” is one of those tricky words usually best avoided, since its quasi-mythological sense of moral absolutism tends to downplay the human agency involved. Yet as Barbet Schroeder well knows, there are times when no other term properly conveys the insidious nature of intolerance and carnage robed in the trappings of power.

Chaplin’s performance is characterized by a lack of vanity and an almost magical combination of empathy and pathos.

If anything, the film is most indebted to classic cloak-and-dagger movies, in which sharp, richly succinct dialogue and plenty of atmosphere seem effortlessly carried along by the force of magnetic personalities.

Boasting superb camerawork from d.p. Ahmed Gabr and stellar crowd direction, Clash might strike some as crossing too often into hysteria, yet this is bravura filmmaking with a kick-in-the-gut message about chaos and cruelty (with some humanity).

Corruption and humiliation are the guiding forces of Donbass, resulting in a scathing portrait of a society where human interaction has descended to a level of barbarity more in keeping with late antiquity than the so-called contemporary civilized world.

The film beguiles with its bravura but it’s a deliberately punishing journey, made by a male Cassandra impelled to point out his nation’s destruction yet sadly aware that it’s too late to change the tide of history.

This story of two couples dealing with change in their personal and professional lives, so packed with intellectual sparring, gets progressively lighter as it moves along, acknowledging the primacy of human interaction (foibles and all) over doctrine.