Jeannette Catsoulis

Socrates isn’t simply about being gay, or poor, or even devastatingly unloved: It’s about honoring a resilience that most of us will thankfully never have to summon.

Mixes method and madness to chart the evolution of a counterculture phenomenon.

[A] sneakily compelling documentary.

With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding.

Big Words is an engrossing, coming-of-middle-age drama that shows how disappointment can fester and derail a life. By the end, hope and change seem possible but far from guaranteed.

Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition.

Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.

As its brilliantly choreographed -- and appropriately modest -- climax proves, given the right ingredients, even the simplest story can leave you gasping.

It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.

Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine.

Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.

Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful.

Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.

His film opens with a lullaby, and while there is indeed something soothing in his images of repetitive, backbreaking toil, the music also serves as a reminder of childhood lost.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

Bolstered by animated re-enactments and Bob Richman's frosty cinematography, Unraveled is a mesmerizing one-man dive into narcissism, entitlement and unchecked greed.

While occasionally unpleasant, the film never crosses the line from bearably chilling to unbearably gruesome, keeping its characters credible and its events explicable.

The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.

Raw, Julia Ducournau’s jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior.

Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.

Buoyed by a fully integrated soundtrack, Kati With an I delivers a lovingly personal observation of young people at a crossroads. The film's sound is not always crisp, but no matter: Kati's story is written in every vital, vérité frame.

Working with grace and patience, Mr. Fernández makes the mundane captivating.

Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.

Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.

By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.

Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.

Summer 1993 is movingly understated and beautifully acted.

Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.

It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.

Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.

A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.

The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.

Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.

Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.

Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.

Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.

Infused with the D.N.A. of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Heel is an uneasy study of subjugation and transformation. Rock-solid performances from Boon and Graham maintain its precarious balance between anxiety and absurdity.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.

The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.

This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.

The men refused to be deterred by institutional rigidity, political apathy or a skeptical scientific community. Their perseverance is cheering, giving the movie a brightly buoyant tone that belies the suffering at its center and renders the sometimes distracting musical score largely unnecessary.

In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.

Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.

Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.

Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions.

Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.

The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.

Strange and squelchy and all kinds of sick, Mad God comes at you with nauseating energy, its flood of dystopian images both playful and repulsive.

Ms. Scherson’s style — backed wholeheartedly by the cool cinematography of Ricardo de Angelis — may value mood over information, but it’s the perfect vehicle for a portrait of two damaged souls grasping for a security they no longer possess.

Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.

This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.

The movie, like the elemental forces we continue to exacerbate, never explains itself. Surrender to it, though, and a narrative - of spectacle, conflict and retaliation - will eventually become clear.

This quirky, obsessive documentary is about so much more than broken keys and busted type wheels. It’s really about how we create art.

The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.

The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.

Just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent.

Like a feature-length version of the television sitcom “My Name Is Earl,” only Canadian -- and not funny.

I went to school in Aberdeen and know the region well. It's a place of unforgiving winds and magnificent sunsets, harsh farmland and deserted beaches. The people are hardy, hardworking and fiercely self-sufficient, asking little of their government except the will to do the right thing. They weren't Trumped; they were betrayed.

My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.

But instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that’s riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.

Captured more for poetry than for clarity, the topography of penalties and free kicks can be impossible to follow. But Léo Bittencourt’s photography has flash and flair, and hardscrabble determination on a real-life field of dreams has a narrative all its own.

The couple’s earnestness sounds mockable, but it’s not: They are too sincere, too joyful and too grateful to be doing the only thing that either of them ever wanted to do. And right now all I want to do is dust off my vinyl copy of “Hot August Night.”

Bathed in the flamingo colors and Caribbean rhythms of its location, this deeply personal debut from the writer and director Mariette Monpierre develops with a lingering attention to sensation and sound.

The film version is now being granted a limited release. Exactly how limited will depend on your tolerance for tasteless behavior, extravagant overacting and a decibel level to rival the unveiling of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

Lurching relentlessly from one conflict to another, the movie distills its emotions — and maintains its momentum — in conversations of remarkably controlled intensity.

Relies less on the novelty of its premise than on the positioning of solid actors in minor roles (including Melissa Leo and Martin Donovan as the tortured parents of a murdered child) and the intelligence of its star.

Smart, wordy and sweetly sympathetic to lives lived online, Sidewalls coasts on Martín and Mariana's twin voice-overs, alternate musings on themselves and their city.

Sultry, but never sleazy, observant yet nonjudgmental, An Easy Girl is more than just a tale of innocence and experience. Taking a nuanced look at sexual awakening and, to a lesser extent, class distinction, the movie has a charming flightiness that builds to an unexpectedly touching climax.

Suffused with sorcery and silvery light, November, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, is a bizarre Estonian love story — a mishmash of folklore, farm animals and scabrous fun — in which beauty and ugliness fight to the death.

Curating a selection of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter noncinephiles.

Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), The Pigeon Tunnel is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator.

At its best, The Fighter takes on the chasm between televised boxing and its mostly working-class, aspirational origins with grit and intelligence.

Cheerfully partial and unapologetically deferential to its subject’s operatic self-promotion, Jodorowsky’s Dune makes you wish that he had scraped together the final $5 million needed, we are told, to realize his dream.

What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.

Despite its immersion in tragedy and decline, So Much So Fast is leavened by unexpected humor.

Even if you don’t recognize the majority of the unidentified clips assembled here, or the quotations that divide and guide them, the fascination they exert is all their own.

Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment.

Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.

Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.

Like a bedtime cup of cocoa, Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle has a soothing familiarity that quiets the mind and settles the spirit.

For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.

Love is a mournful thriller about the myth of assimilation and the way nurture - or, more precisely, the lack of it - fashions identity and character. Elegantly directed by Vladan Nikolic using multiple viewpoints and an elliptical, nonlinear narrative, the movie presents a New World disrupted by old grievances and a neglected community living by its own rules.

Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.

For all its dazzling allure, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, a feverishly psycho thriller set in the hermetic world of classical ballet, proves a meaningless exercise in Grand Guignol exhibitionism.

Discrimination against nomadic populations is hardly restricted to Romania, but the integration of that country's largest ethnic minority seems particularly pressing. If only that view were shared by the Romanian adults on screen, most of whom display a shocking degree of prejudice.

Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle.

Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.

A caldron of unspeakable acts and unpalatable language, The Human Centipede 3 takes the bottom-feeding standards of its previous chapters (released in 2010 and 2011) to new lows of debasement.

A wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy.

Coolly executed and seductively simple, Oddity, the second feature from Damian McCarthy (after the unsettling, underseen “Caveat” in 2021), is a fun, back-to-basics supernatural thriller that cares more about making us jump than making us cringe.

Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish.

It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.

Harks back to the drive-in classics of yesteryear with unapologetic nostalgia and undisguised affection.

At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.

Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.