Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.

The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.

With its soft, bleached images and occasional detours into black-and-white stills, Turn Me On, set in an unspecified recent past, has a gentle oddness as unforced as its performances and as inoffensive as its dialogue.

The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.

Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.

Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.

Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.

Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.

Featuring exceptional people doing extraordinary things, Blindsight is one of those documentaries with the power to make you re-examine your entire life -- or at least get off the couch.

Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.

Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.

Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.

Circo offers a touching chronicle of a dying culture harnessed to ambitions that remain very much alive.

Unapologetically designed both to inform and affect, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s delicately lacerating documentary, Blackfish, uses the tragic tale of a single whale and his human victims as the backbone of a hypercritical investigation into the marine-park giant SeaWorld Entertainment.

With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.

Surreal, sophisticated and sometimes sickening, Infinity Pool suggests that while the elder Cronenberg might be fixated on the disintegration of our bodies, his son is more concerned with the destruction of our souls.

God’s Own Country weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful.

Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.

A creative tour de force, an intellectual high-wire act as astonishing as it is entertaining.

The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.

This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.

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.

Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, Hitler's Children takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.

Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.

Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.

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.

Mr. Mills (drawing on his own experiences and doing triple duty as the director and screenwriter) gives a performance of rancid single-mindedness. It’s a fearlessly unsympathetic role that provides plenty of space for train-wreck humor but almost no wiggle room for redemption.

Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.

Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere.

Bathed in a shadowy beauty and slippery psychological atmosphere, “Beast” soars on Ms. Buckley’s increasingly animalistic performance.

Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.

The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.

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.

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.

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

Reveling in misdirection and a teasing duality . . . Hokum profits from Colm Hogan’s insinuating camera as it noses through gloomy corridors and a terrifying dumbwaiter shaft, hinting at what lurks on the other side of the frame.

McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.

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.

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.

What follows is something rarely seen in American movies: a sincerely humane examination of what it means to experience a crisis of faith. Tender, bittersweet and often gently comedic, Corinne's 20-year journey toward (and around, and away from) her God has a loose, searching rhythm that's engrossingly unpredictable.

A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.

Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.

Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.

Smartly written and flawlessly acted, Lovers of Hate is a Trojan horse, the kind of movie that begins so self-effacingly that we don't expect any surprises.

Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.

This devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues.

Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.

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.

Communicating much with very little, Guidelines (“La Marche à Suivre”) presents a profoundly hopeful view of education as a civilizing force and a haven for transformation. There have been many more eventful high school movies, but rarely one that’s more absorbed in the forming of adults and the shaping of citizens.

The dead are unquiet and the living are terrified in The Road, a powerfully atmospheric blend of ghostly encounters, horrific situations and missing-persons mysteries from the Philippine director Yam Laranas.

Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.

A slight yet profound exploration of generational choices and our fear of living our parents’ lives.

Much better to focus on the tempestuous Mercutio (Hale Appleman, a standout), whose increasing volatility forms the perfect counterpoint to Mr. Doyle's beaming Juliet and Seth Numrich's sensitive Romeo. Punctuated by eerily static shots of empty basketball courts and deserted hallways, Mercutio's blustering menace is as timeless as the romance he seeks to derail.

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

Beautiful Boy is the antithesis of melodrama. Painfully perceptive and relentlessly raw, this intimate observation of a couple in extremis plays out with such subdued intensity that, by the end, audiences will very likely feel as wrung out as its embattled stars.

Jagged and gentle, shocking and sweet, Life During Wartime finds the King of Cringe more concerned than usual about forgiveness: who deserves it, and who is capable of bestowing it. True to form, though, he's not telling.

The wonder of Black's performance here is its empathy and balance: inasmuch as he can disappear into any role, he dissolves into this one with no hint of mocking remove. It's a beautiful thing to see.

The film's greatest accomplishment is its ability to change tone at least three times without losing the audience.

Frequently moving and quietly enlightening, Last Train Home is about love and exploitation, sacrifice and endurance.

Neither bitter nor maudlin, The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.

One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.

Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, this strikingly original travelogue glides on the lovely lilt of Mr. Santos's Portuguese narration.

Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.

Economical in the extreme — but without appearing cash-poor — this tightly wound thriller proves that minimal resources can sometimes produce more than satisfying results.

Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.

The Kid With a Bike feels as vulnerable as Cyril's unformed character. Within its tight 87 minutes, not a lot happens, unless you count the saving of a life.