Jeannette Catsoulis

The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but The Humans is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane.

A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, Stolen Seas can't resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of Somali piracy really needs to settle down.

Imogen Poots’s fantastically expressive performance as the adult Lidia transforms this movie (the feature directing debut of Kristen Stewart) from punishing to mesmerizing.

A singularly focused and avant-garde talent, Ms. Streb bends the messy rush of risk to her indomitable will.

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

Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.

Stingy with details and dialogue, but more than generous with atmosphere, this seductively photographed thriller (written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who also wielded the camera) sells its empty calories with great skill.

While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.

Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, Saloum has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce.

Offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes -- and, more important, what it gives back.

Edging now and then into the surreal, this unusual and tender little movie gingerly interrogates the gulf between digital and biological wiring.

Slow, sweet and subdued, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman’s lovely first feature, is about late-life longing and needs that never completely go away.

Using de Chabannes as the film's conscience and moral fulcrum, Tavernier - just as he did in his 1996 film "Captain Conan" - exposes the shame of a meaningless war and the psychological damage borne by those fighting it.

Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.

It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.

Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.

Its sociopolitical concerns — primarily around indigenous land rights — are muted and muddled by a script that favors manly grunting and moody looks over clarifying dialogue. Riven with racism and sharp bursts of violence, Goldstone nevertheless has a rough, desolate beauty.

A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.

Blindingly beautiful and meticulously assembled by the award-winning editor Bob Eisenhardt, Meru easily makes you forget that what you are watching is completely bananas.

Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.

The trick to enjoying The Town, Ben Affleck's follow-up to his impressive 2007 directing debut, "Gone, Baby, Gone," is to expect nothing but pulpy entertainment.

Ethereal, intensely moving.

Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.

Warmhearted and defiantly unsentimental, Grandma, a Thousand Times gains lightness from Teta's tart observations.

Illustrating the film's rags-to-ring narrative with panoramic mountain views and compact shots of young bodies punching their way up the food chain, Mr. Sun straddles ancient and modern, tranquillity and turmoil, with equal sureness.

As chilling and stylish as it is, Longlegs is a frustrating pleasure.

In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.

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

As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.

The very definition of modest, Las Acacias articulates emotional transformation with simplicity and grace. Rarely has a film managed to say so much while saying so little.

Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."

This brisk reimagining of the 1984 slasher "Silent Night, Deadly Night" delivers the seasonal goods with admirable efficiency and not a little wit.

A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.

Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” The Royal Hotel is after something more subtle than pure horror.

An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.

Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.

Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.

When [Ms. Jones] bounds onstage with a holler and a howl — and diction that nails every last word to the melody — it’s clear she deserves that exclamation point in the title. Even if the movie around her sometimes struggles to do the same.

Gracey paints a fabulously entertaining and touching picture of an insecure, complicated man hauling himself from a quicksand of grasping fans, greedy impresarios, unresolved addictions and father-son dysfunction.

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

Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, Hoard is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor.

A searing look at the role of American evangelical missionaries in the persecution of gay Africans, Roger Ross Williams’s God Loves Uganda approaches this intersection of faith and politics with some fairness and a good deal of outrage.

Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.

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

More curious and combative than the movie around her, Kennedy is as much anthropologist as chef, her deep love for her adopted country palpable.

Margolin’s empathy for Thelma (he based the story on a scam perpetrated on his own grandmother) lends the film a sweetness and occasional poignancy that help mitigate much of the foolishness.

Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.

Despite some snappy ideas (an aggressive advertising drone pushing products as answers to the family’s every problem), Bigbug is overdressed, overlong and diminishingly amusing

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

What could have been a very funny short film about self-control and befriending your id instead becomes a rambling commentary on father-son dysfunction and the limits of proctology.

Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer), digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences - some desperate, some hopeful, all tragic - into a first-person commentary on the malign reverberations of war.

Slicing through the fat of policy debates to the visceral rush of critical care, the narrative combines existential worries... and blood-and-guts immediacy with a seamlessness that made me want to high-five the editor, Joshua Altman.

Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.

Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing.

Naturalistic and mysterious, Nana is terrifyingly dependent on its diminutive star. Insisting on neither written lines nor predetermined actions (the film's short script was used primarily to obtain financing), Ms. Massadian, who worked with the child for almost two years, has coaxed a performance of remarkable lucidity.

It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent.

Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.

Mr. Sauvaire’s approach may not be for everyone, but his skill and audacity are invigorating — and, strangely, liberating.

Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.

The result is a movie about large setbacks and small triumphs, and the grit that takes you from one to the other.

Silent Souls is part folk tale, part lesson in letting go. In its quiet acceptance of the passing of time, this unusual film reminds us that to die is not always the same as to disappear.

Raising significant questions about the psychological effects of poverty on young children, this unsettlingly direct stab at atonement feels genuine.

A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.

In a movie whose greatest tension comes from wondering whether Chris will violate his parole by drinking a beer, the actors need to be compelling. Easily clearing that bar, Ms. Falco gives Carol a gentle kindness and the emotional intelligence to transform Chris’s ardor into a catalyst.

Spouting stiltedly clichéd dialogue...the actors struggle to sell their characters. Only Mr. Harris eventually succeeds, conveying, in a single speech, what it must be like to be the parent of an addict.

A minor chiller and major downer from the talented Alexandre Aja.

Smartly incorporating Sasa Zivkovic’s sweet and simple animation, as well as an exhilarating, punk-infused soundtrack, Mr. Persiel extends the film’s appeal beyond hard-core skaters.

Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.

Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.

Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin isn't exactly known for slapstick, so Soul Kitchen has the feel of a palate cleanser. After the hard-edged drama of "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," this boisterous comedy milling with scruffy misfits goes down more easily than an oyster on the half shell.

By choosing simplicity over specifics, the filmmakers free themselves from the weight of words and open up space for a mood of intense disquiet and unusual sensitivity.

The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.

Surrender to its vintage vibe and its emotional kick may surprise you.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.

Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, Incredible but True is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy.

An affectionate, rollicking guide to the drive-in classics of Australian filmmaking from the 1970s and ’80s.

By the end of Howard, it’s the songs we’ll never hear that may haunt us most.

This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.

Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, 10 Cloverfield Lane, though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.

Thematically underdeveloped yet pleasingly creepy, Tigers Are Not Afraid balances its mild terrors with appealing moments of childish creativity.

The film’s small group of primary characters slips from joy to fury to murderous suspicion with faultless fluidity.

Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies.

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.

Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.

Carefully assembled and soberly presented, Robert May’s Kids for Cash takes a lacerating look at America’s juvenile justice system.

This challenging and mesmerizing documentary captures horror and joy with the same gorgeous dispassion.

Soft in tone and muted in color, Waiting for August is a child’s-eye view of one family — among many in today’s Romanian economy — rising to the challenge of living without parents.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.

Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, My Little Sister offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism.