Jeannette Catsoulis

As she did in her gentler but equally original “Good Dick” in 2008, Ms. Palka carves a black and biting niche between a man and a woman, a space where chaos and psychological unease demand to be reckoned with.

Unfolding with a minimum of dialogue, Francisca’s maturation from watcher to doer would be laughable if performed with less nuance or photographed with less originality.

The film’s satire is barn-door broad, its humor sidelong and sharp enough to take the edge off the gore.

Maybe it’s the hell we’re all living through right now, but Tyler Cornack’s orificial fantasy struck me as a hilariously bawdy, intermittently inspired act of vivacious vulgarity.

Not since "Flashdance" has a lobster dinner been seasoned with so much unspoken emotion.

Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.

Predictable musical montages fail to deflate an exceptionally subtle script (by Mr. Vallely) and Ms. Ynoa’s astonishingly mature, hard-to-pin-down performance.

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.

Stingingly attuned to the tension between long-term love and last-minute misgivings, Between Us makes a familiar situation feel remarkably fresh.

A tale of two siblings -- one basking in memories, the other fleeing them -- Prodigal Sons grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.

Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal.

Verhoeven brings more vitality to his work than many filmmakers half his age, and his screenplay (with David Birke) is a tasteless hoot, gleefully cramming the frame with blood, fornication and flagellations galore.

The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills.

The two leads are mesmerizing, hurling themselves into their physically demented roles with ferocious commitment.

Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.

If some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.

Gruesome without being gory, The Autopsy of Jane Doe achieves real scares with a minimum of special effects.

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

Since his debut in 1987 with "Red Sorghum" Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that's more fun. With Curse of the Golden Flower he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.

Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.

The music is lovely, and the animation is soft and imaginatively detailed. Patema and Age may not know what’s upside down or right-way up, but their director is never in any doubt.

Damsel may feel 20 minutes too long, but it fills them with attitude and cheek. Here, the frontier is not just a crucible of reinvention, but a wilderness that can make you more than a little crazy.

The result is a movie so sweet and soothing you’ll be forced to admit that sometimes the universe — or, in this case, Netflix — gives you exactly what you need.

Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.

Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.

Moving and maddening in almost equal measure, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a devastating meditation on what can happen when a prescient thinker challenges corporate interests and the power of the state.

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

[A] moving drama ... With its quiet realism and almost unbearably intimate hand-held camera work ... "Rosie" holds our hands to a flame of desperation.

A disturbing look at reprogramming that masquerades as rehabilitation. Having been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, Mr. Gaglia has produced a work that's as much an act of emesis as of filmmaking.

Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.

Moody and strange, Fast Color has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame.

Playing with memory — the characters’ and our own — allows Mr. Boyle and his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to conjure some of the movie’s loveliest, most melancholy images.

This low-budget debut by Joshua Overbay cooks a surprising amount of tension from the barest minimum of ingredients.

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.

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

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.

The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.

Without much to distract from the three central characters, Tuesday can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical.

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.

Immersed in the alien beauty of the Kazakh steppe, "The Gift to Stalin" moves slowly but engages thoroughly.

This wonderfully weird documentary pinpoints the desire to preserve fleeting glories.

Engrossing, poetic and often very funny, "Position," like its predecessors, uses the lens of a single family to view the tumult of an entire country.

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.

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

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.

Though the film eventually caves to sentiment and stereotype, its alert performances and muted rhythms offer much to enjoy in the interim.

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.

Strange, challenging and boundlessly confident, this tripped-out noir from the Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (best known for his 2009 horror movie, “Pontypool”) is part lucid dream, part drugged-out nightmare.

The result is an exceedingly well-made first feature, a simple genre movie elevated by strong visuals, potent performances and a mood that falls somewhere between resignation and guttering hope.

Borne along on the whine of insects and a lead performance of surpassing strangeness, “Mosquito State” is a disquieting merger of body horror and social commentary.

A picture so modest and minor-key that the emotional bruise it leaves may take days to develop.

Sleep Tight is a nifty little thriller that dances on the boundary between plausible and preposterous.

A blue collar poem threaded with old-timer memories and present-day pain, Braddock America pays bittersweet tribute to a once-thriving Pennsylvania steel town and those who stuck around to bear witness to its decline.

Shot in luminous whites, pulsing blacks and gorgeous grays, the stories explore sexual insecurity, rural superstition and sociopolitical anxieties with an inventiveness that's seldom scary but never less than mesmerizing.

Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with Belfast he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.

The movie dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.

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.

Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that’s beholden to no rules but its own.

Art house meets grind house in Cargo 200, Alexey Balabanov’s morbidly compelling thriller set in the Soviet Union.

A frustratingly fragmented yet warmly intimate portrait of an evolving bond that frays but doesn’t sever.

With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.

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

Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.

A fascinating profile of the online pornography provider Kink.com.

The film presents an often sharp commentary on dueling beliefs and idiocies that unfolds in lush pastel hues and distinctively retro drawings.

Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.

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.

The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.

Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.

Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid.

Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.

Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay.

The movie’s emotional potency is undeniable, its slow crescendo of wounded feelings and shimmering photography leaving unexpected imprints on the eyes and heart.

His well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds. (Those with no access to land can, postapocalypse, use them as currency.)

While most movies of this type simply peter out, “Instructions” maintains such an unswerving commitment to its dark purpose that its final, gorgeously tenebrous images will leave you wobbly for days.

Johanna Schwartz’s miraculously hopeful documentary, They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile, delivers a vibrant testimony of resilience under oppression.

There’s a stillness to the filmmaking, coupled with Saunder Jurriaans and David Bensi’s truly lovely original score, that lends specific shots... a near-heartbreaking melancholy.

Unfolding in somber tones and among hard surfaces, Arbitrage has the slickness of new bank notes and the confidence of expensive tailoring.

The setup is commonplace, but the scenery is delicious, the dialogue refreshingly tart and the keen supporting cast frisky or affecting, as the occasion demands.

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

Lizzie isn’t perfect — the pacing can flag, and the lovely Kim Dickens, as Lizzie’s older sister, barely registers — but Ms. Sevigny’s intelligence and formidable control keep the melodrama grounded. Her empathy for Borden, whose fragile constitution belies a searing will, is palpable, as is the sense of inescapable peril surrounding the two female leads.

All the more disappointing, then, when what has been a celebration of last-ditch passion slides abruptly into a cautionary tale. Until that point the movie's refreshingly unbiased tone allows us to make our own moral judgments, teasing us with the possibility that, occasionally, the scarlet woman can escape unbranded. I, for one, was rooting for her.

And by exploring the lighter side of communal action - the camaraderie and cruising that turned weekly meetings into what one member calls "a combination of serious politics and joyful living" - he uncouples the gravity of the cause from the perceived humorlessness of advocacy. Foot soldiers for the dying, the members of Act Up never forgot how to live.

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

Always arresting and sometimes troubling, Watermark — aside from the odd comment here and there — neither lectures nor argues.

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.

Sweet, funny and ultimately rather touching.

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

Straight-shooting, hard-hitting and fuming with contempt for the tobacco industry, Addiction Incorporated would be almost too exhausting to watch were it not for the folksy charm of its star witness.

Ms. Uberoi's straight-shooting style is a perfect match for her salt-of-the-earth subject, a hard-working husband and father with more on his plate than most.

Lion Ark, a spunky account of a perilous rescue mission, has a ragtag rhythm that befits the mercurial behavior of its hulking furry stars.

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.

The filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.

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

Like a fresh ripple in the near-stagnant high school movie pool, Chris Nelson’s Date and Switch balances formula with winning performers, genuine humor and a generosity of spirit that this genre too often lacks.

Weaving a glancing love triangle into a poignant observation on the waxing and waning of creativity, Serebrennikov revels in radiant black-and-white scenes of urban grit. The vibe veers from grungy to blissful, the characters’ earnest charisma serving as the movie’s force field against criticism.

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

Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.