Jeannette Catsoulis

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

Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.

A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.

Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.

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

Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.

The Girls in the Band is everything a worthwhile documentary should be, and then some: engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters.

Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.

Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.

The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.

A blue-collar meditation on the meaning of community and the imperative of compassion, one that endures even as an unexpectedly prurient drama unfolds at its center.

Rhythmically blending vintage recordings and live performances, The Winding Stream exudes a quirky warmth that counters its PBS-pledge-drive aura.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.

Its violence is low-tech... and its look is old-school, but its message could not possibly be more momentous.

The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.

Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach.

At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.

The director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.

Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is a chase movie disguised as a western. Its humor is as dry as prairie dust...and its morals are steadfastly gray.

A film with nothing to please the eye and even less to excite the mind.

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.

Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.

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.

Poised self-consciously between art and entertainment, Joshua offers imaginative staging and some superb performances.

If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.

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

Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.

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

Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.

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.

Raw, melancholy and unquestionably mature, Hope understands that some wounds may never be healed. Even so, it takes a brave movie to hold that stance until its very last second.

Were it not for the charming Patrick Bruel as a no-nonsense security expert and Alice’s unlikely suitor, this spun-sugar concoction would be well nigh unwatchable.

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.

Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.

With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.

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

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.

Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.

With its whispery conversations, sepulchral atmosphere and soothing play of light and shadow, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably best enjoyed in a chemically enhanced state of mind.

With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.

Only a superficial reading of The Lost Daughter would describe it as a meditation on the twin tugs of children and career. It is, instead, a dark and deeply disturbing exploration of something much more raw, and even radical: the notion that motherhood can plunder the self in irreparable ways.

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.

Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.

Knowing but never jaded, Hollywood Dreams is driven by Ms. Frederick's no-boundaries commitment to her broken character, a performance that's as startling as it is touching. In Mr. Jaglom's maverick hands, the appeal of illusion over reality is both fatal and irresistible.

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

Song of the Sea moves delicately but purposefully from pain to contentment and from anger to love. On land and underwater, the siblings’ adventures unfold in hand-drawn, painterly frames of misty pastels, sometimes encircled by cobwebby borders that give them the look of pictures in a locket.

Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.

Something unexpectedly profound emerges from the flimsiest of stories in Stranger Things, a drama so modest and trusting of its two leads that any directing flourishes might have shattered its spell.

Exit could be a new subgenre: the prankumentary. Audiences, however, would be advised simply to enjoy the film on its face -- even if that face is a carefully contrived mask.

Thanks to Ms. Haas’s truly remarkable lead performance (she was 16 at the time of filming) and Ms. Shalom-Ezer’s nuanced dialogue, Adar’s journey finally feels more like one of empowerment than victimization.

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.

Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.

With immense sensitivity, the screenwriter and director Harry Lighton, making his feature debut, stages sequences that deepen the characters and expand our understanding of their lives.

Neither suspenseful nor even comprehensible, John Swetnam’s dashed-off script (carelessly directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi) throws up plenty of red herrings — and a stupendously idiotic ending — but not a single character worth caring about.

This dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.

Opening an aperture into a process so ego-stripping that it feels unseemly to witness, The Work is enlightening yet also punishing.

This film belongs to its star.

The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.

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.

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.

What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.

Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.

Looper, a cocky sci-fi tale with more brass than substance, is rife with these "Say what?" moments.

Elegantly shot on film by Chris Teague, the movie feels unforced and at times shockingly authentic, allowing its emotions to percolate and rise of their own volition.

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.

The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.

Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.

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.

Visually distinctive and aurally delightful, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench" has style to burn. A soulful black-and-white commentary on love, art and their competing demands, this Boston-based musical from Damien Chazelle floats on a wave of spontaneity and charm.

The filmmaker's eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us.

Engrossing despite its daunting scope and tangled politics, The Other Side of Everything offers an uncommon opportunity to view the shifting borders and identities of an entire region through the eyes of the Eastern European intellectuals caught in the turmoil.

Equal parts disturbing and humorous, informative and bizarre, Rat Film is a brilliantly imaginative and formally experimental essay on how Baltimore has dealt with its rat problem and manipulated its black population.

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.

Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.

With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.

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

Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.

More than a fable about the clash of tradition and modernity, Ixcanul is finally a painful illustration of the ease with which those who have can prey on those who don’t.

A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.

An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.

Muting adult concerns — like the jackboots of fascism and the ubiquity of male violence — with marshmallow clouds and subtly shifting light, Mr. Miyazaki smooshes fantasy and history into a pastel-pretty yarn as irresistible as his feminism.

A film that begins as a family quest but evolves into a gripping study of know-don't-tell reticence and the umbilical tie of a lost homeland.

Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.

Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.

Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.

Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, Blood on Her Name packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes.

Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.

Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.

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

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.

The look is rough, the emotions always hovering near the surface. Yet, buoyed by Mr. Sharif’s cheery personality, these can sometimes be defiantly upbeat.

Wrestle isn’t slick or impartial, and doesn’t claim to be, yet the movie has a raw honesty that disdains forced uplift.

The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.

Propriety and recklessness make for uneasy bedfellows in The Deep Blue Sea, a shimmering exploration of romantic obsession and the tension between fitting in and flying free.

You Won’t Be Alone, the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.

Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.