Jeannette Catsoulis

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.