Jeannette Catsoulis

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.