Jeannette Catsoulis

Sweet, generous and tonally sure, Patrik, Age 1.5 has a nostalgic feel, and not just because of a soundtrack skewed toward last-millennium tunes and a hyperreal suburban setting lifted straight from "Pleasantville."

Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.

Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.

A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.

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

Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.

Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.

Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.

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.

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

A slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it's fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can't quite believe what they're seeing.

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

Socrates isn’t simply about being gay, or poor, or even devastatingly unloved: It’s about honoring a resilience that most of us will thankfully never have to summon.

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

The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.

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.

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.

The strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.

Delicate and autobiographical (Wang Han was the director’s name when he was a child, and the story is constructed from his boyhood memories), 11 Flowers clings steadfastly to its youthful point of view.

Educates without lecturing and engages without effort.

For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.

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.

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

Like its namesake, Jon S. Baird’s Tetris is clever, crafty and shockingly entertaining.

Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.

It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.

It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.

What emerges is a poignant commentary on the uneasy commingling of love and fame.