Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.

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.

Though the film’s ice-cold blend of the cerebral and the atavistic can be off-putting, it enables a queasy portrait of moral disengagement that lingers long after Simon has slipped from the screen.

Summer 1993 is movingly understated and beautifully acted.

A tale of two brothers, one band and a boatload of psychological baggage, Mistaken for Strangers is, like its maker, scruffy, undisciplined and eager to be loved. The big surprise is how easy it is to comply.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.

Merging the sustainability worries of guitar enthusiasts and environmentalists with the hard-cash concerns of logging corporations and Native American land developers, Maxine Trump’s thoughtful documentary wrests clarity from complexity.

The filmmaking is rough and rather clumsy, but by ceding the floor to his open, highly articulate sisters, Mr. Colvard has created a fascinatingly raw study of ferociously wielded male power.

Curating a selection of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter noncinephiles.

What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.

This confident first feature from the actor Amy Seimetz is much more invested in atmosphere than in plot.

An ingenious black comedy written and directed by James Westby, comes at you like a horror movie before settling down into something quieter but equally skin crawling.

A wry, mournful study of midlife crisis.

Like the teenage girls who monopolize its attention, Kill Me Please is moody, lovely, preening and libidinous.

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.

Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.

At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.

Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.

Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.

Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.

The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.

With its soft, bleached images and occasional detours into black-and-white stills, Turn Me On, set in an unspecified recent past, has a gentle oddness as unforced as its performances and as inoffensive as its dialogue.

The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.

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

Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.

Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.