Jeannette Catsoulis

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

Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.

Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.

Circo offers a touching chronicle of a dying culture harnessed to ambitions that remain very much alive.

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.

With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.

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.

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.

Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.

A creative tour de force, an intellectual high-wire act as astonishing as it is entertaining.

The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.

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.

The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.

Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, Hitler's Children takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.

Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.

Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

Mr. Mills (drawing on his own experiences and doing triple duty as the director and screenwriter) gives a performance of rancid single-mindedness. It’s a fearlessly unsympathetic role that provides plenty of space for train-wreck humor but almost no wiggle room for redemption.

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.

Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere.

Bathed in a shadowy beauty and slippery psychological atmosphere, “Beast” soars on Ms. Buckley’s increasingly animalistic performance.

Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.

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

Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.

The movie, like the elemental forces we continue to exacerbate, never explains itself. Surrender to it, though, and a narrative - of spectacle, conflict and retaliation - will eventually become clear.

Lurching relentlessly from one conflict to another, the movie distills its emotions — and maintains its momentum — in conversations of remarkably controlled intensity.

Reveling in misdirection and a teasing duality . . . Hokum profits from Colm Hogan’s insinuating camera as it noses through gloomy corridors and a terrifying dumbwaiter shaft, hinting at what lurks on the other side of the frame.

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.