Jeannette Catsoulis

Remarkable as much for its insights as for its audacity, The Dirties approaches school violence with a comic veneer that slowly shades into deep darkness.

The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.

Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is a chase movie disguised as a western. Its humor is as dry as prairie dust...and its morals are steadfastly gray.

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.

Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.

Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.

Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.

The movie’s ability to express, with directness and humor, the insecurities of intimacy — most remarkably during the couple’s first night together — is a delight.

Three Sisters documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country’s unfortunates never seems to wane.

Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.

With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.

At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.

The Girls in the Band is everything a worthwhile documentary should be, and then some: engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters.

A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.

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.

By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.

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.

Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.

Bathed in the flamingo colors and Caribbean rhythms of its location, this deeply personal debut from the writer and director Mariette Monpierre develops with a lingering attention to sensation and sound.

Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.

This dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.

The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but The Humans is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane.

Morally cunning and with a tone as black as pitch, Pieta, the 18th film from the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, is a deeply unnerving revenge movie in which redemption is dangled like a cat toy before a cougar.

Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.

Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, 10 Cloverfield Lane, though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.

Ethereal, intensely moving.

Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.

A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.