Jesse Cataldo

These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.

By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.

Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.

Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.

Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt.

It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.

As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.

Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.

The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.

The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.

Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.

Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.

It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.

There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.

Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.

The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.

Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.

It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.

Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.

Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.

The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.

It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.

Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.

Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.

True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.

It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.

Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.

Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.

By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.

This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war.

Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.

Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.

The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.

A human-interest story that claims spite for human-interest stories, the film has some pretty divisive issues at its core that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.

Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.

A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.

As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.

Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.

It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.

Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.

Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.

Polisse has been compared to "The Wire," but beyond a shared interest in the Sisyphean nature of police work, the two are mostly comparable as inverses of each other.

A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.

It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.

Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.

It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.

Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.

Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.

While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.

A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.

More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.

Seems to be looking for answers, but the ones it finds are too close to the surface to be satisfying.

The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.

The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.

It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.

While it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.

It defines Manoel de Oliveira's late period, during which his movies have continued to shrink in size and scope while remaining thematically expansive.

A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.

The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.

Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.

The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.

Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.

The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.

Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.

It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.

While Steve James's documentary is persuasive on an informational level, it doesn't do enough to explore the human side of its subject matter.

After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.

The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.

Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.

With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.

Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.

This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.

Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.

It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.

Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.

It's disheartening that, despite some half-hearted overtures toward shifting the comedy paradigm, the filmmakers make little attempt to expand their comedic palette.

There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.

Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.

It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.

Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.

The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.

The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.

A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.

Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.

While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.

The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.

The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.

While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.

The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.

Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.

Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.

It’s always clear who’s right and who’s wrong, which material interests each is representing, and who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.

Covered in tattoos and clinging to wisps of their outsider status, the men profiled here seem assured of the novelty of their dilemma, as if they were the first generation to settle into a middle-class existence after a youth spent on the fringes.

What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.