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.