Jordan Hoffman

Many a first-time film-maker thinks they are too good to follow any sort of rules, and blends genres by writing from a purely instinctual level. More often than not, the result is unpalatable. The Mend, somewhat miraculously, is here to buck the trend. Let’s just hope that not too many people decide to follow its lead.

Mistress America eventually travels down roads of broken trust and acceptance of reality, but please don’t let those heavy themes suggest this movie is anything other than pure delight. The primacy of the joke rules the day.

The Kindergarten Teacher is probably the only movie about poetry with an ending as tense as any thriller.

Clearly there is entertainment value in this documentary, but it’s very much of a “behind the music” calibre.

It’s hard to find compliments for Jamie Dornan beyond “very athletic”—but from start to finish, one can’t give Johnson enough credit for making these asinine movies work as well as they do.

This is an extremely watchable and enjoyable film, but its compression of historical events does become a tad silly.

The three leads draw you in. The pace gives these actors time to breathe, show nuance and make their characters human.

He’s taken what, on paper, boils down to an extra ridiculous episode of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” and passes it off as high cinematic art.

Not since Grey Gardens has a film invited us into such a strange, barely-functioning home and allowed us to gawk without reservation. This is a nosy movie, but it is altogether fascinating.

In addition to its ability to take this odd premise and run with it, Nina Forever scores by being tremendously erotic. Granted, what’s sexy varies from taste to taste, but the exuberance in passion exhibited by young Abigail Hardingham is refreshing in a landscape of independent films that too frequently play nudity for a cheap laugh or just to tick a box off a potential distributor’s list of requirements.

Greene makes it clear early on that his interests lie less with a news report than with what Werner Herzog dubbed “ecstatic truth”. The dial swerves between “catching something” to “clearly rehearsed” and back again, and all to the betterment of the final project.

The movie on its own is great, but with this music it's sublime.

Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.

It’s a minor work that knows its place in the margins, but is thought-provoking and surreptitiously insightful – and very funny.

This light and predictable movie, with its overwhelming box office success, still offers tremendous insight into day-to-day Israeli society.

Southside With You uses our affection for the Obamas to add urgency in the otherwise simple script.

The Measure of a Man’s decision to keep its conflicts so microscopic in the service of realism is a real problem. Put bluntly, Brize’s touch is so light that it’s immeasurable.

The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.

While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.

It asks more questions than it answers, and doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s also a great movie for anyone who grew up in New York City area in 1980, with the right needle drops and art direction. This is James Gray’s eighth feature and, in the end, his simplest. It may also be his best.

Thelma is an example of a wonderful type of fantasy/sci-fi film, the sort of movie that both clearly deals in allegory and is still effective on its surface. But as the stranger aspects of its story tease out, the film manages not to get lost in the reeds of its own mythos. It finds strength in ellipses.

Wash Westmoreland’s Colette is exhilarating, funny, inspiring and (remember: corsets!) gorgeous, too.

Eat That Question does a good job of giving us just a taste of nearly every era in Zappa’s multifaceted career.

The varied ingredients blend together well.

The point of this film is the spell it weaves and, by and large, it is successful. It’s the music, it’s the cinematography, it’s the score, it’s Casey Affleck’s hollow speaking voice — they all add up to something that resembles a fever dream facsimile of an eventful movie.

Lengthy passages are unrelated to any discernible narrative, and seem to exist in that interzone your mind travels through just before it goes to sleep.

Cage, not one known for subtlety of late, is truly great in this sad, funny and tender role.

What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.