Jordan Mintzer

More than ever, Trier reveals how well he can keep shifting tones and emotional arcs without losing any narrative momentum.

Like other recent French cartoons — ranging from Persopolis to the Kirikou series — this one manages to maintain something personal within a broadly appealing framework: it doesn’t shy away from the dark side of life, and in the end, even allows us to enjoy it.

The film is both a food lover’s dream and an aspiring chef’s guidebook, uncovering the sophisticated alchemy that makes such places not only run flawlessly, but serve up groundbreaking dishes that are also locally sourced.

There are a few standout scenes in War's closing reels, as well as a few cleverly executed twists, yet Erlingsson doesn't let them undercut the movie's emotional sway.

Do stars Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon manage to make the material feel both fresh and engaging? Yes.

The Smashing Machine’s greatest attribute may be the way much of it doesn’t feel fake at all.

Understanding the life and work of Luis Valdez is a way to broaden one’s understanding of what it means to be American, perhaps now more than ever. Watching this enlightening and entertaining documentary is a good way to start.

Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

What emerges is not only a depiction of psychiatric treatment administered with plenty of warmth and enthusiasm, but a portrait of several individuals who, despite their noticeable disabilities, are capable of producing original and moving works of art.

The Friend’s House Is Here chooses to emphasize love, courage, community. It zeroes in on the sacrifices its characters make for each other, the community that builds around them, the resilience that keeps them going in the face of fear and oppression.

What ensues is a long battle that has all the trappings of a small-town political thriller: corrupt officials, refuted elections, reporters fighting for their rights at the risk of their own livelihoods… It’s a story we’ve seen before, but never in this kind of setting.

Director Marie Losier ... chronicles the wrestler’s twilight years with affection, humor and gravitas.

This endearing old-age drama works best as an earnest and colorful character study, even if it doesn't really break any new cinematic ground.

Tavernier focuses on a dozen or so major and minor auteurs, showcasing their artistry in hundreds of film clips that he comments on with historical insight and aesthetic precision.

Kahn never offers an easy way out for Thomas, even if the finale tends to wrap things up in ways that seem a little too conclusive. But his film mostly explores, with steadfastness and moments of raw emotion, the crude uphill battle faced by junkies on the path to recovery.

Reteaming to play a duo similar to the one in A Prophet, Rahim and Arestrup maintain the film’s tense and sinister tone – the former providing a convincing mix of fragility and machismo, and the latter looking and acting more and more like Brando in the latter half of his career.

An engrossing depiction of severe occupational hazards, with most of the action set in drab, purely functional offices and conference rooms where Philippe has to contend with an impossible task.

This superbly crafted yet intimate family drama is so realistic in terms of its setting and technical specificity, it sometimes feels like a documentary. ... It’s perhaps a tad deliberate in spots, hitting its central theme too heavily on the nose, but Proxima pulls off an impressive balancing act between the personal and the astronomical.

Working without much in terms of visuals but talking heads and screens, Klose manages to make his film feel both suspenseful and informative.

Beautifully directed and performed.

Yes may be purposely over-the-top and unsettling to watch — at two and a half hours, it won’t win over audiences looking for light arthouse fare — but Lapid is trying to show us that it’s hardly an exaggeration of the truth, or at least his own truth about his homeland.

A film that doesn’t hit you like a tidal wave as much as it gradually washes over you, leaving in its wake a series of memorable set-pieces and a dense, dark web of violence and fatality.

While the two leads deliver the goods and manage to combine a frisky sense of first love with the movie's gloomier arc, they are well-served by a terrific supporting cast.

Utama is very much a pessimistic film, never shying away from the realities faced by those who still inhabit the highlands of Bolivia. And yet it’s also convincingly, and sometimes movingly, optimistic.

Take the plot of one of Richard Linklater’s Before movies, combine it with the eye-popping aesthetic of Wes Anderson, then set it within the ethnically diverse, highly photogenic South London enclave of Peckham, and you’ll wind up with Rye Lane.

At times the movie feels so raw and unedited, it’s as if Loktev dumped all her footage onto the table without shaping it into a definitive cut. Perhaps a leaner two-hour version would have yielded something more dynamic, though the point of My Undesirable Friends isn’t to entertain us, but to capture every detail of a democratic movement that was doomed to fail.

At a time when the fate of Black men and their bodies has risen to the level of a national emergency, what happens to the characters in Two Gods takes on added weight.

If the film runs a tad too long, especially in its second half, Embrace of the Serpent is still an absorbing account of indigenous tribes facing up to colonial incursions, revealing how Westerners are in many ways far behind the native peoples they conquer.