Justin Chang

For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.

Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.

The film’s considerable power depends entirely on its moment-to-moment persuasiveness, on a set of narrative and aesthetic choices that, as presented—in a series of swift, kinetically composed, and jaggedly edited scenes—seldom feel like choices at all.

To say that not everything coheres in this swift, propulsive 93-minute film is to suggest that the filmmaker has done justice to the unruliness of his subject: In capturing and preserving a long-standing oral tradition, he has arrived at both a persuasive vision of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. Like all good storytellers, he leaves you wanting more.

Coming-of-age dramas may be a dime a dozen at Sundance, but one this tender and truthful can make an entire subgenre feel shimmeringly new.

Transit touchingly illuminates the close bonds that can form within migrant communities, even as it refuses to harbor any illusions about how easily those bonds can be broken.

Konchalovsky has said that he meant to recapture the look of films from the ’60s, but these crisp, high-contrast images speak to another impulse as well: to look into a past shrouded in the fog of delusion and doublespeak, and to see through it with a clarity that burns and even heals

One of the pleasures of “The Eras Tour” is the way it destroys the facile notion of a pure individual self. With its labyrinthine arc, jumbled chronology and dazzling changes of tone, milieu and costume, it’s Swift’s ode to invention and self-reinvention, the many different lives she’s lived and faces she’s presented over the course of her career.

Fast-moving and slow-burning by turns, The Killing of Two Lovers suggests that real life — and real drama — so often unfold in the in-between moments, in the anticipation rather than the actual execution of the next move.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

It is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, rigorously controlled in ways that he doesn’t always evince: It’s a bone-deep sensory immersion that never feels merely sensationalist, anchored by two performances of astonishing commitment and emotional power.

It would be hard to overstate just how singular this picture feels in its seriousness of purpose and in its cumulative power to enthrall and astonish.

It moves between cities and centuries, and teasingly undermines the relationship between sound and image, with a sly and miraculous fluidity.

Completely disposable yet rousing on its own crude, testosterone-saturated terms.

A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.

It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control.

The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.

The result is a tough, harrowing work of self-portraiture in which it’s Ito’s own journalistic tenacity, as much as her personal determination and outrage, that leads her to go public with her story, despite enormous pressure to do the opposite.

This is, to be sure, a riotously funny movie — a priceless collection of puns, insults, one-liners and some of the best-timed barf gags this side of “Problem Child 2” — but it also treats the classical detective story with the seriousness and grandeur it deserves.

The family that slays together pays together in Killer Joe, a nasty little Texas noir that transfers Tracy Letts' 1993 play from page to screen with generally gripping results before devolving into an over-the-top splatterfest.

I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.