Keith Uhlich

New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

A cut above most nonfiction explorations of Katrina, thanks to the ever-empathetic Demme's talent for showcasing the uniquely human qualities of every person he films.

The movie might very well have come off as a too-clinical experiment if it weren't for Leo, who maintains a rivetingly mysterious aura even as her character's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre.

The film builds to a shattering climax that works precisely because all involved fully embrace the melodrama. Be sure to bring Kleenex.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

It never feels as if we're watching a brand-name cash-grab, but instead as if we're participating in an endlessly imaginative afternoon of play.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)

This is an exquisite portrait of a family navigating the wreckage imparted to them by one of their own.

The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.

That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.

Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

If there’s humor to be found in some of the particulars, it’s never to judge or to poke fun, but to revel in the very real delights of consensual sexual roleplay.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.

Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.

It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.

The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.

For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?

The filmmaker's expressively cockeyed impulses soon take over (he's ably assisted by the terrific cinematographer Seamus McGarvey), and the resulting craziness is quite delightful to behold in the moment and to reflect on after.

It’s nonetheless the very slipperiness of Sakurai’s passion — to humbly become the god he worships — that continually compels.

One thing's for certain: Not even Charles Darwin could fully figure this monkey out.

The filmmaker seems to have been granted unprecedented access to both Manning and to the people around her, and he uses this natural, unforced intimacy to present a fragmented portrait of a person attempting to readapt to a society in which they never particularly learned how to fit.

The story's knotty aspects reverberate under its sentimental-cum-inspirational surface. In the guise of a glossy entertainment, Welcome to Marwen gets at some unnervingly irresolvable truths about humanity.

This is derivative if well-executed product, except when it comes to the relationship at the film’s center.

Olive paints a portrait of righteous rage and determination.

Alex Strangelove is much more affecting whenever Johnson steps out of genre comfort zones.

At its strongest, the film feels like kin to Kirsten Johnson’s great Cameraperson (2016), a free-associative nonfiction memoir comprised mostly of B-roll and personal footage. Though the subject here isn’t Ross himself (despite a few offscreen aural appearances) but an entire community that, in both micro- and macrocosmic senses, has remained historically unacknowledged and unseen.