Kenji Fujishima

It’s a stylistic throwback as well: an old-fashioned, star-studded, big-budget historical epic with an intermission, filmed in a classical style that hearkens back in some ways to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.

Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.

Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.

A film full of fascinating contradictions.

As impressively exhaustive as it is as a work of history, Dawson City: Frozen Time plays even more affectingly as Morrison’s most direct love letter to cinema: as a tool not only for recording history, but also for capturing between-the-lines truths that history books can only graze.

Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.

Brendan J. Byrne's documentary about Bobby Sands colors its familiar formal lines with welcome intelligence.

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.

Stephen Chow's distinctive vision is evident in the seemingly boundless imagination of his scenarios, and in the film's sincere spiritual concerns and generosity toward misfits and outsiders.

It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.

Instead of finding one consistent tone and sticking to it, Serge Bozon allows the wildly hilarious and the grimly serious to uneasily coexist, exulting in the resultant clash.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.

The film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.

Laura Poitras doesn't indulge in score-settling cheap shots, but seriously grapples with her contradictory subject.

Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.

Striking throughout are the seemingly caught-on-the-wing moments that subtly enrichen the film’s characterizations.

It constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality.

Deepak Rauniyar may be more skilled dramatist than inspired image-maker, but his admirably balanced and humane social and political perspective is bracing nevertheless.

Though the film doesn’t quite overwhelm as horror, the thematic implications are dense enough in this case that it ends up leaving a lingering aftertaste anyway.

It’s sobering enough to witness a dedicated artist facing the possibility of losing his/her ability to create. And yet, Restless Creature is anything but relentlessly downbeat, primarily because Whelan refuses to be cowed by the pressure.

Not only does the film provide an exhaustive account of the band’s rise and fall, but it also clearly articulates their importance in music history, their singular character as a performing entity and even the distinctive nature of their fandom.

Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.

The characters here are so vividly drawn and performed, and the contemplative mood so remarkably sustained, that the film casts a genuinely suspenseful and mesmerizing spell over the span of its nearly four hours. Don’t be daunted by its length: at its best, Diaz’s film has the richness of a great, wide-ranging, deeply immersive novel.

By keeping explanatory talking-heads interviews to a minimum, the filmmakers put their trust in the audience to draw their own conclusions based on what they present to us.

Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.

To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.

Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman's rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.

Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.

Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.

This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.

The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.

This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.

What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.

Here is a film that isn't afraid to risk didacticism in order to put across its vision of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of colonialism.

If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.

A coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through its subject's first-person perspective.

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.

The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.

Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.

The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.

Failure hovers over the film as much as it did in Schulz's comic strip, infusing even its most ebullient set pieces and designs with a sense of melancholy.

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

With its broad performances, rapid-fire pacing, and rampant visual and verbal gags, Bernard Tavernier's first out-and-out comedy doesn't try too hard to hide its graphic-novel origins.

The film's lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.

The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.

Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.

Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.

Hawkins’ performance in Maudie is as indelible a feat of psychological imagination as it is of physical dedication.

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.

The Transfiguration gradually reveals itself to be a coming-of-age tale, one whose central figure reaches a point at which he’s forced to reckon with the evil lurking within himself.

Instead of the clinical detachment implied by the title Those People, writer-director Joey Kuhn bathes his first feature in warm compassion.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

Transpecos distinguishes itself with a sharp ear for dialogue, keen attention to ground-level detail, and an ending that unexpectedly chooses cautious optimism over blanket cynicism.

Much of it feels inconsequential compared to his previous films, but McDonagh's unflagging anarchic energy keeps it juicily diverting in the moment.

This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.

Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.

If The Hero works at all, it’s because Elliott brings a measure of emotional truth to even the most sentimental of plot developments, and because Haley exudes such warm patience for his lead actor’s rhythms and cadences.

Tragic anecdotes put a human face on this still-polarizing issue and serve Soechtig and Couric’s broad argument in Under The Gun better than any heavy-handed music cues and animated statistics ever could.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

Intimately focusing on its main character's personal triumphs, its refusing to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.

Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.

Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.

The familiar premise is done with enough intelligence and heartfelt conviction that it rises above its potentially cliché trappings.

Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.

It resonates as a portrait of artists trying to figure out their own paths toward making valuable contributions to the world.

Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.

The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.

Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.

It weaves through past and present, memories and reality, analysis and history, like a mercurial mind reminiscing seemingly at random.

It's never made clear how witnessing a family deal with their specific issues affects Jesus's own perspective on his destiny.

Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.

Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.

The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.

Hlynur Pálmason, who has a background in visual art, explores the film’s family dynamics through a vignette-like structure that sometimes feels akin to walking through an art exhibition.

It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.

The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.

The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

Rama Burshtein allows us to form our own impressions based on what she presents to us of the Orthodox faith.

Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.

The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.

For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.

Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.

It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.

The film's messy pile-up of comic diversions can be exhilarating in the moment—the chaos of an id given free rein.

The screenplay's enigmatic nature holds one's interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.

Though the filmmakers may not believe in a higher power, they still maintain a faith in raunchiness as an id-blasting form of liberation from rigid norms, spiritual, sexual, or otherwise.

It has enough ingredients for a reasonably entertaining fantasy adventure—except, that is, for an interesting lead character with an emotionally compelling hook.

The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.

At times throughout this concert film, Kevin Hart’s brash honesty about himself can feel liberating.

The film may not announce itself as hagiography, but it’s hero-worshipful to its core.

Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.

Band Aid never quite adds up to more than the sum of its fleeting charms.