Kenji Fujishima

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.

Haimes seems less interested in examining this unfamiliar world and the people involved than in shoving them into feel-good platitudes about following your dreams.

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

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

The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.

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

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

Hong’s two-part structure in Right Now, Wrong Then, instead of just being a cute formal trick, reveals a character’s troubled inner life in fiendishly clever ways.

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

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.

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

It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.

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

All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.

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.

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

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

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

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.

For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.

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

With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.

In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Junction 48 mostly sticks to uplifting formula, rarely offering anything particularly fresh or interesting.

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.

Our Little Sister often vibrates with such tenderness of feeling that it’s difficult to dismiss outright. The excellent performances from the four lead actresses help offset the occasional heavy-handedness of the script, with Kore-eda alive to their distinctive tics and gestures.

Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.

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

Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.

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.

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

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.

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.

Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.

Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.

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

This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.

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

Director Ian Cheney doesn't delve too deeply into the possibly unsettling questions the documentary raises about society at large.

Adds up little more than an anguished man using the hook of following his famous brother in order to gaze, however critically, at his reflection for 75 minutes.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.

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.

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

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

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

Brigsby Bear is so committed to its brand of self-congratulatory uplift that the filmmakers refuse to contemplate any of their material’s darker aspects.

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.

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.

The deeper Some Freaks wades into what becomes a series of sadistic and masochistic humiliations, the more McDonald’s film begins to feel schematic, with these characters little more than pawns in a screenwriter’s game of toying with our expectations.

Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.

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.

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.

Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.

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.

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.

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