Kenji Fujishima

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.