Kerry Lengel

[An] exhilarating, brutally depressing documentary.

Abe’s performance is compelling in the way it captures the gap between who Ryota has become and how he wants to see himself, and Japanese screen veteran Kirin Kiki gives a terrifically nuanced turns as his again mother, pulled between the disappointments of the past and a fierce determination to find joy in her present.

The story is captivating from the very first moments.

You might say the lack of a Hollywood narrative arc is both a strength and a weakness in this film, because Lipitz isn’t entirely clear about what story she is trying to tell.

A delicious trifle for anyone who has ever dreamt of bantering about the cinema with Luis Buñuel or lounging at the piano to hear Cole Porter sing "Let's Do It."

The metaphor is plain yet elegant: Ai is the clever cat busily devising ways to push through the barriers physical, cultural, mental -- that make humans less than free. And in China, of course, the biggest of those barriers is the one-party state.

Waves is definitely not a film for everyone, but it has hidden depths that will reward the patient.

In Too Late to Die Young, Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor excavates details from her own memory to unlock a hidden bonus level of starkly original cinematic beauty. This spare coming-of-age story is a slow-burning stunner, despite hardly having a plot at all.

As a portrait of modern warfare, politics and propaganda, Coriolanus is intriguing, even if the gritty action sequences don't quite measure up to the realism of "The Hurt Locker."

You can read Emma's affair and its eventual effect on Edoardo as an inverted oedipal thing, or perhaps as a metaphor for decadence, the embodiment of a family that subconsciously realizes it's in decline and must fight to warm its blood.

With a filmography stuffed with masterpieces, the Coen brothers’ greatest trick is balancing the ironic commentary on cinema and storytelling with the dramatic impact of compelling human stories well told. And it’s a trick they pull off again and again.

More than anything, The Sisters Brothers is an exploration of how far you can take an anti-Western before it snaps out of the genre’s orbit entirely.

As a cinematic diatribe set in a stark moral universe, Goldstone comes in loud and clear.

Prophet’s Prey isn’t definitive, but it is compelling and occasionally even cinematic.

If there is a criticism to be made, it’s that Equity is just a bit too low-key to fully draw the audience in. The chiaroscuro lighting and thrumming mood music build tension slowly and surely, but never enough to make you inch forward in your seat. Just a smidgen of Gordon Gekko bombast might kick things up a notch.

It's a gentle and unassuming film, lingering over sometimes poignantly awkward conversations as Terry encourages his protege to persevere in his search for an original voice to go along with his skilled hands.

The title implies a sort of old-world glamour, but the proverbial gilded cage is looking a bit dilapidated in The Heiresses, a subtle but intense character study from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi.

The power dynamics between two peoples locked in “asymmetrical conflict” — not to mention two sets of gender codes — set the stage for Alayan’s thriller. In storytelling terms, they are the rules by which the tightly wound plot unspools. But the film’s great strength, in addition to the usual quality-control things, is its care to humanize, not demonize, the characters who are playing by those rules.

What he (Fukunaga) doesn't deliver, however, is a fresh take on an often-told love story.

It is the mythic resonance of her story that makes it a worthy subject a documentary. But it is the down-to-earth human touches that make Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq worth watching.

There are moments when this funny, self-consciously quirky film feels a bit like a Welsh "Napoleon Dynamite."

Border brings to horror-fantasy the same Swedish sensibility that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” brought to crime thrillers. Welcome to the land of eternal night.

And now with Tangled, a delightfully fresh spin on "Rapunzel," the entertainment powerhouse delivers its first classic-caliber computer animation outside the Pixar family.

McQuarrie delivers a tense, eye-popping amusement-park ride that’s almost as exciting as it is forgettable.

The great strength of The Sower is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It zooms in on its microcosm with a tender urgency that offers a glimpse of complex humanity without reducing the story to some sort of pithy takeaway.

This gently humorous, fiercely honest indie film is a step forward in the quest for a move inclusive Hollywood, which seems to one of the themes of the cultural moment. Some may dismiss it as identity politics. But movies like this prove that it’s about broadening our scope and deepening our understanding.

For me, it doesn’t really matter if LaBeouf is letting himself off the hook, or if Honey Boy is the ultimate vanity project of a pampered narcissist. What matters is that he has plunged into the maelstrom of his own memories and emerged with a real work of art — something that feels real, feels true, even though we all know it isn’t.

It is a quiet but intense and closely observed piece of work.