Kimberley Jones

Terribly tender, good-hearted picture.

The material begs for a much longer consideration than the film’s trim 79 minutes, but it’s still a must-watch for serious film fans.

Why wait for 2012? If you're hankering for a taste of the apocalypse, the opening sequence of this eye-opening, stomach-queasing doc has plenty to go on – witness menacing superimpositions on a bleak, blighted landscape – and the hits just keep on coming.

In Passages, Sachs’ enthralling eighth feature, he and his regular co-screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias return to the more experimental bent of Keep the Lights On, echoing that film’s elliptical nature and naturalistic presentation of sex, its dizzyingly destructive relationships and Euro-arthouse affect.

This is a strange and beguiling film to the end.

Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.

Sollett’s first feature is a small, but indelible picture, one that approaches the most universal of themes -– first love, confused hormones, parental clashes -– with originality.

What a weird, winning little movie is Robot & Frank, which explores what happens to the essential self as the memory goes. Oh, and it's a heist picture. With robot butlers. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

As much a portrait of a community as of its brilliant, de facto mayor, Harmontown is a stirring tribute to the restorative power of finding your people.

A devastating and weighty picture.

That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.

Thoughtful and achingly empathetic – there is so much grace in these performances – We Grown Now occasionally tilts a touch too capital-A Arthouse Film.

Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.

What sets apart this eighth outing is its giggling bouts of male henpecking, all puffed feathers and nyah-nyah taunts.

Much has been made of the fact that Swanberg has cast for the first time bona fide movie stars and not just his mumblecore pals: In fact, it's the making of the movie. If you're going to build an entire film on microexpressions, then a certain innate magnetism is required. Swanberg gets it in spades from his top-shelf cast.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.

The plot isn’t sturdy enough to fill two hours. An honorable mention, but no best in show.

Mamet does a shrewdly skillful job with these Tinseltown terrors.

This documentary does boast some bowl-you-over reveals best experienced blind.

Ramsay is experimental, unconventional, and forever reaching at the gorgeousness in grief and despair. Her film moves slow as molasses, slow as paint drying -– and all the better to see the colors and the complexities.

It’s the funniest, friskiest date movie in a good long while.

This revisionist Western – intellectually, aesthetically, and narratively absorbing – rattles to the bone, but never quite rends the heart.

One wishes perhaps for a more thumping conclusion, but what we have instead is something perfectly in the spirit of the piece, reaffirming that life, big and little, happens in 10 minutes chunks.

The magnificence of the film's pieces does not quite add up to a satisfying whole.

As light on his feet as he is as a musical-comedy showman, Jackman is perversely even more pleasurable when he’s popping neck veins from the effort of heavy drama.

So much here is equally befuddling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.

This film is sweet and frequently very funny. It isn’t perfect. Some of those imperfections – or, more to the point, irritants, such as the twee chapter headings and college-essay framing device – are carryovers from the YA novel, written by Jesse Andrews, who also adapted the novel to screen.