Kyle Smith

Deep, disturbing and funny.

There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.

Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.

The narrator tells us that a doctor said to him, “War is like an X-ray. All human insides become visible. Good people become better; bad people, worse.” Such astute observations, together with the harrowing imagery, lift “20 Days in Mariupol” to the ranks of the great war documentaries.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Both broader and deeper than the relentless and monotonous “12 Years a Slave,” it’s one of the few important movies to hit cinemas this year.

In Living, Mr. Nighy excels again in a performance that is magnificent in its restraint and eloquent in its sparseness of words.

If it’s an extravagant demand of time it’s an even more extravagant pleasure, the rare film worth a trip out to the cinema for full immersion.

As raucous as The Invite gets when it’s in go-for-broke comedy mode, it’s just as powerful in its dramatic stages. Movies rarely venture so far into the hearts of ordinary people trying to do their best but suspecting they have made a great many irreparable mistakes.

Lost Illusions is sumptuous yet piercing, an expertly plotted social-relations saga of the kind that once typified prestige Hollywood cinema, and it dives into moral quandaries rather than dispensing easy bromides.

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.

Heart and soul—those two concepts beaten to death by lyricists—suffuse every scene of this modest, perfect picture.

Rich, evocative, crafty and exciting, it’s one of the few standout movies of the year.

Chess Story is a nerve-scraping exercise in grand deception.

Just as early youth means the endless fascination of new encounters, it also brings sudden, bewildering losses. “Little Amélie” brims with feeling for every precious moment of it.

The Housemaid is a delightful hall of mirrors in which reality turns out to be subject to infinite modification.

Cinema’s power to transport is vividly on display in Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s eerie but beautiful visit to a rich and unfamiliar setting.

Messrs. Soderbergh and Koepp have followed one of (Elmore) Leonard’s Laws—“Leave out the parts that people skip”—to construct an electric, fast-paced thriller that amounts to one climactic scene piled atop another.

The film honors maturity and all its weighty deliberations without putting a sheen of sentimentality on the condition.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

The determination to find greatness in the ordinary gives Song Sung Blue a magical, unforced luminescence that much more immodest films usually lack.

Though marred by an unfortunate title (“Fire of Love” sounds like a disco number from about 1979) and by the wobbly vocals of its narrator, Miranda July, who speaks in a fragile croak, the film is one of the year’s few awe-inspiring documentaries—a visually ravishing record, a bustling adventure, and an engrossing character study that begs to be remade, with actors, as a big-budget Hollywood narrative feature.

Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.

Mr. Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Susanna Nicchiarelli, has crafted a weighty, suspenseful family drama that touches on the eternal conflicts of religion but widens into a consideration of law, personal development and power politics.

Daddio is a bracingly naturalistic conversation with a sneakily brilliant screenplay and two wonderfully textured lead performances.

The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling—and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals.

Low-key indie dramas sometimes overstate the understatement to a degree that becomes dull or even exasperating, but The Quiet Girl is consistently fascinating throughout its 90-minute runtime.

The attraction is in the haunting texture of the picture, its delicate, breathy wonder.