Manohla Dargis

Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.

There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.

Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured.

Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.

The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.

Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.

Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.

Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.

It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

The film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.

With visual precision and emotional restraint — and aided by Mr. Driver’s tamped-down, sober and gently endearing performance — Mr. Jarmusch creates that rarest portrait of the artist: the one who’s happy being hard at work.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.

A potent, persuasive and quietly furious documentary.

It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.

By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.

Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.

In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.

There are several genres nimbly folded into The Skin I Live In, which might also be described as an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza. In other words, it's an Almodóvar movie with all the attendant gifts that implies: lapidary technique, calculated perversity, intelligent wit.

20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.

If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

At once an emotional thriller and a domestic horror movie -- a woman's picture with a vengeance, in which the bloodletting is kept to a minimum, and ends up all the more powerful and profound for it.