Manohla Dargis

Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.

April is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl.

Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.

I fell hard for both Ms. Kazan and Mr. Nanjiani and The Big Sick, which tells a great story with waves of deep feeling and questions of identity and makes the whole thing feel like a breeze.

It's a doozy of a story and so borderline ridiculous that it sounds - ta-da! - like something that could have been cooked up only by Hollywood.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.

Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.

A modest, near-flawless gem, This Is England is the fifth feature by the young British director Shane Meadows, doing his best work since he first hit the festival scene in the mid-1990s with his hilarious, raw-hewn shorts “Small Time.”

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.

More information and in-depth analysis, as well as greater restraint in the use of atrocity images, might have deepened a movie that leans on shortcuts and visual shocks.

For Tian, who was banned from directing by Chinese authorities for a decade, it marks a triumphant return; for those who have loved the filmmaker's work in the past, few resurrections have seemed as welcome.

There are all sorts of ways to look at The Son -- as a philosophical thriller, as a statement of faith, as a call to political arms or just as a terrific entertainment.

The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.

The stories in The Interrupters, a hard wallop of a documentary, may weigh heavily on your heart and head, but they will also probably infuriate you.

Mostly, Ernest & Celestine is an ode to the happiness that comes from being with those different from us.

Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.

There’s much to enjoy in Baby Driver, including the satisfactions of genuine cinematic craft and technique, qualities that moviegoers can no longer take for granted.

The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.

In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.

No Other Choice is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances.

A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.

Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.

Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.

Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.

Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.

City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.

With Amy, Mr. Kapadia isn’t simply revisiting Ms. Winehouse’s life and death, but also — by pulling you in close to her, first pleasantly and then unpleasantly — telling the story of contemporary celebrity and, crucially, fandom’s cost.

Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, is a beautifully nuanced tragicomedy about two floundering souls.