Manohla Dargis

Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.

With beauty, mild and sharp jolts, and mesmerizing camerawork, he (Gaspar Noe) tries to open the doors of perception.

Mr. Selznick’s emphasis on wonder...can feel bullying, as if he were demanding delight instead of earning it. Yet even as he follows Mr. Selznick’s narrative lead, Mr. Haynes quietly and touchingly makes Wonderstruck his own because the wonder of the film isn’t in its story but in its telling.

Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.

A tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.

Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.

Despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, Crimes of the Future feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.

The film is a snort-out-loud-funny master class of controlled chaos.

The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman's history as a budding documentarian. It's clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It's easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education.

An attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances.

Dark Shadows isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.

Mr. Eastwood is also an adept director of his own performances and, perhaps more important, a canny manipulator of his own iconographic presence.

The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.

Mr. Amalric, who directed this dark, delectable, shivery tale, adapting it from the Georges Simenon novel, sets its uneasy, dank mood with energetic economy.

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.”

A sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.

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.

The German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s spiky and at times mordantly funny Afire is a tonic for moviegoers tired of nice, squishable, likable, relatable dull and dull characters.

The film’s title, needless to say, has an ironic bite. One of the pleasures of The Merry Gentleman is Mr. Keaton's commitment to that bite, which never registers as cruel or gratuitous, just honest, weary, sad.

What is clear is that while there are several stories folded into Iris — a marriage tale, an ode to multiculturalism and a fashion spectacular — it is also about the insistent rejection of monocultural conformity.

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.

Inside this small canvas - almost the entire film unfolds in the one apartment - Mr. Eimbcke turns each character into an epic.

Here Mr. Cantet -- whose earlier features include "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two other dramas about systems of power -- has done that rarest of things in movies about children: He has allowed them to talk.

Watching it again, I recognized that Linklater’s film is itself an expression of a certain approach — a consciousness — toward cinema’s pleasures and possibilities, one that at once embraces the art’s past and insists on its future.

The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.

Reality is a story about one man’s desire to make it big on the small screen, and something of a familiar exploration of the blurring between reality and its simulations. More elliptically and more interestingly, it is also a look at an Italy engrossed with rituals and spectacle, in watching and being watched.

Mr. Moretti finds broad comedy in the antics of some clerics, who can seem as sweet as children, but in Melville there is pathos and there is tragedy, and not his alone.

Some filmmakers give us dreams and false worlds in which we can find refuge. For others, though, like the young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the movies aren't an escape from the world but a way more deeply into it.