Mark Feeney

A marvel of energy, wit, and visual imagination, The Man With a Movie Camera remains one of the most exhilarating movies ever made. [06 Feb 2015, p.G5]

Killer of Sheep is a drama that’s hardly at all dramatic, which makes it all the more moving. It’s quiet, unhurried, understated, unblinking. Mood matters more than style, dailiness more than incident. All movies are about other movies. A few are also about life. “Killer of Sheep” is one of them.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

TÁR is ambitious, unusual, forceful, and ultimately frustrating, an emotional epic that’s also a nose-against-the-glass view of classical music and unconventional take on the #MeToo movement in that world.

Memoria isn’t a film about explanation. You get caught up in it. You don’t ask why. You don’t wonder what’s going on, what will happen next. You just accept it. You trust Weerasethakul. Until about the 100-minute mark (the runtime is 136 minutes), he justifies that trust. Then things begin to falter.

Over the course of just under three hours, Hamaguchi reworks and expands a Haruki Murakami short story (it first ran in The New Yorker) into an intimate epic.

If it weren’t such a good and distinctive film, “Flee” would still have a strong claim on the attention of moviegoers, since it’s that powerful a rendering of the refugee experience. But it is that good and definitely that distinctive.

With his fondness for long takes and unobtrusive camerawork, Panahi has a real knack for maintaining a balance between comedy, usually courtesy of the younger son, and deeper feeling.

What starts out as a beautifully depopulated filmic exercise - it's 14 minutes into the movie before Guzman introduces any people - becomes toward the end a nearly unbearable examination of good and bad in the human heart.

This is a world where people still put out wash to dry on fire escapes, watermelon has seeds, amusement park rides cost 9 cents. Joey is the little fugitive of the title, of course, but at the heart of the movie, as its makers could never have imagined 60 years ago, is a much bigger fugitive: time itself.

Visually, it’s the experience of falling in love turned inside out. “The Worst Person in the World” is showing how it looks to feel like the only couple in the world.

The things in Licorice Pizza that are so good, like the performances from Haim and Hoffman and Cooper and the period fidelity, make you wish that the entire movie was just as good.

Fortunately, both Souvenir films have two signal virtues: Hogg’s style and their star.

In a sense, there can be nothing ordinary about such an extraordinary place. Furthermore, Wiseman’s special gift as a filmmaker has been to show how searching attention reveals that there really is no such thing as ordinariness.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

The film shifts back and forth in time. It works like memory that way, but the memories are Johnson’s, not the viewer’s, which makes the absence of some discernible organizing principle a real drawback.

Wiseman has made something so mundane as to be absorbingly exotic, a civics-lesson procedural. As with any procedural, the people involved in the process are just as important to the story as the process is.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

The heroine of a woman’s picture is almost always a victim, a practitioner of redemption through suffering. Janis is no victim, and Cruz’s performance makes that very plain. In revisiting the genre, Almodóvar, with Cruz’s help, is also subverting it.

For such a small place (officially a city, Sidney sure feels like a town), it's strikingly diverse.

Just to remind us that he’s Almodóvar — and to make it up to us that Serrano looks so implausibly different from Cruz — the movie ends with a bravura, meta-movie flourish that’s at once dazzling and matter of fact. It’s one more example here of Almodóvar’s ability to take pairs — not just people, but concepts (like, say, present and past, or pain and glory) — and happily join them.

What makes a rock band worth attending to a half century after its breakup isn’t its personalities or backstory or context, interesting as those can be, and here they’re all highly interesting. It’s the music.

Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.

A glorious late-summer pendant.

Banshees is like a short story trying to be a novel. The extra pages get filled with the postcard views. There are bits of wit — again, this is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about — but overall “Banshees” is lugubrious and slow.

There’s an intimacy to this Macbeth that’s transfixing. Largely filling the frame with the actors doesn’t do just them a great service. It also does Shakespeare’s language a great service, making it that much easier for the viewer to attend to it.

At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.

[Gyllenhaal’s] direction is unemphatic without ever being tentative, and she’s made a film with a relaxed, easy rhythm — but not too easy.