Matt Fagerholm

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

What makes this film special, first and foremost, is the performance by Chin, who has lost none of the acerbic edge she sported as Waverly’s mother in “The Joy Luck Club.”

Its visual landscape is unlike any I’ve experienced, and though everything about it is aggressively repellant, it still managed to hold me in a constant state of gobsmacked awe.

Apart from its numerous profound achievements, Neulinger’s picture is an extraordinary work of film analysis, inviting the viewer to study certain encounters frame-by-frame as a way of revealing their unspoken subtext.

In some ways, The Infiltrators is reminiscent of 2018’s under-seen gem “American Animals” in how it blurs the line between narrative and documentary while incorporating genre tropes into the nonfiction medium.

Resembling Maude Apatow in her youth, Rachel is a richly fascinating figure in her own right, and though she originally hadn’t planned on putting herself in the film, she wisely chose to have her face on camera (a la Bing Liu in “Minding the Gap”) when interviewing Josh, which heightens the emotional impact of their scenes together considerably.

One of the best films I’ve seen about fine art. It casts an entrancing spell that allows the staggering depth of its subject’s work to consume us, while showing how her trailblazing vision left an unmistakable imprint in over a century of iconic art spanning various mediums, resounding through history like a drop of colored paint in a pitcher of water.

I fully endorse the message blatantly expressed by Beemer’s picture, but as a work of cinema, it drove me nuts in how its style was antithetical to the principles its numerous subjects were championing.

Tape isn’t just a movie. It is a rallying cry.

Beyond its message and intent, Chandler’s film is a raw and insightful portrait of the psychology fueling addiction, and how the healing of pain and depression must be tackled in a healthy way.

If this material were compiled into a book, it would be rightfully deemed great literature. As featured in Heise’s film, however, these insightful words are frequently marred by a style oddly akin to a mournful podcast, one that requires listeners to repeatedly peer at their phone to read the subtitles.

There’s no question that Islamophobia is also on the rise around the globe, and this film — however inadvertently and well-intentioned — plays directly into it.

I imagine even Billy Wilder would’ve gotten misty-eyed during the final, perfectly-pitched moments of this extraordinary film.

This is screen acting of a very rare sort, and Clemency is a vital emotional powerhouse sorely deserving of being seen.

Filmed over the course of three years and clocking in just over 70 minutes (minus credits), When Lambs Become Lions is a triumph of shrewdly economical storytelling on the part of Kasbe and his co-editors Frederick Shanahan and Caitlyn Greene.

Landsman’s film is enraging for all the right reasons, and more than a few wrong ones as well. It comes off as more of a puff piece than an exposé.

The overwhelming positivity in this footage is illuminating and encouraging, yet also more than a touch puzzling, raising questions of precisely where this intolerance hibernates when cameras aren’t around to support such devastating legislation.

God is destined to forever be a complicated subject for most mortals, yet there’s no question this film has made me a believer in the boundless artistic potential of its creator.

Though its generic title may evoke memories of the archaic science videos you fell asleep to in grade school, Schwartzberg’s film quickly proves to be one of the year’s most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs.

The plot seems sillier the more one mulls it over, yet it’s a testament to the film that we’re not preoccupied with questions of probability for the duration of its running time.

Many of the film's backdrops are admittedly breathtaking, yet the foregrounded people never seem to be actually populating them. The character animation is so flat and uninspired that it causes Dilili and her fellow humans to resemble stickers grafted onto postcards, with the subtle use of shadows and reflections doing little to add dimension.

By the time Margo finally announces that she’s ready to leave, I was eager to gather my things and join her in escaping this would-be comedy.

With a running time clocking in just over two hours, Promise at Dawn often plays like a truncated miniseries, with scenes moving along too quickly for their emotional peaks and valleys to reach their fullest expression.

This is one of the year’s best films.

The best thing that can be said about the script, penned by acclaimed playwright Alice Austen, is that it never sounds written. Most of the dialogue seems as if it were improvised by the film’s remarkable ensemble, particularly when scenes of prolonged verbal altercations reach Cassavetes-level decibels.

I didn’t laugh a whole lot while watching Adam, but I was never less than wholly engaged, and by the end, I felt grateful for having seen it.

When a comedy is made about a real-life topic that is no laughing matter, it had better be funnier than Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire. The premise is a richly flavorful one, but the execution is as bland as unseasoned hummus.

Share is a relatively restrained work. Nothing is made explicit aside from the internal agony of its heroine, whose headspace we occupy so fully, we can’t help sharing in every tremulous emotion that ripples across her face.