Melissa Anderson

A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.

What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time?

With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.

A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.

It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds.

Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature from writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest.

35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.

The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.

As is his custom, Weerasethakul addresses his nation's martial history with the lightest of touches.

A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.

Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.

The Tillman Story goes deeper, exposing a system of arrogance and duplicity that no WikiLeak could ever fully capture.

Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."

A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era "woman's picture," the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director.

The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.

In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.

Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder - a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."

Though full of mysteries, and, like all of Rodrigues’s work, consistently unpredictable from scene to scene, The Ornithologist may be the director’s most conventional narrative.

Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.

Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.

Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.

Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play.

Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.

El Velador still sharply conveys what life is like in a traumatized nation.

Without a trace of didacticism, Boden and Fleck portray the insidious details of exploitation and hollow American maxims.

Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.

Referents and identities are always slightly unfixed in Neruda, a film that reaches dizzying, exhilarating velocity by flouting the conventions of its hidebound genre.

Stranger abounds with precision and detail, evinced not just in the spectacular visual composition but also in the observation of behavioral codes in carnally charged spaces.

Denis quickly immerses us in her voluptuous, allusive mode of storytelling.

The dread and unease that suffuse the film — never has the peal of a rotary phone sounded more terrifying — seem rooted partly in anxiety over second-wave feminism, the cresting of which nearly coincided with the release of this movie, one that centers on its heroine’s profound ambivalence about growing emotionally attached to a man.

Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.

Sometimes you just can't fight the funk; as much as you might resist the film's more maudlin scenes, not succumbing to the band's signature tune, "Head Wiggle," is impossible.

Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore. But however seductive and trance-inducing, the visual splendor of Dash's film is never vaporous.

Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic that Breillat has laid out: A girl's childhood and adolescence are often culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren't always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to "go alone into the world."

His gift-and the film's-is to transform the seemingly banal relationship between pet and owner into something singular, inimitable, sacred.

Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting—beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties—while never letting us forget its formidable perils.

A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.

Hawkes and Hunt nobly tackle the physical demands their roles require.

The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces.

When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.

The quick-witted malcontent, a Morristown, New Jersey, refugee who arrived at Port Authority in 1969, is the best kind of New Yorker: one with a long memory who's averse to nostalgia.

In his sympathetic and intelligent Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies honors his subject by remaining true to this observation from the poet herself: "To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations."

Watching this taciturn man grow close to mother and child - close enough that he experiences twinges of jealousy and abandonment toward the end of Las Acacias - is one of the most satisfying spectacles in a movie this year, a time-lapse of emotions rendered perfectly.

When one goes to see Kristen Stewart — among the most quicksilver of her generation's performers — in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, a shape-shifting, resolutely of-this-moment ghost story that features her in nearly every frame, one goes not to watch her act but refract.

The definitive postcolonial cult-movie musical.

A funky, nonfiction tribute to the great avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Ornette upends the staid portrait-of-the-artist formula, and it tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio documentary just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.

Clinical in the extreme, Evolution aims for open-endedness, but the film, unlike its pint-size protagonists, remains impenetrable.

What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.

A hazy drift through vast subjects — the fluidity of adolescence and the fragility of family — Anna Muylaert's Don't Call Me Son works best when it goes small.

A fiction film that documents the unpredictable, unscripted actions of its pint-size lead, Nana offers new ways of thinking about childhood, or, at the very least, about children in movies.

Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, The Hunter still seethes with fury - and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote.

Delicately balanced between grandeur and absurdity, Serra's film maintains this tricky equilibrium largely thanks to the icon whose face fills the screen.

Despite the claustrophobic setting and Tsangari's observational style, Chevalier doesn't register as hermetic or coolly condescending; the film feels loose and agile even amid so much capricious rule-making.

Jacobs lets casually observed details and offhand humor advance the story. There are no grand pronouncements in The Lovers, which smartly communicates its ideas about relationships during its long stretches of silence.

The Art of the Steal's thorough research, bolstered by many fiery talking heads, makes it one of the most successful advocacy docs in recent years and may prompt some firsthand investigating of your own.

In so shrewdly exploring the illusions — namely (self-) deception — required to keep a dyad functioning, Garrel shows just how much we all remain, consciously or not, in the dark.

In the thinly veiled version of her life that appears onscreen, the actress unforgettably shows the deadening toll of always being on the move, only to return to the exact same place.

Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.

If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh's final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls.

Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury.

Against interpretation, Heisenberg (who is, after all, the grandson of the physicist who gave us the uncertainty principle) has nonetheless created a nimble, dynamic character study of a fiercely guarded loner on the run.

Her (Davis) homage--tender, never hagiographic--also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that the artist was up against.

Recalling other cine-duets, both straight (Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise) and gay (Andrew Haigh's Weekend), Paris 05:59 distinguishes itself by seamlessly including a lesson on HIV post-exposure prophylaxis.

Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes.

Rapisarda Casanova's film shows just how much natural splendor dominates the region, here caught at the height of estival glory.

Director Sean Baker, co-writing his fourth feature with Chris Bergoch, does some deft balancing of his own: His genuine admiration for these two women extends to their idiosyncrasies, yet they never become fools, whores, saints, or coots.

Reybaud’s film similarly serves as a tonic lesson in physical specifics, each location populated with richly idiosyncratic conversation partners.

Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.

Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.

You Don't Like the Truth focuses on the pathetic manipulations of Canadian intelligence officers as they interrogate Toronto-born Omar Khadr, the youngest prisoner held in Guantánamo Bay.

The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.

Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.

An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary Planet of Snail celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple.

Cogitore's movie is at once otherworldly and firmly tethered to stark reality.

Though hewing to a too-conventional structure, Bowser's film is densely researched enough to yield insights not just into its overlooked subject, but also into his overly analyzed era.

Undeniably, the rhythms — of clanging machines, of humans at work and repose — seen and heard here are the tempo of the quotidian and the repetitive. Yet even in their mundanity, these factory routines are not without their exalted moments.

As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.

A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.

"Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."

The frontman's reminiscences, though, are invariably eloquent, witty, and often moving.

Often drolly, coolly morbid, Post Mortem also operates just as effectively in a more nakedly direct register.

For all of its wise, welcome focus on the libidinal, Summertime additionally succeeds in presenting the liberationist fervor of the time without devolving into school-play pageantry.

Every shot and edit in Wiseman's film also suggests without over-explaining, allowing a viewer to lose herself in pleasure.

Rejuvenating the romantic comedy through its unusual premise — in which training for an elite army unit releases a flood of pheromones — Cailley's film is also buoyed by its enormously appealing leads, Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.

Admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a relationship that may only ever be one-sided.

Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.

The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.

Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.

An affectionate look at a self-destructing maniac and his supporters that bluntly reveals Liebling's total abjection without mocking him.

Reichardt pays clear homage to Breathless and Badlands, but her movie, the title of which is a local name for the Everglades, operates in its own ecosystem, teeming with the droll, shrewd observations about downwardly mobile life explored more solemnly in Reichardt's next two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.

There's great archival footage.

Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with next-level ribaldry and smack talk, especially in its first half. But in the remaining hour, the laughs arrive less often as the gender politics grow weirder.

Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.

Moves briskly, unfolding as one lively sit-down after another with artists, scholars, and curators who established themselves at the height of second-wave feminism.

The animation studio's first film with a female protagonist, a defiant lass who acts as a much-welcome corrective to retrograde Disney heroines of the past and the company's unstoppable pink-princess merchandising.

Wintour's arctic imperiousness has a way of creating the most masochistic deference, a dynamic that R.J Cutler superficially explores--and becomes prone to--in his documentary The September Issue.

Henriette's last thought will forever be a mystery, but the grandeur of Romanticism is tartly, pleasingly demystified.

The film courageously shows its reprobate hero sliding further, not redeeming himself.