Melissa Anderson

Les Hautes Solitudes is both ravishing portraiture and wordless biography, a life and aura distilled to glances and gestures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

We’re fortunate to witness such impassioned consideration of Houston’s art, career, and life from the people who actually knew her. Still, it’s notable that Crawford isn’t interviewed here.

The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.

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

The force of the acting alone almost compensates for some of the more difficult (and realistic) questions about not giving birth that García willfully sidesteps.

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

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.

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

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

Those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about the obscenely privileged have overlooked Coppola's redoubtable gifts at capturing milieu, languor, and exacting details.

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.

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.