Melissa Anderson

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

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

Crucially, all four men, plus the ancillary characters who appear throughout the film, prove to be excellent company, holding forth on literature, Europe's future, inner-ear ailments, and side triceps.

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

Never a banal depiction of dysfunctional group dynamics, Stinking Heaven, which was shaped, as in Silver's previous work, largely through improvisation, remains consistently absorbing.

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.

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

For many of the film's brisk 84 minutes, Fox eclipses his earlier work-and several other same-sex tragedies-by immersing us in his protagonist's quiet turmoil.

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.

Echeverria [has a] gift for capturing detail-dense moments in the most casual way.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.

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

As always with Guiraudie’s films, Staying Vertical shrewdly (and often hilariously) captures both the seriousness and the absurdity of sex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.

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

As we watch Haenel — whose piercing gaze is only one aspect of her luminosity — stride through these overdetermined scenes, clutching a medical bag to her side, we are reminded that even the most timeworn of conventions can be made electric and alive.