Melissa Anderson

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 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.

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

In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.

There's great archival footage.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.

The definitive postcolonial cult-movie musical.

Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.

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.

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

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

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.

Like the pacing of the novel, the film, even at almost two and a half hours, moves briskly, continuously drawing us in.

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.

A pleasing, often rousing movie for the 99 percent, In Time is not without flaws.

Bitton, best known for her 2004 nonfiction film "Wall," about the barrier Israel is building along its border with the occupied territories of the West Bank, questions her interviewees calmly and dispassionately (though her voice is heard, she is never seen). It's a strategy that yields damning revelations.

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.

Beatriz, a person committed to doing good in the world, can be obtuse in reading social cues and fatiguingly sanctimonious, her wearisome traits finely calibrated by Hayek.

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

Thomsen culls wisely from Fassbinder's filmography to illustrate the kino-giant's abiding themes, patricide and masochism among them.

With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.

Fonda is a co-conspirator with the filmmakers, slyly tweaking her own offscreen activities.