Michael O'Sullivan

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

The film by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov is a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable.

Many thematic ingredients come together in Farhadi’s rich stew of a story: jealousy, resentment, betrayal, forgiveness, healing. The filmmaker stirs them, with the touch of a master, into a dish that both stimulates and nourishes.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

The frequent, mundane talks -- which Alexandra engages in with her grandson, Malika and the base camp's enlisted men -- are not so much about politics as they are about people.

There’s lots of hurt, past and present, in “Daughters,” as well as a huge measure of healing and forgiveness. Those feelings are palpable and contagious; they jump off the screen.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

A small film of surpassing beauty and sadness. Yet its bittersweet flavor isn't artificial, but rather the product of the slow ripening of character.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.

Spielmann doesn't move his camera much, but he doesn't have to. The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.

As quintessential a story of American ambition as Welles' own "Citizen Kane."

As overcrowded as it all sounds, “Flipside” never falls off the cliff into confusion or incoherence, thanks mainly to Wilcha’s superb grasp of his theme.

[A] solid yet subtly sphinxlike new drama from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The disparity between Cindy and Jerry is itself obscene, but less so than that illuminated by the customers of Farewell Cruises, whom Yung shows to be almost parasitic in the way they feed off the misery (albeit without knowing it) of those who serve them.

McQueen makes the case that its subject was an artist whose clay was clothing. It also, despite giving short shrift to psychoanalysis, reminds us that everything you might want to know about the artist can be found in the art.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

"Kubo" is both extraordinarily original and extraordinarily complex.

Momma's Man takes that germ of an idea and lets it flower, in a way that is both odd and oddly compelling.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.

Boys State is a portrait of the country in microcosm: divided, but not yet irredeemably lost.

Short on drama but long on poetry.

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

The Rescue isn’t just a movie about cave divers, or a recap of a well-reported humanitarian operation. It’s ultimately a film about the triumph of altruism, ingenuity and perseverance in the face of almost impossible odds, by the very people you might initially have dismissed as not up to the task.

Moodysson's cornball sentimentality about the many shapes of the human family is tempered by his honesty about personal frailty and the silliness of utopian living experiments.