Nick Schager

A zombie film unlike any other, focused less on mayhem than on grief, loss, and the quiet, tragic terror begat by the dead’s return.

As a ruminative travelogue-cum-dissertation, Rodrigues and Guerra Da Mata’s film is often haunting, and its portentous and mournful atmospherics ultimately help compensate for the nagging impression that it’s a work almost too personal for an outside viewer to fully penetrate.

It may eventually champion love as the guiding light amidst so much homicidal darkness, but Meyer’s film—happy ending be damned—resonates most deeply when confronting the ugly, inescapable reality that man’s murderous past is likely also his future.

Overflowing with super-slow motion, color filters and the clunkiest of flashbacks, The Last Lions frequently amplifies the melodrama to borderline-excessive proportions.

Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.

Heed its title’s advice and just don’t.

Evil Dead Rises is confirmation that—like so many that have come before it—Raimi’s legendary horror saga has run out of steam, continuing onward only because its easy-to-market IP value remains relatively high.

As a literal origin story about how we live today, it’s a captivating history lesson with global appeal.

Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.

A sweet and sad slice-of-life about the comfort and sorrow of solitary repetition, buoyed by a Yakusho performance that rightly earned him the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Animal Kingdom is what an X-Men movie would look like if it doubled-down on its tolerance-for-outsiders metaphor and did away with any exciting superpowered spectacle.

A winningly weird comedy—premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—about isolation and community.

An agonized drama about the burden of yesteryear and the conflicting ways to embrace and transcend it—one that’s rich in character, conflict, detail, desire, and history.

A yuletide fable that boasts Aardman Animation's peerless mix of whip-smart comedy and cheery heart.

The film exhibits a contemplative quiet and attentiveness to detail that enhances its issues of regret, bitterness, and confusion, many of which are rooted in thorny parent-child relations.

In “Feast of the Epiphany,” a narrative-documentary hybrid, the line between fiction and reality is demarcated quite clearly, even as those two modes remain in constant dialogue — and the conceit is entrancing precisely because of its elusiveness.

Style can't fully compensate for a tale that, underneath its gorgeous affectations, proves undercooked, especially during a third act that provides duly titillating answers to its initially beguiling mysteries.

A refreshingly eccentric spin on the staid biopic.

Employing straightforward, music-free aesthetics that express the grim realities of his story, director Funahashi captures both grief and outrage in equal measure.

Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.

The film thrives thanks to its superb lead performances, with Sparks exuding an endearingly off-kilter earnestness that nicely contrasts with Ireland’s internalized phobic fears and self-doubt.

As far as celebratory backward glances go, it’s compelling enough to temporarily brighten one’s day.

A story of courage, trust and tragedy, the last of which materializes in ways that are at once shattering and uplifting.

The aesthetic devices used by the directors to embellish their material — including educational and archival videos, split-screens, slow-motion, time-lapse footage, and lingering close-ups of needles and money — are a bit too self-consciously stylish for their own good. Nonetheless, their film captures the recurring nightmare of substance abuse.

Jacobson’s documentary resounds as merely a small victory in an ongoing war.

A pleasant and well-acted curio, and little more.

The filmmakers profile the prolific Mark Landis with a non-judgmental straightforwardness that allows the sheer brazenness of his scams to generate both shock and amusement.

Contextualizing the prime minister's rise to power within a larger portrait of a nation under constant internal and external siege, Bhutto conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts, as well as the courageous, heartbreaking personal sacrifices its subject made in service to both her homeland and ideals.