Nick Schager

Proves to be an ideal showcase for its lead—even if its light comedy is a bit too slight.

Ambiguity enlivens the smart, knotty Resolution, which routinely nods to its own artificiality while positing storytelling as a constantly evolving beast apt to save your life one moment and consume you the next.

Despite its familiarity, Chapter & Verse manages to make its material both fresh and authentic.

An electric thriller with blood on its hands, flesh in its mouth, and deviance on its mind.

Like few modern films, Alfredo Garcia seems to not only be a product of a director’s singular vision, but a virtual window into one man’s fractured, tortured soul.

Rock ‘n’ roll portraits this vibrant, introspective, and nimble don’t come around very often.

While its assortment of recurring images, conversations, scenes, and dynamics intermittently borders on the exhausting, it plays as an intriguing meditation on desire, dreams, and the things that make us who we are—and without which we’re lost.

A directorial debut of poised peril that should inspire both laughs and a few sleepless nights.

A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.

Sweetgrass achieves a borderline abstract splendor that's furthered by the directors' avoidance of delving deeply into its human subjects, whose backstories and general circumstances are only alluded to through fly-on-wall scraps.

In sticking its landing, Linoleum proves a case study in why no story can be fully judged until it’s over.

Stallone yearns to investigate the loneliness of a man who can’t get over the past, an endeavor which entails unwieldy speeches (delivered by the actor in his patented “yews guys” patois) and reflective shots of the city’s skyline.

The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.

The cautionary tale is a familiar one. But it’s told with enough flashy verve and humor, along with a gossipy bombshell audio recording, to play as a breezy non-fiction look back at a phenom that had its 15 minutes—or, at least, enough time to get through an evening’s worth of quiz questions—in the smartphone spotlight.

Yanking unashamedly at the heartstrings, however, it’s a manipulative and uneven tune that strains to elicit the sniffles it so hungrily seeks.

An endearing, infuriating, and despairing non-fiction portrait of a country’s final descent into oppressive authoritarianism, all of it shot covertly by one brave teacher, it’s a striking work of rebel cinema.

Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.

Notwithstanding its cop-out upbeat ending, Red Rock West solidified the expert neo-noir credentials of John Dahl (The Last Seduction). A taut, nasty bit of crime-genre business, Dahl’s tale (co-written with brother Rick) is in most respects archetypal.

Boasting an exceptional Nicole Kidman performance as a woman recklessly in search of who she is and what she wants—as well as the orgasm that she’s long coveted—it’s a thrilling and amusing shot of cinematic Viagra.

Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.

Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.

Affords an intimate and wrenching view of a national collapsing under the weight of unbearable traumas, and of the young children who are the prime victims of that strain.

It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.

Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.

A captivating character study about a young man trying to carve out a grown-up life despite having spent half of his years on Earth behind bars.

With quiet, seething intensity, Kinski turns Dracula into a simultaneously sinister and sympathetic creature—one whose viciousness curdles the blood, even as his fanged ferocity comes across as merely a wounded-animal reaction to his eternal loneliness.

If immaculately realized, Silence is also an increasingly monotonous, patience-testing slow-burner, with characters repeatedly voicing their fears about God’s silence (often in voiceover), debating the merits of apostatizing in service of a compassionate cause, and suffering in quiet.

Ripped from yesterday’s headlines, it’s as fast, flashy and superficial as the director’s prior efforts, and also as exaggerated.