Nick Schager

This winning non-fiction portrait proves equally adept at eliciting laughs and tears.

Nothing—including a game performance by Dev Patel—can prevent it from tumbling down a bottomless hole from which it can’t escape.

No amount of narrative wackiness and star power can make [cabbages] or this Sundance Film Festival offering funny.

A quiet and formally rigorous portrait of a paternalistic society, the crimes it breeds, and the fury, shame, regret, and self-loathing that follows.

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.

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 formal polish and deep compassion, it proves to be the most heartwarming film of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

A model of tone, concision, and emotional and psychological insight, led by a staggering performance from John Magara and an equally moving one from pint-sized co-star Molly Belle Wright.

Devolves into such a morass of shrill chaos and affected symbolism that it’s difficult to feel anything other than exasperation with its central maternal crisis.

A rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

Those with a hankering for willfully pretentious absurdity may find this festival entry right up their alley.

A successful experiment that’s highly attuned to the digital immediacy of our modern condition.

Diaz and Foxx still got it, the film constantly screams. The evidence on display, however, suggests otherwise.

A peerless example of using exacting form to not simply inform and enhance content, but to create a profound link between movie and moviegoer.

It isn’t a debacle, but it also won’t have genre aficionados howling for more.

[Gudegast] infuses his inspired-by-real-events tale with the muscularity of its metal-titan namesake, all while pivoting everything around the grungy, rugged charisma of his star.

Funny and charming as ever, it’s a welcome cinematic reprise for the British icons, even if this latest outing is slight enough to suggest that it might have been perfectly fine as a short.

Concise, clever, and unnerving, it’s a perfect film for the onset of winter.

Includes enough critical voices and material to complicate Johnson’s view about his actions and ethos—in the process undercutting the material’s superficial optimism.

Throws a bevy of familiar, rousing punches on its way to a feel-good finale. Yet in the fearsome eyes of Destiny, it boasts its own unique power.

Pulsates with harsh, anguished emotion, thanks in no small part to splendid visuals that make it the most beautiful film of the year.

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.

Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation.

A harrowing 215-minute epic of perseverance, trauma, exploitation, and anti-Semitism, it’s a bracing examination of the scars of war, the difficulty of recovery, and the genius, madness, and self-destruction begat by calamity.

Only receiving a multiplex release because Warner Bros had to do so in order to maintain the franchise’s theatrical rights, it’s inconsequential and hackneyed to the point of being forgettable.