Nicolas Rapold

Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke).

Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.

Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.

Directing his first feature after some shorts, John Magary digs into his characters with fresh eyes and a sly sense of adventure.

Blink keeps escaping any pat framing to tap into a deeper ache.

Science fiction has become such a mainstay of lumbering franchises that it’s hard not to root for left-field small-scale twists on the genre like the fizzy, funny Molli and Max in the Future.

Ali brings a matter-of-fact compassion to the experiences of three different people: Hanif, a Black Muslim man in Newark, and the two boys he is mentoring, Furquan and Naz.

Colman's performance comes as a revelation.

Roddy Bogawa’s Taken by Storm taps that intimate, thrilling ritual of another era: picking a record in a music store, beguiled by a mysterious album cover before the needle has even dropped.

It’s the no-nonsense filmmaking, seamlessly integrating even dreams and visions, that keeps us fixed on the bold line of the student’s trajectory, all the way through to a transcendent ending.

It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.

In the end, Dandelion feels like one artist’s emotional prequel, leaving us wishing for even more.

A Band Called Death is more concerned with bringing out the personal connections behind their driven music than with insisting upon the group’s distinction in the perennial music history search for oddities and firsts.

Out of the fractured family documentary, what emerges finally is a drama of self-realization.

The pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.

It’s an unexpected illustration of how psychiatric challenges can turn one’s life into a “shrinking world,” as Jennings puts it, and how to keep going.

Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed.

Kramer quietly but forcefully recognizes that the conflict cannot continue as it has.

The shrewdly observant film sticks with one Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to tell an emotional story that feels as significant as any analysis of troop numbers.

Landsberry-Baker and Peeler could linger more on details about the people involved instead of the horse-race suspense of vote counts. But who can blame them when freedom is in the balance, and as local media outlets dwindle nationally.

76 Days, which gets its title from the Wuhan lockdown imposed from January 23 to April 8, is defined more by the human capacity for resilience and compassion than by a relentless sense of doom (or by a focus on China’s policy decisions).

Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist’s optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in.

Though floridly written and relentlessly scored, the film's dramas are more persuasively framed than many human ones, going so far as to include multiple flashbacks.

The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.

[Campbell's] Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.

Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis, the activist and beacon of counterculture radicalism, is a snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it’s equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.

Amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.

While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others.