Nikola Grozdanovic

Petzold distills a familiar atmosphere to create a work veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power.

Hell or High Water might walk over familiar ground with second-hand boots in terms of character development and structural beats, but it does so with great personality and zero pretension of wanting to be anything more.

The theories in Level Five simultaneously thrive in realms of computer science, ethnography, and cognitive psychology, while the picture remains cloaked by the emotional weight of a historical tragedy that marked an entire nation.

This is Brando on Brando, and it's scintillating stuff.

A work of immense and intense emotional vigor, sprinkled with fun-loving traits and intellectually stimulating prowess, The Duke of Burgundy is the stuff dreams are made of.

It’s a searing series of accounts from dignified patriots, weary politicians, and desperate civilians stuck in a frantic situation, and a remarkable piece of work that should be seen by everyone who thinks they know everything about the Vietnam War.

If you have the patience to play the role of silent witness for the full two hours, Maidan is a rewarding experience and an alarmingly important wake-up call for those still in the dark about one of today's most critical situations.

Cary Bell’s Butterfly Girl is no reality TV show segment, it’s painstaking reality itself, told in confident style.

Tremendously evocative and inherently enchanting, Horse Money is one of the year’s most profound films and an essential step forward for both Ventura the Cape Verdean, and Pedro Costa the artist.

The film delves deep into the soul of a fundamentally important cause, with a slice-of-life look at a time in history that feels incredible urgent in today’s torn-up world.

Katz, with the help of an inspired cast and an emotionally intelligent and mature screenplay, has succeeded in depicting the trials and tribulations of adults who, all for respectfully different yet equally weighty reasons, often make a three-year-old the most mature person in the room.

Steeped in a culture rarely observed on screen, Bustamante's film has the airs of a documentary. Its ensemble cast of local actors have zero trace of affectation in their performances.

Ultimately, the main source of power behind The Second Mother is found in its effortless skips between character study, family drama, and silent socioeconomic warfare. The final result is a gleaming cinematic treasure as heartwarming as the film's final reassuring smile.

This isn’t a story of success and fortune, but a slice of life with a personal rhythm and a universal beat.

Twinsters is an enjoyable ride, made with vigorous love and creativity, which is more than enough reason to recommend it. Especially to siblings.

Uninspired films utilizing cinematic devices that felt old decades ago are a regrettable part of the cinematic viewing experience, and The Forger squarely falls into this category.

The film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.

The force of originality felt in the narrative is only matched by Bellocchio's execution.

Elemental in construct and narrative, the picture breathes through the screen during Theeb's moments of quiet reflection at his surroundings and all the cruelty the vast, all-encompassing desert has to offer.

Once it becomes clear that this is no mere murder mystery, and the bizarre turns into the ludicrous and into the depraved, Dumont’s analysis of life’s toughest questions (reaching for an understanding of the very essence of evil) as told through the simplest of ways becomes tremendously captivating. And it’s worth noting, again, just how laugh-out-loud funny this is.

While the performances are the key to the success of Lullaby, it is Levitas’ heartfelt and personal story (his inspiration for writing it came from his own family experience) that provides the necessary tools for these actors to work with.

The biggest lesson to take away from I, Daniel Blake is how a movie doesn’t have to be psychologically complex or cinematically dazzling to dig beyond its surface. It’s rudimentary in terms of technique, but how the film generates its power is through the themes of humanity and kindness at its center.

In systematic and cinematically dazzling fashion, Loznitsa’s nihilistic riff will drag you to a circle of hell that makes Dante’s “Inferno” look like a love sonnet, and you’ll walk out of the film feeling woozy, defeated and utterly destroyed, in that order.

Once it ends, you may be panting from exhaustion while still appreciating that Endless Poetry is greater than the sum of its parts as it feels naturally necessary and appropriately organic to the series.

This is an exquisitely shot suburban tale of trauma, stretching the “show-don’t-tell” golden rule of filmmaking to the furthest reaches.

Amalric puts all of the esoteric artistic tendencies that are part and parcel of the creative process into “Barbara” and comes up with an incoherent mess of a docu-drama. The entire film feels like a playful experiment that never evolves beyond a concept, like an unlit cigarette, never getting the spark it needs to fulfill its purpose.

Cloaked in a mystifying atmosphere and possessed by a transfixing, amorphous mood, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Evolution is a beautifully strange hybrid of innocence and disturbance.

While zooming in and out of Burre’s life, Greene foregoes true insight in favor of a stylistic approach, using the kind of cinematic language that’s often reserved for fiction and feature films, and the result leaves you admiring Actress greatly, but from a distance.

Dosch, though she’s been appearing more and more in French films of recent years (including Maïwenn’s “My King”), will make heads turn in the role of her career thus far. Her Paula is instantly charming, never too outrageous, hilarious and supremely sympathetic. She will steal your heart.

By the time the curtains draw to a bittersweet close, you’ll walk out feeling rejuvenated, satisfied, well replenished in humor and culture, and already planning your own trip to Italy.

There's a tangible sensitivity to Kate Plays Christine that is constantly present as the project explores two personas and a gamut of topics (gender politics, gun control, and depression among them).

Two actors. Two locations. Two laptops. One bittersweet movie.

With her underdeveloped, dismissive, screenplay and myopic direction, Rondòn is as delicate with her theme as Michael Bay is with his American flag shots or Tim Burton with his kitschy quirkiness. That hers is a serious context makes it that much more disappointing.

It's a wonderful thing to experience a film unshackled from Hollywood conventionality and unburdened by the necessity for simplistic storytelling.

By pointing their camera at the Red Mosque, Trivedi and Naqvi add surprisingly little to the conversation.

With his monumental control of the camera —at times staying with characters during quiet moments of anticipation, at others panning slowly 360 degrees to envelop us in the entirety of the environment— Davies directs the most refined coming-of-age story cinema has seen in recent years.

Tired, lazy, incongruous, shocking and hilarious in all the wrong places, Rage is destined for the graveyard television slot, squeezed between infomercials for mops.

As an austere and darkly comic family drama, and a scathing commentary about the kind of world our children are living in, Happy End is stunning cinema

Laura Poitras has done it again. Much like the celebrated Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, “Risk” is instilled with a sense of immediate urgency as an apprehensive cloud hovers over every action, every word, every wayward glance.

What it lacks in cinematic girth, it makes up for in factual appeal.

Even if you don’t agree with Jarmusch’s introductory claim that The Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band ever, there’s still a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from Gimme Danger; most of it coming from Iggy’s love of the band, the music, and inability to be anyone but his incomparable and uncompromising self.

Infidelity has long been one of Hong’s central subjects, but The Day After might just be his greatest film about the ails of mixing business with pleasure.

It’s a profoundly vague piece of filmmaking that hides an undeniable magnetism beneath its bare-boned narrative.

The film is a boilerplate biopic, but with stunning cinematography and a couple of fierce performances, The Theory of Everything is nothing if not an accomplished and emotional work of cinema.

Dior And I succeeds in bringing this exclusive world down to earth, knitting the viewer with its needles and threads and making a highly relatable story, no matter where you come from or how you feel about fashion.

While it makes its point half-way into its running time and you start getting the anxious jitters of a film that overstays its welcome, A Ciambra serves the fundamental cinematic purpose of transporting you to another world.

John McNaughton’s return after too many years of absence is a dark look at the nature of overprotective parenthood, and how volatile it can become under particularly difficult circumstances. With that said, you’d do well not to take The Harvest too seriously but more, like its deliciously simple and 70s B-movie horror title suggests, as a wickedly fun time.

This is a film that should, at the very least, make one appreciate the all-encompassing breadth of cinema, and, at most, provoke deeper thought of transcendental existence in correlation with nature and The Idea of Man.

The cinematic trickery on display – lurid dissolves, off-kilter juxtapositions, and bizarre dance numbers bouncing around Chloe’s brittle mindscape – compensates for the skin-deep thematics, and keep the rhythm of the film popping.

What makes Amour Fou a fascinating, if at times frustratingly idle experience, is that it seems to be saying so much with its upfront style, injections of black humor, and focus on stifled feminine disposition, yet still feels disappointingly unresponsive when mulling it over in your head.

The film's MVPs are Bryan Cranston's dedicated performance as the title character, and, appropriately, John McNamara's jocular screenplay, with a terrific ensemble of supporters also along for the ride back to Hollywood's notorious past

None of this would be as funny if it was done by anyone other than Wiig, who has never been funnier. Her crass, narcissistic, capricious Alice is her greatest creation.

The Kindergarten Teacher is too lackadaisical in its execution to be as profound as it thinks it is.

Alive Inside contains a tiny revolution within its message, and will likely end up being one of the most important documentaries of the year.

A dysfunctional structure and some bizarre plotting stop the film from reaching greatness, but never from being endearingly satisfying.

It’s a finely tuned and tenderly detailed love story of two people told on a cosmic scale.

The BFG exceeds expectations thanks to Rylance’s performance, and joyously expounds the essence of a cherished children’s tale in all of its imaginative glory.

From the performances to the repetitive jokes and bizarre actions that have little bearing on anything, Slack Bay exhausts you with its intense spirit.

Last Passenger is a good antithesis to the overloaded and cluttered action Hollywood seems to love nowadays. If you're not feeling especially picky on plot or character, you won't go wrong with this compelling and stylish train thriller.

Though Manos Sucias, like the compelling local songs used to supplement the melancholic mood, often feels like fragments of a picture glued together by a temporary adhesive, the experience will leave you believing that you've just witnessed something very real and, even with its all-too-short running time, still manages to pack quite a punch.

Metro Manila is a horror story in its own unflinching way.

Sadly, the core of ‘Fade’ is essentially banal, and the narrative is too blunt and inert to make any kind of lasting impression.

Without the performances and splash of style as support, the film would collapse, because the story is indisputably boxed inside a square of standard dimensions.

Carefully balancing stereotypes with tasteful comedy, De Felitta has his three leads and a generally refreshing screenplay to thank for making Rob The Mob a joy to watch.

Like an epic sonnet, with beautiful accompanying music and songs, “Eleanor Rigby” deals with memory, perception and the emotional toll a relationship can have on an individual as much as it deals with the more grandiose themes of love and loss.

Purposefully joyless and bereft of any kind of aesthetic gratification other than the one found in Mendoza’s use of cinema verite and non-sentimental approach, Ma’ Rosa is tough-as-nails, and leaves you with a heaviness and a pulsating sympathy that’s impossible to ignore.

On both technical and thematic levels, the filmmakers have succeeded in using the tools of cinema to carve out an authentic look at troubled youth, and the choices we have to make in order to steer away from the wrong path.

Under The Influence is ultimately much more of a listening pleasure than a viewing one. Neville's by-the-book direction makes sure of that. That said, Richards is an undeniably magnetic force of nature that keeps the attention span reined in for the swift 80-minute runtime.

Hayek's passion project is a stimulating success for the senses.

Fumbling between broad comedic strokes you’d find in a Disney film and the kind of darkness that usually creeps out of heavy Danish dramas, “Two Lovers And A Bear” is tonally off-kilter on top of failing to engage on any deeper level.

Haemoo is a picture worth seeing for its thrills, scrupulous tension-building and mischievous genre twists that will have you gasping one second, and laughing the next.

The documentary struggles to remain relevant throughout its short run time, and wobbles between glorification and reflection until it completely tilts over.

As aesthetically dazzling as this picture is, with hypnotic compositions carved through meticulous mise-en-scene, there are certain conventional lines which — when crossed — must warrant good reason. In this case, the activity on the screen must be immersive and interesting enough to balance out the physical endurance asked of the viewer by the creator.

Still The Water is at its enchanting best when depicting the mysteries of death and the conflicts of trying to come to terms with it.

As compelling as R100 is in spurts, it's ultimately an exercise in excessiveness that only a niche audience will be able to fully stomach.

The Grand Seduction reeks of a pleasantness that makes for a very soothing watch. The lack of character depth and the contrived plot won’t be placing it near any top ten lists, but there are far worse ways to spend two hours in a theatre these days.

Perez appears content with representing UFW's past strikes and boycotts like a segment from the History Channel, while having the interviewees—relatives, people who worked closely with Chavez—focus on how much good Chavez has done, rather than how he has impacted them.

You’ll walk away almost certain that you’ve seen a decent thriller, but your thoughts may stumble on the word “thrill.”

As visually arresting as Kornél Mundruczó’s latest film Jupiter’s Moon undoubtedly is, it remains too intellectually imprisoned within its own allegorical confines to make a truly positive impact.

Ullmann’s version of Miss Julie exists in a special cinematic category; it’s toxic, it’s hypnotic, and passionately translates Strindberg’s genius instinct for enlightening the multi-layered psychological spectrums of human desire for lust and power. It’s unforgettable in every sense of the word.

It’s all fun and games and one big, great joke as we watch the cantankerous Jean-Luc dismiss his admirers and spit on contemporary cinema, but it’s hard to praise Redoubtable as a great film once its final act comes around

All of that star-making and directorial grace Scherfig possesses is substituted for a bludgeoning attempt at provoking the British elite into taking a long hard look at themselves through a cracked mirror. She retains her confrontational sensibilities with none of the subtlety, and hammers a single message to mind-numbing effect.

It’s a narrative vacuum big enough to make you mad at this melancholy werewolf drama for not being, at the very least, good.

Camp X-Ray is as transparent in its message as the title suggests, and the scan shows a malignant tumor in the very bones of the film’s structure. An on-the-nose approach smothers all subtext into submission and leaves nothing of interest alive.

A couple of exhilarating cycling scenes, and a pretty solid lead performance, does not a good movie make.

It’s a love story set in a contemporary world brimming with immigration issues, but it manages to be neither political drama, nor bubbly romance, somehow getting away with being labeled as a comedy.

It has all the makings for Green to find that sweet-spot between drama and comedy, and make something special. Instead, we're left with something exasperatingly bland and almost claustrophobically generic.

Thanks to deplorable direction by Paco Cabezas, and a childishly broad screenplay by Max Landis, Mr. Right ends up all wrong.

Perhaps through time this hallucinatory quasi-dream of a biopic will grow in stature, but as first impressions go, the film loves itself so much it renders itself beautiful, but utterly shallow.

Thanks to a few exemplary moments of monumental acting from Hoffman, truly harmonious singing from the boys, and a graceful score by Brian Byrne, Boychoir is, at its best, a comfortable viewing and listening pleasure.

With a bare minimum amount of suspense, and a screenplay that needs too much work for one that has so many long stretches of silence, this film leaves you with too many reasons not to care about it.

Some intriguing dialogue, and a closet full of fantastic frocks, can’t help an impressive ensemble cast save A Little Chaos from being a lackadaisical picture, far removed from anything remotely exciting as chaos.

This outer space oddity is destined for the cult-classic section of some future camp horror and sci-fi B-movie aisle.

Too many times, Trash asks the audience to trust its characters and their words unconditionally by throwing around terms like "change," "hope," and "rights" with no basis whatsoever.

There are moments when the fabrication behind Claire’s arc breaks to reveal a real person, and the filmmaker’s have Aniston to thank for this, because it’s certainly not the bland dialogue or unremarkable events.

The acting is as inspired as the screenplay allows, which just isn't enough to add any kind of conviction to the events that transpire on screen.

With a unique blend of style and content, an escalating discomfort in atmosphere, a score that sounds like it was spawned from the nether regions of hell, and three ferocious performances, Hungry Hearts is this year’s most unique horror film.

The silent scenes, which hold so much power in the first act, feel emptier and emptier, as the conclusion nears. Moments where Halpern’s score felt like it was adding to what was on screen, turn to moments where it’s compensating for the lack of interest.