Noel Murray

Louder Than A Bomb is a different kind of high-school movie, brimming with life and hope instead of social-climbing, bullying, and furtive first kisses.

A Poem Is A Naked Person is littered with striking moments that fit casually into Blank’s study of fame and aspiration.

The cast and creative team’s memories are vivid and moving, as they describe — often while on the verge of tears — how this experience changed their lives, forged tight friendships and transformed their understanding of art, performance and what it means to be alive.

Is this the stuff of gripping drama? Not at all. But like nearly all of Kiarostami’s films, it’s the stuff of good conversation.

Though The Hunter maintains the same even tone after it turns into a chase thriller, the look begins to resemble the work of William Friedkin and Walter Hill in its clean, elemental approach to action.

For those who can’t abide conventional biopics, here’s a viable alternative: A Room And A Half, a fantastical, imaginative depiction of the life of Nobel-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

It’s simultaneously tricky and profound—a documentary about something small that gradually grows to cover so much more.

The craft of the film is undeniable. The artistry is subtler and perhaps harder to perceive. But it’s there, lurking in the dark, waiting to rise up when least expected.

The charming, rousing WWII romance Their Finest is a film that openly stumps for two causes: the value of women in the workplace, and the power of cinema to tell stories that people need to hear.

Creepy uses silence as a tool of terror, following its characters through long, tense scenes where everything’s a little too quiet, and where each creak sounds like a scream. The director has always excelled at making the ordinary seem unsettling.

With the help of some vivid old photographs, their documentary reconstructs a world that was both darkly dangerous and strangely liberating.

Beneath the affectations, there’s poetry in Kid-Thing, and truth in its depiction of how absolute freedom can be a kind of trap.

By sticking closely to a heroine who's skating on the edge of sanity, the film keeps the audience properly disoriented. Darkness runs deep in "The Lullaby," rooted in the never-ending conflict between mothers and daughters.

Intimate Stories stays doggedly, purposefully minor, in part because director Carlos Sorin and screenwriter Pablo Solarz want to explore the casual interactions of people doing nothing.

There's not much juice to the movie's central romantic triangle between money-minded boss Charlton Heston and his two star attractions, dueling trapeze artists Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde. Still, Jimmy Stewart does some appealingly subtle work as a clown on the run from the law, and DeMille's narration has a charming, corny, true-life-adventure quality, as he hypes the circus as a life-and-death proposition.

Still, even if The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson doesn’t wholly deliver on its premise, France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now.

It’s refreshing not to be led along or handled by a filmmaker, but given the almost-novelistic structure of The Father Of My Children--which juggles half a dozen or so major characters and follows their reaction to a crisis in obsessive detail--the movie could stand to be a little more dynamic.

Going strictly by plot description, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox sounds a little like an Indian knock-off of a Nicholas Sparks movie, but it plays out more like Brief Encounter.

Quietly, persuasively, Tokyo Waka asks whether cultures decline by pouring resources into propping up entities that can no longer support themselves.

From scene to scene, Lopez and Caro do fill these broad outlines with real feeling, bringing a personal touch to old pulp archetypes.

Well-plotted, with a strong lead performance by Michael Shannon, and a fair amount of authentic regional flavor. It isn't really meant to be a treatise on Southern life. At heart, it's a country-fried genre film, minus the peppery white gravy.

Someone as attuned as Varda to the quality of an image should know that a flat, disposable medium like video makes images harder to internalize.

The film’s as eclectic as it is eccentric, and it stays true to its own twisted sense of poetry, all the way to an epilogue that’s somehow even odder than anything that came before.

Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.

Regular Lovers isn't a folly-of-youth story that aches with emotion, like "Au Revoir," "Les Enfants" or "The Squid And The Whale." It's drier, and simpler.

Witty, disgusting, eye-popping, and incomprehensible, The Holy Mountain is every bit as pop-philosophical as Jodorowsky's earlier work, but it also contains original visual ideas nearly every 30 seconds, from frogs in armor to crucifixes made out of painted bread.

For the first 90 minutes or so, there’s remarkable vibrancy and spontaneity to this picture, as its creators and stars seem to be coming up with their story on the spot, with the cameras rolling. They seem inspired and excited. The mood is infectious.

Builds slowly--maybe too slowly--to a mano-a-mano standoff, just like "The Twilight Samurai," and just like the earlier film, the new one presents its climactic swordfight matter-of-factly, with no superheroics and a lot of hesitation.

This film has a worthy goal: to change the perspectives of people who might be hurting right now. For those willing to go with its flow, it has a real power.

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

In keeping with Jóhann Jóhannsson's score - alternately ominous, triumphant, and elegiac - The Miners' Hymns plays on the broader emotions of the subject. The film is all about the mysterious world down below, how camaraderie turned to conflict, and the nagging feeling of loss.

It’s more gentle and fanciful in tone, and though it’s as episodic and digressive as Jodorowsky’s best-known work, the various pieces add up to a clear, not-so-odd narrative.

Think of Not Quite Hollywood as a vividly illustrated catalogue of astonishing smut.

Tim’s Vermeer is more of an engineering lecture. And while it’s edifying in and of itself, it’s almost more fascinating because of the reasons it never transforms into anything else.

While the game Chevalier keeps evolving into something darker, the movie Chevalier is fairly static. The style’s unchanging throughout, holding to a slow pace and a muted sense of humor.

While Harvey does a fine job evoking the violent, character-driven crime pictures of the 1970s, he can’t quite make Into the Ashes feel original enough to be vital.

A lollapalooza of a twist ending elevates Isolated, a suspense film that for much of its first 75 minutes is just another well-acted, slickly produced variation on a too-common horror subgenre.

For a movie that’s so photo-realistic in its backgrounds and detailed in its character design, Ghost In The Shell is just as effective when it goes minimal, suggesting presence through absence.

It’s more a feel-good recap of an impressive championship run. But the game analysis is keen, and the arc of this story is undeniably inspiring, arguing that victory is sweeter when it springs from a common purpose.

García apparently prefers ambiguity, implying all sorts of heavy backstory for each of his leads but leaving the details vague, and he lets his actresses carry the baggage in their performances alone.

Even though Gondry and Chomsky’s very different sensibilities don’t mesh in such a way that either man’s work gains substantially from the alliance, they’re each such good company individually that Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is still entertaining.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Every scene of The Killing Fields (and every participant in its making) is in service of showing how abruptly a seemingly safe and vital individual can have everything essential stripped away.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (best-known for their Terry Gilliam behind-the-scenes docs Lost In La Mancha and The Hamster Factor) have made The Bad Kids in the “fly on the wall” mold of Frederick Wiseman, crossed with the “year-in-the-life” storytelling of Hoop Dreams. The structure of Black Rock itself is one of their biggest narrative assets.

More essay than documentary—and by no means a monster movie--Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo takes a closer look at the Japanese obsession with insect-collecting, and considers it as a partial explanation of the country’s national character.

It's the most obvious point that actually rings truest: that Wilder's sketchy vision of life, love, and death is as funny and moving as it ever was.

Patience reveals through images and tone as well as through the interviews how Sebald yearned for restorative meaning in the places he toured, only to end up lost in thought.

Here’s a seemingly twee movie that ultimately, surprisingly argues that some music isn’t for everybody, some people are too broken to fix, and some would-be artists are better off in the audience.

For all Crowley's reliance on quiet naturalism, Boy A ultimately steals a page from film noir, showing how guilt and constant hounding can turn any ex-con into the desperate animal everyone presumes him to be.

What’s missing from The Punk Singer is real friction or ambiguity.

Because the movie plays on so many common fears - including fears of being in a remote house with big windows when intruders arrive - the confusion of Martha Marcy May Marlene proves effective, not sloppy.

If nothing else, Terror's Advocate offers a useful summary of the last half-century of global politics, and how changing public perceptions can make goats out of heroes.

Kohn’s talking heads are remarkably animated and, collectively, the interviews present a provocative debate about the meaning of “valuable.”

For the many, many viewers who’ve never heard of Dream Alliance, Osmond’s documentary is edge-of-the-seat stuff.

The director deserves kudos for setting her movie during such a gray, dreary Toronto winter. It couldn't have been easy to find a climate that so resembles adolescence.

It’s a little frustrating at first to realize that Huber isn’t going to get much explanation of anything from Stanton. But she ends up making a virtue of the actor’s Zen calm.

May be too heady to take in one sitting. Even given relatively calm passages-like a hushed tour through the courtyard of a Scottish castle or a mediation on ripples in a pond-there's just too much to absorb.

It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.

The film is really all of a piece in the way it toys with expectations, keeping viewers off-balance. Stevens and company put the audience in the place of both the predator and prey. They’ve built a clever little anxiety-generating machine.

There’s a lot to see and to think about here, all well-curated by a documentarian with a clear passion for his subject.

Darkest Hour dwells at a very particular point between “exaggerated for dramatic effect” and “how it really was.” The star embraces the challenge of that tricky balance, simultaneously playing a cartoon and a person.

As tense and taut as any crime saga, but the stakes are more personal.

Nimona is imaginative and boisterous, just like its main character — the kind of inspirational free spirit who gets a kick out of shocking and tormenting anyone who won’t just let her be who she is.

All the nudity in Zerophilia is either prosthetic or body-doubled. Which means the sex scenes--and the feeling and meaning behind them--are just as phony.

Too shaggy at times, with digressions into science and history that come out flat and awkward. But there's a sweet, unshakeable poetry in the main idea of the film.

A historical epic with elements of wu xia, supernatural thrillers, and drawing-room murder mysteries.

Collectively, the mixed approaches illuminate a complicated man, at once spiritual and temperamental.

The result is something visually dazzling and emotionally resonant, though likely to appeal primarily to youngsters and genre buffs.

Crude is so crammed with facts and figures that it can be a little dizzying, but what’s more important is what Berlinger records between all the talking-head interviews and vérité footage.

The Stunt Man still thrills as a witty, sly, action-packed mind game.

This lively and at times moving film explains, eloquently, why Hawk has endured in popular culture — and why he can’t stop risking his bones to master the maneuvers few can do.

While the material here is thin and largely predictable (aside from one great jump scare), the cast is outstanding and the dialogue is snappy, delivered at a brisk pace.

What makes Super Dark Times one of the most exciting American filmmaking debuts in recent years is how well Phillips and company grasp both the intensity and ephemerality of adolescence.

The greatest achievement of Middle Of Nowhere is that DuVernay and Corinealdi make Ruby’s big decision believable, by showing how it’s really just been a series of smaller choices.

Flags as it heads toward a moralistic ending, complete with a couple of contrived (albeit charged) sexual encounters, but it's heartening that it soars as long as it does.

Seems too subtle at times and too obvious at others, but Hamer strings together pieces of conversation and layers of voyeurism (everybody in the movie is watching somebody) into a moving study of the perils of presumption.

Up to the last five minutes, Poison Friends stays true to that heady, idealistic-to-a-fault world of academia.

At times, Treeless Mountain almost feels like a fairy tale--but without the magic.

The relentless negativity in Must Read After My Death can become overwhelming at times, but it's undeniably mesmerizing.

Guerrilla still holds up as social history, primarily because its description of seething frustration in a divided America has become spookily relevant.

Anjelica Huston's directorial debut employs an impressive cast, and at times showcases a promising sense of style. But Bastard Out Of Carolina seems hollow at its center, due largely to the fact that Anne Meredith's screenplay doesn't make very good use of its source material.

If the film has a significant flaw, it's that Venditti never explains in the film how she found Billy, or why she's interested in him. Billy The Kid often plays more like an extended home movie than something intentional and artful.

Studio Ghibli productions have always been adept at making the fantastic seem real, but with Whisper Of The Heart, Kondo and Miyazaki focus so intensely on the everyday that they make the real seem fantastic.

About 30 years ahead of its time, Blast of Silence follows a hit man (Baron) who heads to New York over the holidays and finds the Christmas spirit interfering with his killer instincts. [13 Apr 2008, p.E10]

The Great Flood works as a wordless narrative of human endurance, showing communities gathering to stack sandbags, then gathering again to dig out of the muck after their previous efforts failed.

Grant and Kermani skillfully keep the audience in suspense from start to finish, even if it’s just by withholding what the heck is actually happening.

It might've mattered to the audience too, if we had any inkling from the first hour of The Robber who this guy is, or why we should care what happens to him.

A documentary that’s both impressionistic and informative—admiring the magic of dance even in its formative stages, while also turning the making of art into a kind of procedural.

On the list of Disney-related 2016 releases about child-rearing and handicaps, this one goes just above "Finding Dory." What it lacks in wacky hijinks, it makes up in hard truths.

Prodigal Sons comes packed with multiple hooks. Aside from the sex-change angle, the movie takes a turn when Marc---whom Reed’s parents adopted before she was born--learns that he’s the biological son of Rebecca Welles, and the grandchild of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

Maybe this picture is just a string of wacky ideas, with no deeper meaning. But for those who take the ride, it’s an hour and 17 minutes they’re unlikely to forget.

This is a smart, melancholy crime picture, which takes its cues from the title of the perverse old standard Christensen plays on her stereo at night: “You Always Hurt The One You Love.”

The documentary seems a little structureless and unfocused at times, as Akers moves from dramatic moment to dramatic moment, not always taking care to connect them.

The Bridesmaid goes slack at times, as it follows multiple Magimel family subplots, but as always, Chabrol stages everything with an elegant economy, moving the camera in short bursts that direct the eye but don't distract. Still, the movie would fail completely if not for the dynamic between the two leads.

The story takes a while to get going, then rambles a lot once the premise has been established. And the dialogue zooms along so fast that it can be hard to follow. But young filmmakers are supposed to take chances like this.

Intentionally or unintentionally, there's a degree of accusation to The Woodmans that's discomfiting, almost as if Willis is indicting Francesca's parents for being so self-involved-even though they're just answering his questions as honestly as they can.

By showing the exhausting diligence that goes into moments of pure transcendent joy onstage, this doc should make new fans for Giordano’s living museum.