Robert Daniels

It’s difficult to believe The Lost Daughter is Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut. The rhythms of the narrative, the assured visual language, the precise performances she pulls from each actor moves with the confidence of a veteran filmmaker.

The Fire Inside, in a deceptively brilliant twist on the inspirational sports film, is a humanist story, whose every hard hitting beat and aching emotion is also truly earned.

A Crime on the Bayou never explodes with fury. But that doesn’t mean you won’t feel enraged while taking in the maddening series of systematic wrongs committed against Sobol and Duncan.

Peck’s film is a rich chronicling of Cole’s unique career, peerless artistry, political strength and moving end.

Devotion walks the tightropes between discord and harmony, hard lessons and heroic triumphs, and full-throated allyship and useless white guilt with aplomb.

If there’s one misstep to “The Bone Temple,” it’s the ending, which features a cameo that alters the tenor of the picture’s emotional hostility.

Foumbi’s Our Father, The Devil manages to take overused themes like trauma and grief and imbue them with every facet of their respective meaning.

Melodically vital and bracingly frank, Questlove’s uptempo Sundance documentary “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)” is a sonic kick to the soul.

McQueen doesn’t aim to achieve an arresting horror or to explain one person's grief. This urban interrogation is a frank interplay between survival and oblivion, selflessness and selfishness, continuity and demolition.

After the story of the Tulsa Massacre entered the national consciousness because of Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” and Misha Green’s “Lovecraft Country,” Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street this Memorial Day feels like the first time that the voices of the victims have finally been heard.

28 Years Later is a deeply earnest film, a picture whose sincerity is initially off putting until it’s endearing.

The film holds the kind of dumb, action beats and inventive kills, hokey yet fun dialogue that Hollywood used to be so good at producing. It remembers that villains can be wholly evil and that heroes can be bulletproof but still be engaging.

An unnerving character study that often borders on thriller territory, “The Things You Kill” is a psychologically intense piece of genre filmmaking.

It’s A Wonderful Knife has plenty of attributes—charm, blood, and angst—that should fit right in at any family holiday gathering.

It’s so refreshing to see an unhurried, patient documentary, one that trusts its audience to follow along rather than relying on cheap gimmicks to manipulate emotions.

"Sujo" is a direct, unvarnished window into the near inescapable pressure of cyclical violence.

While “Souleymane’s Story” throws many roadblocks in this Guinean man’s way, it’s pretty clear where we’re heading. And while that predictability does slightly undermine the weightiness of the journey, the ending, a cathartic revelation, is granted immeasurable pathos due to Sangaré’s overwhelming openness as an actor.

Unlike most other true-crime films, "The Order" isn't out to titillate or digress into exploitation. The film instead heeds to a strict hold on tone, mood and pacing that doesn't aim to manipulate the viewer but to slowly unravel them to the point of feeling as hollowed out as Husk. In the process, it furiously tears us apart

By making a film that says there is no complicated legacy to Riefenstahl, Veiel’s uncomplicated approach, supported by Riefenstahl’s own words, is strongly rendered into a direct, inarguable slashing of Riefenstahl’s importance.

It’s a profoundly Catholic work, whose slippery sense of sin and living instils great confusion and consternation to those occupying the narrative’s solemn monastery setting.

All Shall Be Well is a picture of cruel realities. It’s a deliberate, nimble drama, one about major slights, class imbalance, and rampant homophobia.

Visually evocative and uniquely conceived, Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones’s “Esta Isla” (“This Island”) is a lovers-on-the-run narrative unafraid to pause for emotional and thematic effect.

While this documentary doesn’t rise to the level of his masterwork “Exterminate All the Brutes,” the pain and anger, resolve, and courage that Peck captures in Silver Dollar Road make it a complex, intense document of the persistence of Black existence in a world hell-bent on erasure.

Blue Film, through its many frank observations, stands as a vulnerable work about one’s past colliding with one’s present, in a bid to make peace with one’s true self.

When The Woman King works, it’s majestic.

It’s very easy to dismiss a film about a hapless loser. But it’s nearly as difficult to ignore a performance like the one Rios gives.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.

This is an enchanting film. At every moment, one feels spellbound by its earnest aims and its heartwarming excursions.