Sheila O'Malley

At times, Blood, feels like a slightly-filled-out television police procedural with better cinematography, but the performances have an almost Shakespearean grandeur.

7 Boxes is both a tense and frightening crime film as well as a sometimes-dreamy evocation of life in the sprawling underclass, its hallucinatory aspects, its chaos and violence, its fantasies.

An engrossing and often thrilling spy drama, and a tribute to this courageous and diverse group of women.

Lisa Cortés uses the Big Bang as a visual motif throughout, with stars and galaxies exploding, hurtling out into the darkness. It is an apt analogy.

What it really is is a screwball comedy with a black-hearted center, an energy extremely difficult to capture and maintain, but Healy—as actor and as director—manages to do so.

Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, is an extreme movie, violent and pitiless and funny, but the space it provides for not just tenderness but contemplation makes it an "extremely" thought-provoking film as well.

Reality is a brutal film, with a short run-time and a story arc so strong it obliterates the memory of self-important complex films, weighted down with a "message," straining for relevance. Satter's film doesn't need to push. Reality wears its relevance on its fluorescent-lit short sleeves.

This potentially maudlin stuff is elevated by the work of all of the actors. What matters here is not just what is being said, but the emotions underneath.

Tigertail floats back and forth between the present and the past, an effective device that creates comparisons, often painful, between Pin-Jiu's hopes as a young man and the disappointments and hardships of the years following.

John Carney has a humorous and loving eye for detail, an intuitive ear for dialogue, and the film is extremely personal in a way that is universal.

The strength of Nine Days is not so much the scenario (although that is imaginative and well-constructed) but the mood Oda sets, the clarity with which he establishes this world, how it operates, its rules and traditions.

This is a great example of Olnek's style. It's respectful, but it's also alive. It's serious, but it's also tongue-in-cheek. Olnek's approach gives Emily room to breathe. At last.

Drowning Dry holds you at arm’s length, but I found it more moving—and unsettling—because of that.

There may be one too many obstacles placed in Prerna's way (the pet goat is a prime example), stacking the deck against her so there will be an even bigger payoff. But overall Skater Girl is so gratifying it doesn't matter.

Strawberry Mansion sacrifices nothing. It's whimsical but it's poignant, it's light-hearted and it's deep.

So spot-on in its evocation of that whole "scene," onstage and off — its intimacy, competition, struggles and rhythms — that at times it feels like a documentary.

EPiC is so vivid it makes Elvis seem not like an entertainer from the past, but a figure who lives in the perpetual Right Now.

In each of her films, Hansen-Løve has the patience to wait for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” the moment where something "small," something detailed and specific, reveals the universal. Things to Come is full of such moments.

Went Up the Hill doesn’t just explore grief, it expresses it.

Strategy combats chaos, strategy focuses people on one goal, and with strategy, winning is actually possible. That's what The Dark Horse is all about.

With all the humor, though, the film strikes an unexpectedly tender almost bittersweet chord, the humor shadowed by sorrow, loneliness, helplessness.

Mc Carthy understands the horror tropes intimately, but he uses them with freedom and freshness, lifting his films out of a specific genre. "Oddity" is a murder-mystery, a supernatural horror, and a home invasion thriller, all mixed together.

It’s a rambunctious, often hilarious, and carefully-constructed story about a teenage boy starting to question his sexuality in the midst of his Evangelical Christian world.

In "The Taste of Things," no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one."

Sin Alas has a lot going on, both plot-wise and stylistically, and it often gets quite theatrical, but the overall effect is that of a pure and beautiful simplicity. There is nothing in the way between the story and its impact.

An astonishing directorial debut.

The tensions in “Living the Land” are experienced in a bittersweet key. We are looking at Atlantis. The film is deeply mournful, but also pierced with joy.

The result is a film that is funny and sad, scary and sweet, disturbing and revelatory.