Sheila O'Malley

A powerful and thoughtful film, it is also not what it at first seems, which is part of the point Polley appears to be interested in making. Can the truth ever actually be known about anything?

Director Wheatley has already shown his aptitude for sardonic horror-commentaries, and Sightseers is his best film to date. Sightseers is dark, gruesome, blithely amoral and thoroughly entertaining.

It's a great film, engrossing, suspenseful, and strange.

It's a courageous film that's willing to sit in those moments instead of underlining them or hurrying past them, hoping we get the shorthand. Love is Strange is a patient film. The emotions it unleashes are enormous.

Both Sides of the Blade is a romance, a love triangle, a marriage drama, an infidelity narrative, all familiar ground, but Denis' approach is her own.

Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

May December is one of Haynes' most unbalancing and provocative films.

Good One is intriguing in its disinterest in explanations. The film's refusal to "satisfy" an audience with easy explanations or even cathartic moments pulls you into its atmosphere, dragging you into the weird dynamic which grows more claustrophobic by the moment.

Alice Diop understands how silence, when allowed to exist, vibrates with echoes, and it is these echoes that are trying to speak to us. They have a lot to say. "Saint Omer" shows us how to listen.

Gimme the Loot is thrilling, although there aren't any stereotypically "thrilling" sequences. The thrill comes from the compulsively watchable dynamic between the two leads (non-professional actors, both of them), the excellent supporting cast (also non-professionals), and the fun use of multiple locations throughout the bustling metropolis.

The Souvenir Part II is more, though, than Julie's progression towards a completed film. It could be called, with apologies to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

The Assistant, a very good film, is especially good on power dynamics.

Leave No Trace is, at times, heartbreaking, but it's also filled with glimpses of almost casual human kindness, throwaway moments of good will and inclusion piercing through what could be the bleakest of tales.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

How on earth Patterson made a movie about a UFO hovering over a small town in the late 1950s without falling back on every cliche in the book is the fun and wonder of The Vast of Night. You already know the plot. You've seen it all before. But the way the story is told is new. With The Vast of Night, it really is about the how, not just the "what happens."

Watchers of the Sky, an intricate and immensely powerful documentary, directed by Edet Belzberg, is both the story of Raphael Lemkin as well as a harrowing examination of genocide, past, recent, and ongoing.

Crimson Peak's atmosphere crackles with sexual passion and dark secrets. There are a couple of monsters (supernatural and human), but the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen.

So many documentaries cut away from performances, thinking we only want a glimpse of it to get the gist before shuttling on to the next thing. What a joy to be given the space to settle in and let Tina take you where she wants you to go.

Everything in The Justice of Bunny King—the clothes, the car, the decor, Bunny's sharpened eyeliner pencil, the plastic cake box, the worn-out bra—hasn't been carefully placed in the frame. They were there before the camera started rolling, and they will be thereafter.

"D-Man" is one of the most eloquent works of art to come out of the AIDS era, and it continues to be done by dance companies around the world. Can You Bring It shows the challenges inherent in this, but is also an essential reminder—to people who sorely need it—of just how bad it really was "back then"...

In "Here," what matters is not what is offered, but the act of offering itself.

Watching Kristen Wiig's lived-in and alive performance as this blunt, practical, and yet totally innocent woman is to be in the presence of something very very special.

Polsky is so honest he has to add a question mark to the film’s declarative title. This slight detachment, this hesitation to believe without question, makes Polsky the best of guides.

Based on Jonathan Ames' novella of the same name, the film is rooted so firmly in Joe's point of view he sometimes is absent from the screen entirely. We're inside his head.

Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and Aftersun understands this. The multi-level awareness is not in the dialogue, but it's there in the film's gentle rhythms, the editorial choices, the patience and sensitivity of Wells' approach.

I am a cat owner, I admit, but even I was surprised at the power of Kedi. Where did all that emotion come from? It's because what Torun really captures in her unexpectedly powerful film is kindness in its purest form.

Harrowing, unpredictable, painful, confrontational, this is a movie for grown-ups.

Under the Shadow, a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed by Babak Anvari, creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with great first features, add Under the Shadow to the list.

Heal the Living is director Katell Quillévéré's third feature, and shows her humane vision of the interconnectedness of humans and the fragile miracle of life. The plot comes straight out of any hospital-based episodic, but it's Quillévéré's approach that is so unique, and ultimately, so powerful.

This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive piece of work.

Delusion feeds addiction, and addiction needs a constant supply of delusion. Uncut Gems shows this electrified-fence feedback loop like no other film in recent memory. It's excruciating and exhilarating.

Keegan's writing is spare and controlled: she gets a lot done in 116 pages, and Walsh's adaptation captures the suggested interiority of the story.

Only 90 minutes long, the film feels intimate and yet at the same time vast. It has a relaxed pace, but an intensity of focus.

Alexander Nanau's Collective has a propulsive energy, relentlessly building in urgency and outrage.

Even with all the sexual trauma, The Chronology of Water manages the impossible, making a lot of the sex Lidia has as an adult look not just fun and playful, but mind-blowing and revelatory. Reclaiming your sexuality after having it stolen from you as a child is a huge, huge deal.

Vesuvius might erupt again. The angel of history keeps moving forward. Time destroys, preserves, and then returns (one hopes, at least). Rosi’s film is a meditative and moving document showing that process and possibility.

No Other Land is a portrait of relentless cruelty, but it is also a portrait of the resilience of this besieged community.

Played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Vincent is a tormented and inarticulate man, and the riveting center of Alice Winocour's sexy, relentless thriller Disorder.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

Emotions never before experienced come surging to the surface. How Martinessi pulls this off — in what is his first feature — is nothing less than extraordinary.

Annette is an exhilarating and exuberant experience.

The Swerve is the opposite of comforting.

The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity.

A riotous medieval-era sex romp played with lunatic conviction by a great cast.

Would the magic hold? The magic holds. It holds from beginning to end.

Chained for Life is more than a polemic. There's a free-floating absurdist mood established, humorous and self-referential, allowing space for the audience to not just feel, but think. This is no small feat.

Foster is masterful in evoking a child's point of view.

The resilience in Scrapper is a type of lived creativity, an imaginative space where Georgie—and her father—make up their own rules and their own world. This is an amazing directorial debut.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

Super Dark Times has a deeply unnerving mood, more unnerving than "what happens."

The Cathedral marries form to content in a striking way.

Thankfully, Eileen doesn't betray its source material by turning Eileen into something more palatable and sympathetic, but the film loses something in the transfer.

Queen & Slim is not interested in "neutral tints" either. Or "understatement." I appreciated the "big mood" of it all, even in those sequences that don't quite work. I responded strongly to the film's sense of scope and scale. The "rhetoric" of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.

Megan Leavey is that rare breed: a war movie that actually shows something new about war, a sub-culture within a familiar sub-culture, the world of the military's K-9 units. For that alone, it should be applauded.

The Mad Women's Ball is part psychodrama and part melodrama, and it wears those mantles proudly and confidently. Each scene throbs with urgency and emotion. Nothing is unimportant. At the same time, the film is highly controlled, with a taut assured script.

Ma is more about its visuals than anything else.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

You may think you know where it is going. And maybe you're right. But how the film gets there is a very different matter.

An effective and creepy-surreal film.

Lucky indulges in all of the horror movie "tropes" but it does so with a purpose.

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.

The darkness of "All We Imagine as Light" isn't darkness at all. The darkness is filled with light.

Suzi Q is a portrait of Quatro's journey and her influence on the generations that came after. Most importantly, it is a history lesson for those who may not be aware of Quatro. As Joan Jett, one of the many people interviewed, says, "[Suzi] really should be one of those people who should be much more discussed, much more in the lexicon of musicians—especially being so early."

Cliches aside, there's something at work in The Peanut Butter Falcon, something eccentric and exuberant. Nilson and Schwartz's devotion to the details of Zac's world highlights Gottsagen's funny and intelligent performance, giving the film an authenticity it wouldn't otherwise have.

You’d think we would be Emma-ed out by now. Not so. The new adaptation, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and directed by Autumn de Wilde, is here, and it’s wonderful!

This is the kind of film that tells its story well while simultaneously showing the joy of the creative act, in Bravo's filmmaking, yes, but also in Zola's decision to take to Twitter and tell her story in the first place.

Blinded by the Light, at its very best, captures the experience of being a fan, the pure exhilaration of it, and the sense of your vision opening out to vistas beyond your horizon.

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

Children absorb everything, good and bad, all the stresses, heartbreak, anxiety of the adults around them. Children can handle the difficult things. Oyelowo knows this and respects it.

The film is very smart, most of all because it resists the urge to devolve into a sentimental redemption narrative. This is a daring comedy with a very sharp bite.

Along with Jarmusch, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave.

Comedy being what it is, your mileage may vary, but for me the pure candy-colored exuberant silliness of Barb and Star didn't just make me laugh. It provided solace, too.

The extraordinarily assured feature film debut by writer-director and standup comedian Bo Burnham, starts out with one of these videos and it is so touchingly real, so embarrassingly true to life, you might swear it was improvised, or found footage. But it's not. This is Elsie Fisher, a 13-year-old actress herself, amazingly in touch with what it's like to be in the stage of life she's actually in.

Watching Krisha is a revelation: there are expected "rules" for such material (a former addict returns home for a holiday), but then director/writer Trey Edward Shults breaks every rule, making those rules seem tired and arbitrary in the process, and he does so with bravura, confidence, flash.

Based on the autobiographical book Everything Went Well by the late Emmanuèle Bernheim (a frequent Ozon collaborator), Everything Went Fine is an emotional and complex portrait of a family in crisis, the father's stroke exposing underlying cracks, old pains, new anxieties.

Shia LaBeouf wrote the script, and based it on his own childhood. This means he is, in essence, playing his own father. The performance is so good, so in-the-trenches, it feels like it's an act of channeling rather than mimicry or even imitation.

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, The Eight Mountains works slowly and patiently. It doesn't rush. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.

Herself is excellent with how difficult and shameful it can be to ask for help. Shame is such a terrible experience people will do literally anything to avoid it, and Sandra's battle with that shame spiral is the most insightful aspect of the film. It's profound on a deeper level than seeing a group coming together to build something.

The directors and the cast, through a miracle of tone, mood, and emotion, have made a film that feels true, that is sweet and sharp and unbearable. Every frame feels right, every choice feels thought-out, considered. All adds up to a heartbreaking whole.

At a daunting 188 minutes long, Never Look Away takes its time, doesn't force its themes. Like one of those novels that follows a family through multiple generations, Never Look Away follows Kurt from Dresden, to Düsseldorf, to Berlin.

Watching it is like being trapped in a nightmare and finally wrenching yourself awake.

The Homesman doesn't play things safe, and that's a welcome change.

A great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with "All the President's Men" and "Zodiac," two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in "His Girl Friday."

Despite the bleak-ness of the situation, the film vibrates with color, noise, music, ferocious arguments (both serious and teasing), and eye-catching snapshots of everyday life in Havana.

Black Bear is ambitious for itself in its many layers of meta, but the observational moments of behavior is where the film soars. Writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine has created a highly self-conscious work that comments on itself and then comments again. Levine's sense of humor is one of his saving graces, and that's particularly true here. This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it's also very, very funny.

There are conflicts in Princess Cyd, but they're on a low boil. One of the pluses of Cone's approach — if you're open to it — is you are sometimes confronted with your own preconceived notions about people.

Suffused with fantastical elements, dreamlike sequences and hallucinatory images, A Fantastic Woman stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress, and her performance roots the film in a kind of intimate verisimilitude.

A powerful and entertaining film about a gang of girls, and what friendship means, the protection it provides.

It feels like this material could have been a bodice-ripping melodrama in less intuitive hands. But "The Promised Land" has control of its narrative.

Pulling back the curtain to see how Carrol Spinney "does it" is not only a revelation of technique but a reminder of just how brilliant he is as a puppeteer and as an actor.

Catch the Fair One is a revenge-thriller, and a satisfying one, since the evil on display is so total. However, the satisfaction is hollow. Hopelessness is the dominant mood.

What Emily does so well is establish a mood. The mood is flexible enough to contain multitudes.

Both actors give incredible performances, playing characters stopped up with feelings and secrets. "You'll Never Find Me" is intensely alive.

The Greatest Showman, directed with verve and panache by Michael Gracey, is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment, punctuated by 11 memorable songs composed by Oscar- and Tony-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

You don't watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

Eloquent and moving, The Deepest Breath shows what it's like "down there," why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.

Director Greg Berlanti, who has helmed a string of hit television shows as producer and writer, uses the familiar teenage romance genre to tell an LGBTQ story, and in so doing makes these tropes feel fresh, fun, entertaining.

Sound of Falling operates like a ghost story, complete with a haunted house, but the ghosts aren’t supernatural. The ghost is history.

Babygirl is a high-wire act. It’s a small miracle the film works as well as it does.

The best part of Lars von Trier's fascinating, engaging and often didactic Nymphomaniac is that, despite the sometimes-grim tone and bleak color palate, it's an extremely funny film, playful, even.

It's truly refreshing to watch a film where nobody has anything figured out, where life proceeds messily and imperfectly. Saint Frances is unpredictable in a very human way.

One of the intense pleasures of Ruben Brandt, Collector (astonishingly, it is Krstić’s first feature) is how it suggests that theft (i.e. "collecting") is the only way to manage obsession.

It is that very lack of objectivity that makes Strong Island the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake.

I was riveted by every moment of this haunting weird film. Enys Men made me legitimately uneasy.

Is the human brain built to absorb so much of "the world"? How do we filter anything? Matt Wolf's new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is an interesting meditation on these ideas, as well as a character study of a fascinating news-junkie with a mission.

The film weaves a spell with its rhythms, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, all accompanied by a vivid and haunting sound design.

She Dies Tomorrow has the feel of a horror film, and is sometimes scary, but it's really an existential meditation on mortality.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

Late Night comes directly from Kaling's own experiences. This is an earnest and funny comedy, with very sharp teeth.

Carol is often about its surfaces, their beauty contrasting with the scary duality of people, relationships. The surfaces in Carol are so seductive that one understands the ache to belong in that world.

Exquisitely researched, beautifully put together, with that celebratory knowledgeable chorus of voices pouring over us, what Spike Lee's documentary really is is an act of love.

The Lobster plays rigorously by its own rules without once telegraphing "Just kidding!" While extremely funny, it is a bitter and ruthless film. Lanthimos plays target practice and his aim is deadly.

Omar is a thriller and a romance, with unabashedly melodramatic elements (there's even a love triangle), all of which are brought into stark relief by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Unlike in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," with a similar circumstance and where abortion is not even mentioned by name (except for the cowardly "schma-shmortion"), Obvious Child is honest.

Refusing to explain Ted Bundy is the strongest possible choice Berlinger could have made because it destabilizes reality. The film itself gaslights us, and this is where Berlinger and Zac Efron — an inspired choice—are powerful co-creators.

The film is thought-provoking, visually arresting, and occasionally very self-important.

Despite the harrowing stories that fill the film from start to finish, Dreamcatcher is not hopeless.

What is truly delightful about the film is its loopy, gently slapstick sense of humor, its use of continuous running gags that pay off cumulatively (no small feat), and the dreamy sense that Schilling's somnambulism is pierced through only by the insane incomprehensible behavior of others.

The film doesn't feel or look like a documentary. It's a character-based piece, but the structure is carefully considered with a clear narrative thrust and an unusual style.

Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand, these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.

A film so purely entertaining that you almost forget how scary it is. With all its terror, The Visit is an extremely funny film.

Rose Plays Julie is very controlled in its style: this control reaps huge rewards.

Mr. Gaga is an intense pleasure: the extensive footage of Naharin's choreography in performances over the years, beautifully captured by Ital Rziel, gives an intimate and thrilling glimpse of what he is all about. Naharin's work is distinct.

By the end of the film, you feel you know these people. You still may be a “blow-in,” but they’ve allowed you access to their inner worlds, they’ve allowed you to see them.

It's an extremely strong and upsetting film, yet another example of the fascinating things going on in Romania's new wave, with a breathtaking lead performance by Luminita Gheorghiu as Cornelia.

Shannon’s approach is uncompromising but not heavy-handed. He hasn’t watered down the material. The style is unfussy but distinct enough to give the film a dissociated quality.

Best of all, they haven't sacrificed emotional impact. Mouthpiece is a deeply moving piece of work.

En el Séptimo Dia makes its points powerfully, even more so since the set-up is so simple. Even better, its third act is as thrilling as anything in a traditional sports movie. McKay's control of tone and rhythm is in high gear, creating a work both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.

None of this is easy, and not much of it is fun. But “Die My Love” is a wild and worthwhile ride.

Folktales suggests that finding the threads connecting us to our collective past is work of great healing and rejuvenation.

Powerful and emotional, without being manipulative. It is deeply inspiring, without trying to be. It is honest about Owen's struggles, and the struggles of his family.

Although the film has much in common with other religious-based horror films, and is often quite terrifying in its own right, Saint Maud is mostly interested in the experiential realities of its central character, and Clark is so deeply in touch with Maud's shattered psyche it's impossible to look away from her. It's thrilling to meet a character where you have no idea what she will do from one moment to the next.

Hittman's devotion to the male bodies onscreen is obsessive. Most good filmmakers, and most good artists, are obsessives. It goes with the territory. Hittman's obsession creates a potent blend of eroticism, pent-up feelings and good old-fashioned appreciation of beauty.

Luzzu is a moving portrait of a world in flux, and one man attempting to survive the changes thrust upon him by a baffling outside world.

Eden is long, but Hansen-Love's style is so observant and specific that it is always a compelling watch and ends up being sneakily profound.

Little Men doesn't reach the humanist tragedy of "Love Is Strange," but that's an unfair comparison since very few films achieve what "Love Is Strange" does. Little Men is extremely powerful in its own right, with its devotion to its characters' differing perspectives so refreshing in an increasingly black-and-white world.

The film is an onslaught, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, but always riveting and emotional, and dazzlingly sure of itself.

Gorgeously shot by Philippe Le Sourd (in his first collaboration with Coppola), The Beguiled lingers on its images, allows us time to settle into them.

Laudenbach's style is haunting. Some of his artwork stops you in your tracks.

For those of you who miss films made by adults and for adults, films which treat things like sex and loneliness with respect and honesty, "True Things" isn't to be missed.

Watching the film is almost like feeling the muscles in your eyes shift, as you look up from reading a book to stare out at the ocean.

There's more going on here than meets the eye. The Night of the 12th runs deep. The film's effectiveness lies in its matter-of-fact surface and its roiling wordless interior, the stealthy way it makes its points (without announcing "This is The Point").

The thematic elements are in place, the emotional tension is highly strung, and the action unfolds in a wave like the fire erupting from the dragon's mouth, overtaking all in its path.

Michael Shannon is both ruthless and strangely tender in his seemingly irredeemable character.

Harry Dean Stanton: Party Fiction takes a dreamy and philosophical approach, reflecting the personality of the man who is its subject.

Wander Darkly is not some misty-eyed golden-hued stroll down memory lane. The title of the film is eloquent. Darkness threatens every moment.

The Settlers is not just an account of historical events, it's a national reckoning with a barbaric past. The fact that The Settlers is shot with such piercing beauty intensifies its message.

The footage of Bordeaux is awe-inspiring, with aerial shots of the great chateaux and the vineyards. Closeups of the labels from the different chateaux abound, along with luscious shots of glimmering wine being poured. The obsessive nature of the entire industry is reflected in these shots, a good marriage of theme and form.

Kicks is knowing and innocent, profound and goofy.

It's gloriously inventive, wonderfully funny, and gorgeous to look at, the screen filled with sometimes overwhelming detail.

Decker's visual style is as distinct as a fingerprint. She destabilizes images, focusing in on parts of it, rarely looking at things head on. The experience is sometimes like listening to music underwater, or trying to adjust the muscles in your eyes to read the fine print.

With all its humor (and there is a ton), Wiener-Dog, following the journey of a dachshund as it is shuffled from owner to owner, is one of Solondz's sharpest visions of futility.

Huda's Salon does not stop for one second to take a breath, and the subjects revealed have enormous and urgent philosophical reverb.

Spa Night takes too much time to portray David's achingly slow and incomplete coming-out process, but its focus on the interior maelstrom of a teenager is extremely insightful

An engaging and sneakily profound film.

In an era of stark division, not to mention demands for simplistic storytelling one can absorb while doing household chores, “Honey Bunch” revels in the uncertain, ungraspable, the neither-nor of it all.

A deeply felt teenage melodrama.

It works best when it's most impressionistic. Although the big events in life have the most impact (you wonder what on earth is going to happen to these three boys), it's the small things — the early morning light, the tall grass, the black flowing river, Ma's smudged mascara, Paps' dazzling grin — that we really remember.

Moxie doesn't have the satirical bite of, say, Mean Girls, nor does it have a particularly punk rock energy, but Poehler does an admirable job keeping things moving.

Call Jane is about an important subject, but it's also a character study of one woman waking up, not just to her own strength, but to the fact that she's hidden in the suburbs for too long. It's time to help others. It's a very satisfying character arc.

Overall it is a friendly and affectionate backstage look at the world of the mostly-straight male dancers at La Bare.

Traditions are people’s stories, connecting them to their ancestors, to this patch of ground. Knowledge is passed down literally—recipes, sewing patterns, hand-drawn truffle maps—but also symbolically; myths, fables, fairy tales. You can’t put a price on any of it, and that, ultimately, is what Trifole is all about.

Cocote, filmed entirely in the Dominican Republic, is filled with such images, seemingly unconnected to one another at times and yet when placed in collage they create a powerful and visceral experience.

Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection is a diabolically intense psychological thriller, with two riveting central performances from Hall and Tim Roth, neither of whom shy away from the dark nutty territory they are required to enter.

Liza, a tribute to someone still alive, is gentle in its intentions, but the overall effect is meaningful.

It's an extremely effective context for this particular story, told with no nostalgia, lots of humor, and a cast of really watchable characters. They are "types," for sure, but the types are given room to breathe. It's a sensitive and interesting film.

The film has atmosphere and energy as well as a specific point of view.

Caveat is a masterpiece of understatement for a title, and a witty opener to Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, an impressive and often terrifying film, taking place almost solely in one location, with two people trapped in a moldy dimly-lit house.

Cinematographer Samuel Calvin is to be commended for his striking work, and Reece shows an intuitive understanding of when to move the camera, and—more importantly—when not to move the camera. It's all very elegantly put together.

The Widowmaker, narrated by Gillian Anderson, is a disheartening portrait of blatant greed, as well as a fascinating examination of the trial and error process used in the scientific method.

It's a quiet and gentle film, emotional but not manipulatively sentimental, sad but not nihilistic, Marilyn Manson epigram and Goth-font chapter markers notwithstanding.

There are a couple of hallucinatory sequences that don't quite work, and the score by Paul Mills comes swooping in, insistent upon being inspirational in a way that feels like unnecessary underlining.

The Great Invisible is strongest when it focuses on the micro rather than the macro. How the spill impacted individuals in the region is the real story of The Great Invisible.

Ritch's script is thoughtful and intense, making The Artifice Girl a mentally engaging and challenging work.

Les Misérables is a gripping experience, tense and upsetting.

This is Owen Kline's first feature, and he knows this world—the world of comic book obsessives and hopeful comics artists—very well. Nostalgia is probably at work in the film—somewhere—but it's buried under layers of grime and bitter disillusionment.

A good old-fashioned melodrama, albeit with a quieter touch.

This sounds very dark. But I Used to Go Here, grounded by a beautiful performance from Gillian Jacobs, treats its subject light-heartedly, while still managing to be honest.

The theme is present in every frame. Gilford's affection for the characters is clear. I'm happy to have met them, to have been welcomed into their world for a short time.

Ghosts and spirits appear, and weird things are indeed summoned, but Brooklyn 45 is really a meditation on grief and the unfinished business of war as experienced by a group who struggle with adjusting to peacetime.

Retrograde is about many things, but it's really about the faces. The cameras linger on the faces, allowing the expressions of suffering, tension, nerves, and desperation, to take root.

Close to Vermeer is a gentle, thoughtful documentary, populated by knowledgeable individuals like Vandivere, experts at the top of their fields who have maintained their passion and love for the subject.

A beautiful portrait of the man himself, still going strong at age 76, as well as a critique of the art world that has ignored him (and others) because they don't "fit."

The film can be smothered by the obligations of its plot, but it's still beautiful and original, extremely funny, and sometimes very moving.

Barrese follows his mother everywhere. She bikes to teach her classes, and there's lots of thought-provoking footage of her lectures and small conferences with students. These are some of the best sequences in the film.

In Jakob’s Wife, the classic vampire theme is looped into an insightful and often very funny commentary on marriage and the limitations placed on women.

With music by Qween Beat, Kiki shows the new generation of the ballroom scene, their care for one another, their awareness of the struggles ahead, their determination to be themselves, against all odds. They are scared, but they are strong.

Southwest of Salem has an investigative questioning bent, but it is always clear in its attitudes about the four co-defendants. It is a powerful act of advocacy. It's hard to look at these events in any light other than that a terrible miscarriage of justice has taken place.

Some of the twists the film takes, particularly in its final third, strain the powers of belief, but the ending, thankfully, does not soft-pedal all that came before.

In a Valley of Violence, written and directed by Ti West, starts out slow, picks up speed, and finally launches itself into a screwball standoff, but always with a slapstick hilarious energy.

Fatima is told simply but emotionally, prioritizing the sensorial reality of the children's world and the people inhabiting it. This devotion to the "real" makes the holy vision palpable and plausible.

Hargitay’s approach is intuitive in a really courageous way, because she’s so open to the process, to her own pain and loss. Behind every frame, you feel her need to understand, to learn, to look.

A successful franchise depends on the hero at its center. Is the hero's personality interesting enough to warrant more? Time will tell, but Falcon Rising is off to a good start.

The Guest takes its time revealing what is really going on, and has a lot of fun in that slow reveal process.

The tone of the film is a little lukewarm, and the visuals aren’t the most thrilling, but there’s a very welcome absence of condescension and sentimentality that is often used in the portrayal of elderly people on film, particularly when they engage in activities not typically associated with their age.

Chuck ultimately works, mainly because Schreiber is so watchable. There's something compelling about seeing a man who is so strong and so weak, simultaneously. You like him in spite of him.

The Gift uses the tricks of the thriller trade well, but why it really works is that it withholds the necessary information until almost the very end.

Suze invests in its characters, allowing them complexity and ambiguities. Everyone is full of surprises.

It works as a genre film; it's thrilling and suspenseful, with enough twists to keep you guessing, but the pointed commentary is impossible to ignore.

We Are as Gods works best as a history lesson as seen through one man's journey: from Haight-Ashbury bacchanals to early computer labs to the Siberian steppe.

See it for the performances. There you will find the whole story.

Lister-Jones is the very definition of a "phenom," and if the film sometimes falls back on cliché, there's enough charm and interest here — particularly in the chemistry between the two leads — to keep it afloat.

Anyone who has ever circulated, even peripherally, in any comedy club scene, will recognize all of it. It's a quick-flash study of both frenzied activity and crushing ennui.

Blichfieldt’s “burn it all down” approach creates turbulence and upset while walking over very well-trod ground.

Bayona's film avoids many of the mistakes made in earlier versions (particularly Frank Marshall's 1993 film), but Ebert's cautionary words remain true. There's something elusive in this story, something which eludes expression.

Humorous and poignant. There are a couple of scenes that fall flat, losing the manic push of the rest of the story, but the mood is so screwball that the film hurtles past its own mistakes. It's good fun.

A fascinating and sometimes frustrating film.

The film gets increasingly hallucinatory as it progresses, and there's a vivid sense of growing danger.

Results is not entirely successful but it does have a charm and a style that works. In its own weird way, it is quite romantic, while acknowledging that romance is sometimes unpleasant, always messy, and hooking up with someone represents the beginning of a lifetime of getting into messes and digging oneself out. That quality alone makes Results a really refreshing film.

It is a celebration of these two eccentric and devoted teachers (and, by extension, teachers everywhere). We see them at work, we see them at rest, we see them kneeling by an open window smoking, wondering what they would ever do with themselves if they weren't doing this?

As a commentary on Reynolds' career trajectory, The Last Movie Star is hit-or-miss. What is undeniable, though, is the space Rifkin has created where Reynolds can do what Reynolds does best, and if you're a fan (as I am) there's much here to treasure.

The montage of footage—New York street scenes in the 1950s, 1960s, the press conferences, speeches, footage of the men getting off airplanes, surrounded by a crush of people, or laughing together, talking together, is mesmerizing. Individually and together, both men “shook up the world.” Blood Brothers shows why.

It's a very insightful insider-baseball look at the creative process.

Tukel takes that tired cliché and blows it to smithereens. Let's hear it for unvarnished hatred expressed with no holds barred.

Winkler, and featuring three very strong central performances and eye-catching poetic visuals, Jungleland is more of a mood-piece than anything else, and on that level it works beautifully. The mood is strange, sad, and hypnotic.

One of the strengths of the film, also written by Pearce, is how much it is willing to withhold, without descending into "Gotcha!" manipulation.

Housebound is a standout, though, because of its satirical mood and its multiple scenes of almost screwball comedy.

It's charming. It's funny. The case they investigate has a legitimate twist to it, there's a lot of French intrigue, there's much that is totally implausible, but the film lives or dies on the dynamic of the two main guys. It lives.

The moments of sentiment, when they come, feel fully earned, and they come out of characterization.

Wild Diamond doesn’t judge or look down on its main character and doesn’t try to control how we view her. This is a welcome rarity.

A nuanced and sensitive exploration of the many ways rape affects a person's life.

Affleck's acting style has always been understated to the point of barely existing. It's why he was riveting in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in particular. Affleck drifts, he floats through dialogue, he doesn't have words at his easy disposal. This works well for him here.

When the film focuses on the wine-making process, in the progression from vine to bottle, it's a fascinating and detailed look at a very specific subculture.

The King has a restless, kaleidoscopic, take-a-snapshot-and-move-on energy. In many ways, it's a documentary about everything, it's a documentary about "then" and it's a documentary about "right now."

There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

The film resonates with deeper messages: the damage done by gentrification, the abyss between the haves and the have-nots, the poor treatment of workers by elites. You don't expect a romcom to explore these issues. But The Valet does. It works.

Madeleine (Adele Haenel) does not know that she is a character in a rom-com. She thinks she's in a war movie. Or, better yet, a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. Anything but a rom-com. She does not smile until an hour and 20 minutes into Love at First Fight.

Kelly is finding his sea-legs as a director. Kelly spends equal amounts of time with Michael's pre-conversion life as he does post-conversion. The conversion itself is pretty well done, all things considered.

All About Nina has moments of stark tragedy alongside the vivid comedy, plus a third-act revelation of what has made Nina so angry.

I Carry You with Me is a complicated film, in many ways, and it covers a lot of ground, but the emotions portrayed are simple and human-sized.

Of all of the things Tatiana Huezo captures in Prayers for the Stolen, her first narrative feature, the terror of the night is most unnerving.

Watching Harris and Dormer create this event together is why I love going to the movies. In that elegant, horrible townhouse, anything could happen. And anything does.

Birth/rebirth has some "body horror" tropes and some straight horror tropes, but it's not really a monster story. It's more of a medical thriller, helmed by two twisted conspirators, both operating from a place of desperation and trauma.

Digging for Fire wants to talk about serious topics and it wants to do so in a humorous light-hearted way. It succeeds.

Gaia does not feel like homework. It's a thought-provoking and disturbing experience rather than a lecture.

At a brisk and efficient 78-minutes, Mercury 13 is engaging, yet sadness and anger seeps in as it progresses.

Brandon Dermer's I'm Totally Fine is a funny and charming movie, with two entertaining performances from Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales at its center, but where it really works is in its understanding of grief, and how grief can turn someone's world—and mind—upside down.

Sarah Polley's trust in the material—and her actors—allows for the performances to flourish, and the performances drive the story along with the barrage of words.