Sheila O'Malley

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

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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

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

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.

The final sequences are the only "stock" moments in this very specific family drama, and something about the last scene left me cold. But the rest is so effective and emotional, a dedicated portrait of trauma passed down through generations, it doesn't matter.

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?

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.

With a script by Eric C. Charmelo, Nicole Snyder and Shepard, The Perfection has a gory grindhouse sleaze overlaid with the tony gleam of the upper-crust, a very sick combo.

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.

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

The Swerve is the opposite of comforting.

The film is one long interrogation, not only from Jennifer the character's standpoint, but from a directorial standpoint.

An effective and creepy-surreal film.

Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

"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"...

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.

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.