Sheri Linden

With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda, whose "Hamlet" and "Cymbeline" boldly reimagined Shakespeare, takes a stylized visual approach in Experimenter, with bracing results.

Set on a dairy farm in southwestern England, The Levelling is a modestly scaled, superbly crafted drama with a powerful sense of place.

There will be blood, yes, but mainly there’s a well-written and beautifully performed investigation of yearning and the mysterious realm that apps and algorithms can only profess to quantify.

The result is a type of cinematic performance art, with all the self-consciousness that suggests — a sibling love story that's no less heartfelt for being in the form of a first-person poem.

Within the concise running time, Zea brings a remarkable life and body of work into dynamic focus.

With superb performances across the board, particularly from her two young leads, and an adventurous use of visual and aural elements, Djukić has conjured an alluring fusion of spiritual awakening and adolescent confusion.

Choppily told but thoughtful and illuminating, writer-director Buirski’s latest film completes a trilogy about the civil rights era, begun with The Loving Story and The Rape of Recy Taylor, that showcases lesser-known warriors for civil rights.

As it follows him over a five-year period, into hotel gatherings and danger zones, James Demo's sharp-eyed documentary lays waste to any assumption that inner peace is a requisite for O'Malley's urgent work.

Speaking with a number of the women who broke the law in the name of justice, and others who were involved in their underground network, The Janes directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes have made an urgent and thoroughly engaging group portrait.

Loveling wisely avoids easy answers, and its deft mix of humor and melancholy never falters.

David Harewood and Edwina Findley, the only trained actors in a compelling cast of non-pros, deliver harrowing performances as a self-styled healer and the desperate mother who seeks his help for her tormented son.

Though it can at times feel wanting in dramatic heft or clarity, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet can also be revelatory, and its drama flowers in delightfully unflashy ways.

Ben Hania lights a connective fuse between documentary and drama.

The result is a sharp-eyed, open-ended inquiry into marriage and romance.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.

John Trengove’s first feature takes real chances, delivering a troubling portrait of the collision between communal and personal identity.

The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry, director Mary Dore's incisive portrait of so-called second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, is an exceptional chronicle, its mix of archival material and new interviews bristling with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th century.

If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.

Director Sang-il Lee’s feature is propelled by operatic intensity and visual poetry. It unfolds over three mostly riveting hours, with only occasional jagged lapses in narrative momentum.

Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder about — and wish for — what he might have done next.

Writer-director Gray's handsomely crafted planet-hopping drama is by turns vividly eventful and deliberate in its uneventfulness, and it feels caught, somewhat awkwardly, between stark simplicity and violent leaps into hyperdrive.

The balance between detail and momentum can at times be off, and the helmer doesn’t entirely avoid generic tropes of the legal drama. But he conveys the enormity of the undertaking at the film’s center — the first major war crimes trial since Nuremberg — and it’s felt in every moment of Darín’s compelling portrayal.

The film boasts a terrific newcomer in the lead role, exquisite widescreen photography and a powerful sense of place.

Aida’s Secrets movingly embodies the traumas that, at war’s end and long after, are inseparable from liberation.

Writer-director Peter Strickland...uses atmosphere as others would use plot, and knows how to provoke comic shudders. But he tends to repeat himself, and he doesn't quite find a satisfying denouement for the inventive premise.

Long deemed unfilmable, the 18th century novel finds the perfect interpreters in director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan.

With its intriguing performances, narrative restraint and unanswered questions, the movie delivers a strong pull of yearning as well as tantalizing currents of suspicion and dread.

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, who directed and edited the documentary, with Eyni also serving as cinematographer, have made a film that pulses with so much hopefulness that when Shahverdi’s story takes a shocking turn, it’s a punch to the solar plexus.

A Still Small Voice is about listening for inner truth and bearing witness.

There's plenty of tawdry glamour, exploitation and grime on offer in this tale of awakening, and through it all, the sisters' bond is its own abracadabra.

A lyrical work that’s as bright and captivating as it is poignant.

At first, the writer-director’s onscreen presence feels like an unnecessary distraction, and it could certainly be pared down. But as his interviews push deeper into the situation — and its overlap with the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — his investigative methods and congenial manner of confrontation prove productive, the results compelling and revelatory.

With its fine mix of dark humor, healthy anger and self-compassion, this portrait of the artist as a young woman is the work of an inspired filmmaker, and it was worth the wait.

Filled with beauty and fury, the film offers an immersive portrait of an endangered community.

Attanasio has made a sharp, affecting film that's brimming with darkness and hope, every instant of it vividly alive.

With its long takes and deliberate pacing, Beyond the Hills is demanding but always engrossing, even during its repetitive middle section.

Drljača’s dialogue is sharp and alive throughout the film, particularly so during Mona and Faruk’s first date.

Through interviews with Jonestown survivors and rare footage of Jones himself, this sober documentary presents an unforgettable historical portrait.

Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis were among those on the front lines of the protests against police violence and their on-the-ground, from-the-heart documentary Whose Streets? communicates that urgency from the inside out — not as news story or social theory, but as communal experience and awakening.

Writer-director Amanda Kernell’s assured first feature has a classic sheen, but with its powerful sense of place and sensitive performances, it’s no fusty museum piece.

This folk tale braids together the primordial and the divine in endlessly surprising ways.

Deep Sea 3D, along with the recent Imax films "Coral Reef Adventure" and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," is a glorious example of educational entertainment at its best.

The unhurried film is a beauty. Shooting digitally — a first for Jarmusch and a paradox for a movie that so ardently celebrates the artisanal — cinematographer Yorick Le Saux uses nocturnal lighting to eloquent effect. The titular lovers are beauties too, soulful and captivating. Swinton and Hiddleston make their love story one for the ages.

Whether you call it a relaunch, comeback, return or rebirth, it’s captured in a fittingly down-to-earth, memory-infused documentary that’s a gift to fans — moving, thoroughly engaging, and a chance to see a remarkable sexagenarian at a turning point, doing what she does best.

A film that breaks the musical biopic mold in ways that are sometimes frustrating and frequently exhilarating.

As the filmmaker traces a season of range riding for two exceptionally skilled and resourceful young women, her documentary becomes more than a portrait of against-the-elements fortitude; it poses piercing existential questions about purpose and independence, particularly for women choosing work that has long been deemed the exclusive province of men.

In its mix of remarkable archival material, the film is both tender and galvanizing, summoning up what New York felt like in 1972 (yes, I would know) and offering a fresh slant on a country’s upheaval and a generation’s countercultural awakening.

It works mainly in fits and starts, though there's no question that the movie's depiction of the effects of Soviet rule on a nomadic population will be eye-opening for many Western viewers, and deeply resonant for Kazakhstanis.

There’s a lyrics-and-melody power to the interplay of sharp observations and visuals that dive deep into archival material — a fitting dynamic for a film about someone with a preternatural gift for infectious tunes. And there’s a playful, irreverent bounce to the film that’s in sync with the Liverpudlian music hall tradition that McCartney, more than any of the Beatles, has held close.

Thoughtful, deeply affectionate and concerned more with essence than chronology, it recounts the band’s 30 years in a way that should enlighten diehards as well as the uninitiated.

Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.

The movie’s shifts in tone and focus can occasionally be distracting, but through it all Jungermann maintains a suitably dark undercurrent with an impressively light touch.

An urgent film, it's filled with chilling detail and propelled by clear-eyed compassion.

With his fine cast and his gracefully restrained screenplay, Shults makes horror recognizable.

It's an eloquent contribution to af Klint's rediscovery, which began four decades after her 1944 death. It's also a cogent argument for why that rediscovery impels nothing less than a rewriting of art history.

With its focus on intimate detail, Off Label is not a conventional "issue film" reaching for conclusions. Palmieri and Mosher have taken on a huge and urgent topic, and their work's impact rests on their refusal to tell viewers how to feel.

This feature debut deals mainly in clichés, never transforming the tough question at its center into compelling cinema.

Beneath its quiet surface, the Austin, Texas-set drama Barracuda thrums with menace and mystery from first moment to last.

The documentary Stolen Seas is not just a high-energy chronicle of a ship's hijacking; Thymaya Payne's bold debut feature steps back for a view of Somali piracy that's both broader and more incisive than most mainstream news coverage.

However pointed the drama's lessons, they're never simplistic and always involving, pulsing with compassion and urgency as Hamoud's vivid characters defy the rules.

Dance purists might dismiss Streb's work as circus gymnastics, but a bracing aesthetic is inseparable from the corporal shocks, as is an insistence on challenging accepted constraints. Through Gund's film, a wider audience stands to be not just amazed but provoked.

This is a comedy that finds poetry in unexpected places: the ancient cuneiform that Alma studies, and the invented past that Tom concocts to explain their romance. With sly humor and no small ache, I'm Your Man asks if we really want our fantasies to come true, and what happens when we fall in love.

Not unlike her gutsy protagonist, Twomey moves through the charged landscape with extraordinary agility. Combining gripping suspense with a quote from the immortal Persian poet Rumi, she creates a stirring final sequence from the rising chords of terror and resilience.

Accomplished and affecting art house fare.

Lee and Smith shine a damning, sorrowful light on American racism, through the shattered prism of spring 1992 in Los Angeles. With its dazzling wordplay and densely layered profusion of history and biography, Rodney King is an experience as cerebral as it is visceral.

Kedi eloquently taps into the mutual attraction between the cats and their people, as well as the animals’ complexity and resilience.

When film lovers these days enjoy movies, we’re not always sitting in the dark before imagery that dwarfs us. But whatever the size of the screen, Desplechin convincingly argues, that screen is a place where reality, transmuted, “glimmers with meaning.” As it does in this artful blend of narrative and nonfiction.

A welcome corrective to the abridged and widely accepted narrative that dismisses Cash's first marriage as "troubled," My Darling Vivian relates a little-known love story, great in its own right — and immortalized in Cash's first hit, "I Walk the Line." And it offers a nuanced portrait, loving but not fawning, of a complex woman.

As well as building a strong case, through example, of the implications for towns and cities across the country, the film delivers telling glimpses of the personal day-to-day coping mechanisms of the cops themselves.

With clinical dispassion and narrative elegance, Breillat has constructed what she calls "a thriller about denial."

Through its droll combo of stillness and churning dysfunction, perfectly embodied by Drakopoulos, Pity deconstructs the artifice of feeling and, most wickedly, movie sentimentality.

The philosophical and sometimes faith-steeped bent of the women’s discussion might put off audiences not willing to go there. For those ready to take the leap, the thoughtful and beautifully lensed feature is a rewarding exploration that addresses not just the characters’ predicament but the existential questions that face any contemporary woman navigating patriarchal setups.

Mam's camera work is exquisite in its immediacy and agility. One of the most striking aspects of her film is the intimacy it achieves without feeling intrusive or turning her subjects into fodder for a message.

What sets it soaring is the discerning guide at its helm, one whose curatorial exultation and rigor are also calming, reassuring — a welcome voice in cacophonous times.

There may be no fancy filmmaking steps in “Alive and Kicking,” but the jaw-dropping improvisations and physical intimacy of the dancers make it an action film par excellence — joy-fueled and gravity-defying.

There’s no overarching life-story chronology; biographical details emerge in bits and pieces. The director doesn’t wring maudlin tears from her subject’s ordeal, in part because Jones never asks for pity.

As two long-timers eyeing potential breakthroughs in middle age, Clifton Collins Jr. and Molly Parker deliver beautifully tempered turns, with fine support from Moises Arias in the role of an up-and-comer with a mournful gaze.

An exhilarating vérité work by first-timer Manuel von Stürler, the documentary follows this seasonal migration, or transhumance, with a sense of quiet awe and intimacy, capturing the feel of cold rain, deep snow and the comforting heat of a campfire.

Having made a number of well-regarded, female-focused short films, the Icelandic director graduates to features with a sure grasp of naturalistic performance and an eye for character-shaping landscape.

The screenplay by Amy Fox is mechanical, the plot more contrived than charged under Meera Menon’s lackluster direction. But as a study of endurance and self-preservation in the face of persistent double standards, the movie clicks.

[An] incisive and absorbing documentary.

Uplifting without a drop of sap, the tale of a boy's obsession with a glittering swimming pool and how it changes four lives offers numerous pleasures and one of the most satisfying and resonant conclusions to be seen in recent cinema.

The comedy star's legions of fans will welcome the cheerfully crude proceedings as a return to silliness after several earnest, lower-key character turns. The melange of Middle East diplomacy, action absurdity, sexual healing and, when in doubt, hummus, wavers between muscular and middling. It's a surefire hit.

Rachel Lang’s first feature isn’t about placing Ana on the road to her life’s purpose; it’s a serpentine trip through impetuous leaps forward and messy retreats.

Within the culinary world and beyond, the honors and accolades have been plentiful for Kennedy, who's been compared to Julia Child, Mick Jagger and Indiana Jones. Whomever her extraordinary life might bring to mind, this grande dame of gastronomy has lived it on her own terms.

There’s nothing particularly cinematic about the well-crafted film, but it’s a compelling piece of advocacy journalism, one that looks beyond the sloganeering on all sides of the debate.

Clear-eyed and urgent.

Hicks' unabashed love letter is, above all, a stirring picture of communion between artists.

Ladkani's Sea of Shadows is a stirring adventure — inspiring and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Nothing in the film has a fraction of the dramatic impact of the emotional roller-coaster Colman’s performance embodies.

Set in a rural village and cast with nonactors, led by a feral performance from dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the drama occupies its own territory, tinged with magical realism and deeply immersed in the sensory world. It’s also a vivid reminder that even a matriarchy can be paternalistic.

Seamlessly melding Marvel mythology with Western mythology, James Mangold has crafted an affectingly stripped-down stand-alone feature, one that draws its strength from Hugh Jackman’s nuanced turn as a reluctant, all but dissipated hero.

A well-told tale, and though its compact running time makes it a fine TV fit, its visual poetry is worth a big-screen look.

What sets Code Black apart is that the filmmaker is himself a physician. His extraordinary access to life-and-death moments and his illuminating perspective on the medical system make for a powerful viewing experience.

The doc’s stunning slo-mo footage of midair locomotion emphasizes these messengers’ grace and mystery.