Sheri Linden

You don’t have to be a follower of Eagles of Death Metal, or even glancingly familiar with their music, to appreciate the emotional power of Hanks’ deeply felt film.

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.

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

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.

We all like to imagine ourselves as brave resisters. Pomsel's unapologetic account of being "one of the cowards" is a haunting, ever-timely reminder of how easy it can be to cash the paycheck and look the other way.

Letting questions remain unanswered and silences go unfilled, Rohrwacher offers lovingly crafted glimpses of an enterprise we all engage in, regardless of whether we've ever been near a beehive: extracting sweetness from the materials at hand.

Wonderfully weird and wistful adventure-comedy about a fish-out-of-water oceanographer.

Thugs offers a damning summary of the FDA approval process as a closed loop in which one hand washes the other and crucial data can remain hidden.

The film captures the intense emotion of the October 2014 performance that capped Whelan’s 30-year career. But more crucial is the way it shows her creating new challenges for herself, turning the terrifying prospect of irrelevance into a shot at reinvention.

Genesis 2.0 is a double-stranded helix of a real-life thriller, chilling and unforgettable. An inquiry into the brave new world of "synthetic biology," it moves between two filmmakers in very different locations. Their twinned subjects, whose connections are gradually revealed, are past and future, superstition and logic, a hunter and his scientist brother.

The actors, all strong, give the lyrical but never artificial dialogue the ring of life. Pearce is riveting as a go-getter who finds himself trapped between a murky past and a future defined by ambition.

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.

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.

The chemistry between Hawn and Burt Reynolds is sublime in Norman Jewison's underappreciated gem, written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson and loosely based on their relationship.

All elements click in "Sun," a shimmering, deeply felt film.

What director Jamie M. Dagg achieves with his slow burn of a second feature is a total immersion in end-of-the-line atmosphere, with four superb central performances bringing archetypal intrigue to life.

That a ragtag group of intellectuals and misfits could so blindside the FBI and hold the media in its grip is an especially sobering aspect of this dynamically told story.

In My Own Time, which takes its title from her second album, is in tune with the haunting poetics of her work.

The film is an important step toward repairing the broken links and resurrecting almost a century of music and the women who made it.

[An] incisive and absorbing documentary.

A clear-eyed, compelling look at getting out the vote, grassroots-style.

There's a wrenching sadness to this simply told story, but also but also a heartrending hope.

One of the strengths of John McDermott’s film is that it breaks the rock-doc mold by not relying on a starry roster of talking heads.

As franchise update, origin story, coming-of-age movie, comedy and indulgent f/x extravaganza, the feature, written by the director and Gil Kenan (Monster House), hits all its marks.

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 film is, above all, a moving portrait of hurting souls, brought to life in compelling performances.

The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With Gimme Danger, Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.

The film is an exploration of art as a way through immense and complex emotions. It is unexpectedly a breathtaking reminder of life's joys — in nature, in friendship and, in a particularly buoyant scene, in the bark of a deceased friend's poodle.