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.

Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.

There’s a thrilling friction between the smoothly assembled pieces of Anthony’s narrative, and often sparks.

An extraordinary vérité portrait of Manila’s Fabella Hospital.

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.

Urgent investigative report and unforgettable drama, Virunga is a work of heart-wrenching tenderness and heart-stopping suspense.

Summer of Soul is as thoughtful as it is rousing, a welcome shot of adrenaline to kick off not just a film festival but a new year.

It’s a modestly proportioned movie of quiet magnificence, one that feels spun of gossamer summer light and rooted in unshakeable depths.

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.

Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.

Moodysson captures that moment — charged, goofy and transcendent — when personal style and wide-ranging outrage fuse in an all-encompassing manifesto.

James Ponsoldt's magnificent The End of the Tour gives us two guys talking, and the effect is breathtaking.

Sora has made a work of magnificent minimalism. Its vision of immortality might be most stirring in the moments when Sakamoto’s elegant hands hover above the keyboard at the end of a piece. It’s as though he’s coaxing the final chords to resonate just a bit longer before they fade into something like silence but now, after his conjuring, much richer.

An exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure.

Its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.

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.

A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.

Putting the viewer into a men’s circle like no other, The Work is a remarkable piece of reportage.

From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, The Librarians is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.

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.

The action flows with the rhythms of play and labor, joy and grief, thanks to sensitive editing by Lucrecia Gutiérrez Maupomé and Huezo and the sound team’s evocative work.

In its fusion of craft and narrative, My Friend Dahmer is exquisite. In its portrayal of Jeff's agonies, it can be excruciating.

The aesthetic that Dominik has crafted is a pitch-perfect expression of Cave’s grappling with matters of time and space. It’s gorgeous and ghostly.

It's an act of defiance that's also a sublime piece of cinema, and it ranks among the director's finest work.

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

The incisive beauty of the documentary, and its power, is that it's not a thesis or an argument but a full-blooded, multifaceted real-life drama.

What Kovgan's utterly transporting film does, through a thoughtful and dynamic combination of curated material and new performances, is radiate the rapturous power of dance.

Meditative and dreamlike yet gem-sharp, director Rob Tregenza's fifth feature in 30 years is an elegantly told story that churns with emotion beneath its deceptive stillness.

As a decades-long, ground-level portrait of the country, [Alpert's] vibrant film is unprecedented.

It would be easy, at quick glance, to dismiss their mischief as youthful self-absorption. It’s youthful self-absorption, to be sure, but something serious, vibrant and compelling courses through the levity.

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.

With its harrowing restraint, Compliance is potent filmmaking that's not easily forgotten.

Loneliness, alienation, the ache of nostalgia and the everyday absurdity of life infuse every encounter in the unconventional road trip.

[An] exquisite and gripping documentary.

No party-line screed, Gunda is a soul-stirring meditation on some of our most underappreciated fellow earthlings. For many viewers, it could well be life-changing too.

Lakota Nation vs. United States is a visually dynamic documentary, and it’s also one that delves into the power of language and how we use it.

The camerawork and editing are extraordinary in their immediacy and their sensitivity to chaos, exhaustion and resilience — often all at once.

Mainly Park lets her actors interact, their humor deadpan, their pain unfathomable, their hormones surging and their flirtations halting.

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

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 absolute charmer, The Tale of Silyan is an affecting look at the human-avian bond, with all its mysteries, warmth and ungainly practicalities.

Provocative and often fascinating, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls, in places as disparate as Appalachia and Midtown Manhattan.

Something more complex and rewarding than surface tension is at play here, and it builds to a conclusion of breathtaking openheartedness. Sometimes a blip on the road is magic in disguise, the root of a dazzling new constellation.

Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained performance as an astute professional who hasn’t time for own vulnerability.

Bursting with passion, sly humor, satirical swipes and the inescapable heartbeat of insurgency — most of the film was shot in 1968 San Francisco — it’s the life-loving tale of a wise innocent abroad, and the not exactly warm reception he receives

Whatever Rosefeldt intended, Manifesto doesn’t quite set forth a manifesto of its own. But it’s a blast of fresh air. And like many of the gauntlet throwers it cites, it risks looking foolish and, in the process, creates something gorgeously defiant.

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

In short, there’s no predetermined narrative at play in this concise and elegantly crafted road trip. The terrain it travels is one of open-ended questions, and the spark it ignites has a contrapuntal power.

A crucial, profound strength of Newtown is its refusal to rush toward “closure” as necessary, or even to suggest that it’s possible. There’s a striking lack of the bromides that usually abound in such contexts.

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.

Inviting us to sit a while in this world of tradition, What We Leave Behind offers a vision of a good death as well as one of a good life. The time will go by quickly enough, and they both matter.

As a documentary subject, Hersh is thoroughly engaging — by turns charming, surly and vulnerable. He opens himself to the attention of filmmakers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus with a sense of purpose, a bit of squirming, and occasional flares of regret.

Desert Road will surely invite repeat viewings to discern its hints and untangle its logic. More than that, within its very specific subgenre, this unlikely intersection of Memento and It’s a Wonderful Life just might prove an enduring classic.

The film’s bracing ground-level truths, by turns hopeful and despairing, challenge Beltway anxieties about the “porousness” of the border and shake up preconceived notions about Americans’ relationships with their southern neighbors.

Each scene, beneath its surface calm, throbs with longing, dislocation and intricately woven layers of time.

Without a drop of self-congratulatory "enlightenment," Land occupies a wild terrain of ineffable tenderness.

Revolving around friendships, the pleasures of summer sport and the nitty-gritty of jobs that seldom take center stage, it's a work of unforced charm, a neorealist marvel.

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.

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

What tantalizes is the way the story moves between their private passion and their public shame, the way then and now become synchronous. Amalric navigates the shifts with a lapidary precision.

Finlay unearths a fascinating biography filled with reversals, comebacks and false starts.

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.

Rather than a pileup of bad behavior, the screenplay offers shifting perspectives as to who’s being sensible and who isn’t, who means well but executes badly, with few characters falling unequivocally into the camp of “right” or “wrong.”

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

As a portrait of a besieged community carrying on as best it can, the film is keenly observed, its character observations lucid and engrossing.

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.

The word "community" has become a cliche, but this party, both backstage and before the crowd, illustrates a specific sense of cultural community and the singular bliss of standing on a city street in late-summer rain for a once-in-a-lifetime concert.

A handsome and achingly sad period piece, a finely observed portrait of cast-aside dreams. The drama is quieter and more chaste than the similarly themed "Camille Claudel," but no less haunting.

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

Zeroing in on the art of rehearsal, Becoming Traviata is an exquisitely observed look at performance and the creative process.

Clear-eyed and urgent.

Voices in Wartime is a stirring testament to the search for meaning.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history.

At the end of Gutiérrez’s fine film, you likely will feel the spell of a remarkable person’s company.

Its strength lies in the way it offers intimate access to people on several clashing sides of the situation, making for a complex, layered and thoughtful examination.

Filmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, whose profiles in courage are sympathetic but not adulatory, have crafted an absorbing, thoughtful report.

Aferim! conjures a world in flux. From the ironic "Bravo!" of its title to its Chekhovian final moment after an episode of terrible brutality, Jude's film connects that world, unforgettably, to our own.

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

Ahn’s erotically charged, quietly devastating drama suggests David might yet find a way to be true to himself, but it finds no easy answers for this good son.

Beyond her tenacious and intimate reporting, director and cinematographer Polak has made a work of powerful images — heart-rending, elegiac, charged with hope.

Charlotte Wells’ sharp and tender Aftersun is the rare father-and-child drama that leaves you wondering who the dad will grow up to be.

This exercise in beauty, derangement and memory can be contemplative or silly. Often it's both, in just the right proportions.

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

There isn’t a predictable moment, and Cotillard (who last worked with Desplechin on Ismael’s Ghosts) and Poupaud (who played a far more even-keeled Vuillard in A Christmas Tale) inhabit their roles with bracing fearlessness.

From the pastoral beauty of its opening sequence to the gut punch of its last, Hadi’s film is an exceptional screen debut, as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the bombers overhead, brimming with life.

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.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes [the director's] work to new aesthetic heights and wrenching emotional depths.

The elegiac Spettacolo is in some ways a familiar story, revolving around the universal tug of war between time and tradition.

Krisha Fairchild’s lead performance starts off as riveting and grows ever more compelling as the brilliantly off-center story unwinds.

At once a powerful psychological thriller and a haunting allegory, The Return marks an auspicious feature debut for helmer Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Olshefski excerpts and shapes the passing years with a fluent intimacy that makes the calamitous intrusion of random gun violence, and its lasting effect on the Raineys’ daughter, PJ, all the more shocking.

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.

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

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.

Terrestrial Verses is a marvel of potent understatement.

Layering soundtrack and visuals in an intricate collage of rich emotional texture, he (Jonathan Caouette) displays an exhilarating talent.

Immersive in ways that not many movies can claim, Humpback Whales is a prime example of the power of large-format documentaries to educate, delight and inspire.

Unlike Mara, the writer-directors of The Girl and the Spider can shape and control their story. They orchestrate a closing sequence of high-impact lyricism, bringing their tale of the mystery-infused quotidian to a shimmering, open-ended conclusion.

A work of terrific imagination, visceral punch and gothic beauty.

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.

There isn’t a false note in any of the film’s performances, and within its brief running time, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLean infuse this story of the changing culture and economics of pot production with an anguished depiction of generational displacement.

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

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.

It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.

One of the most effortlessly absorbing and deeply encouraging nonfiction films of recent memory.

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.

Transposing the Athenian comedy to Southern California, Casey Wilder Mott takes his bow as a feature director with a sensuous, silly and superbly cast version, one whose visually vibrancy matches its feel for the language.

Lyrical and provocative, Acasa, My Home brings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life. And it does so with laudable concision.

As a woman who has pushed away a lot of hard truths, Louis-Dreyfus delves into a sphere of emotion that she’s never before explored onscreen. She gives us not just the psychology but the feelings of fear, loss and resilience that infuse Tuesday, a story with the sensibility of an Eastern European fairy tale.

Less giddy and more cohesive than the original, the film doesn't waste time, plunging almost directly into a spectacular heist.

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

Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done... "Fox" is a visual delight.

For all its S&M specificity — down to earth and sometimes comical — the movie holds its beveled mirrors up to the role-play, ritual and compromise in all love relationships.

A rich and illuminating piece of cultural history.

A stirring character study ... To Leslie recalls the grit of 1970s American indie cinema at its most indelible.

Through a finely calibrated ebb and flow of insight and emotion, Lo offers a fresh perspective on life in the shadows — the freedom as well as the neglect — building toward an end-credits coda, a song from the heart, that's not to be missed.

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.

I Am Another You offers further evidence of this young director’s investigative energy and eye for cinematic poetry without the slightest preciousness.

Icarus: The Aftermath is both more intimate and of broader scope than the earlier film. It’s documentary as spy thriller, a portrait of institutional gaslighting, a legal nail-biter, an intimate look at the cost of refuting authoritarian doctrine, and, above all, an affecting character study.

Ben Hania lights a connective fuse between documentary and drama.

Rodeo is a combustible fusion of crime story, character study and existential mystery, a tale of celebration and lament, and it announces the arrival of a gifted and adventurous filmmaker.

At once a vivid portrait of a place and its people, an unsentimental ode to the art and craft of tequila-making, a damning depiction of the results of globalizing economic policies, and an exquisite character study, with Teresa Sánchez delivering a performance of potent restraint.

No stranger to found footage, Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) has tapped into NatGeo’s treasure trove with a bracing immediacy.

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.

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.

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

Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed Little Men zeros in on teen-spirit qualities that might, by conventional standards, be considered less cinematic: creativity and innocence, a tender spark brought to life by terrific newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri.

D’Ambrose’s drama is attuned to how much sensitive kids keep inside, watching and holding their breath while the adults convince themselves they’re not making a mess of things.

Working in an improvisatory vein, in actual locations rather than constructed sets, writer-director Dominic Savage gives this story of a married woman's despair and awakening a powerful, lived-in immediacy. It's also the story of a man's struggle to understand his wife's pain, and the tortured, tender chemistry between leads Arterton and Dominic Cooper is profoundly affecting, at times shattering.

A documentary that doesn't force-feed its message of hope but genuinely earns it.

Offers solid, kid-friendly storytelling.

As frank, discerning and eloquent as its subjects, The Woodmans is one of the most affecting art-themed documentaries.

The film's dark beauty and the quiet intensity of the performances have a discomforting pull.

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

The film is as vibrant as it is personal and urgent.

Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.

This is the straightforward story of a family facing adversity head-on and making inroads against a rare disease.

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.

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.

With a semi-playful nod to the 1945 film Detour and more than a few rain-drenched streets, Nightmare Alley pays tribute to noir. But it’s also its own dark snow globe, luminous and finely faceted, and one of del Toro’s most fluent features.

In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it’s war’s futility that rings loud and clear.

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

Somewhere You Feel Free is a love letter to Petty, but also to that most mysterious of alchemies, the chemistry of a rock 'n' roll band.

Immediate Family is an affectionate and insightful group portrait and a sweet jolt of nostalgia for boomers — but more than that, it’s time well spent with delightful subjects who played crucial roles in shaping the popular music of a ground-shifting era.

In Holy Motors Carax insists on our other selves. His daylong ride is a wary celebration, a joyful dirge that's served up in concentrated form by a roving band of accordion players. It's all in a day's work.

Moving somewhat obviously toward denouement, the film hits a false note or two. But mainly it's exhilarating in its refusal to make smooth what's messy, inchoate and tenaciously alive.

What will make the film compelling even for audiences who never heard of the miracle on ice is Kurt Russell's taut, nuanced portrait of Herb Brooks.

Messy and ungovernable at its strongest, Lafosse’s film is a story of heartbreak and real estate and, not least, money, viewed from within the still-smoldering ruins.

It's a story of contained chaos, quietly observed — one that catches fire more in retrospect than in the viewing.

First-time feature director Frida Kempff embraces and revamps genre tropes, casting them in a trenchant feminist light and a character-specific poignancy. The action unfolds entirely through Molly’s perspective, and Cecilia Miloccco’s performance, by turns guarded and explosive, is gripping from first scene to last.

Waiting for August" is an impressive, if muted, debut documentary.

Poehler’s telling is energized by a personal edge, searing and sympathetic, as it traces career struggles, creative breakthroughs and formative sorrows.

Working from a snappy but never snarky screenplay by first-timer Shelby Farrell, helmer Freeland (Drunktown’s Finest) maintains a strain-free upbeat energy yet keeps the action rooted in a strong sense of place and class.

With its lyrical sense of place and terrific lead duo of Johnston and Rene Cruz, it's a strong example of low-budget regional filmmaking.

Without becoming a screed for victims' rights, the riveting film shows how in the face of terrible events a grieving parent is galvanized into activism.

The proportions of the narrative strands sometimes feel off, but the movie pulses with the unpredictability of full-blooded characters.

Key to the strength of Big Sonia is its refusal to give in to easy bromides. Its use of animation to illustrate Sonia’s memories spins off her own artful drawings in a way that amps the sense of unspeakable horror rather than sugarcoating it.

Peck celebrates Abargil as an impassioned and inspiring advocate while making clear the emotional complexities of her single-mindedness.

As “Hitchcock” notes, his movies have been analyzed every which way and back again. Cousins’ fresh approach divides the work into six sections, an elegant capsule melding existential questions with the practical challenges and opportunities of big-screen storytelling.

The relatively laidback angle on all the murderous spree-ing gives Chris Hemsworth a chance to find the comic groove beneath the title character's beefcake godliness. He does it expertly, and the self-mocking humor is all the more welcome given Thor's essential blandness.

The result is a riveting portrait, one that doesn't quite dispel what's maddening about Dolezal.

Fireball delivers the cosmic goods.

The excellent film combines a wealth of archival material with the reminiscences of an unforgettable group of octogenarian women who were champion swimmers when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.

As it sheds light on these women’s experiences and the larger issue of homelessness among female vets, the film grows deeply engaging.

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

A few bumpy patches notwithstanding, the new feature is an exquisitely designed, emotionally absorbing work of dark enchantment.

A well-made and entertaining descent into a black-comic hell.

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.

A vibrant, affecting piece of filmmaking that’s sure to widen Hesse's following.

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.

Through the Night is both celebration and indictment. A sympathetic depiction of "women's work," in all its unsung dignity, it's also a quietly damning portrait of a merciless economy's effect on working-class mothers — particularly black women and Latinas, who often must work taking care of other people's children in order to feed their own.

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.

Beneath the well-worn dysfunctional-family setup are bracing observations of the human coping mechanism. Startling expressions of longing and denial go off like detonations within the quietest of exchanges.

Nimbly avoiding the excesses of melodrama and the recessiveness of mumblecore, Chan and his likably low-key cast navigate hairpin turns from drama to comedy to outright farce with an impressive sense of proportion.

Twilight is a procedural with little procedure and, by design, no satisfying answers. The mood it builds is soul-shaking.

The experiences and challenges of the rural poor might make it into the national conversation as an abstraction, but rarely with the specificity of this intimate portrait of a black community.

Sympathetic and perceptive.

The directors never lose sight of the struggles and the hard work that go along with his calling.

Katie Says Goodbye is a plaintive story of hard luck and fringe dwellers, one that might have felt clichéd in lesser hands. But first-time filmmaker Wayne Roberts conjures new, resonant chords in his taut, tender drama.

The documentary's talking heads include Rubin's aunt and cousin as well as artists, friends and critics — notably Amy Taubin, whose personal recollections are particularly incisive. Even with this mix of voices, Smith doesn't try to fill in the many gaps in Rubin's story but to honor them, along with her creative and spiritual impulses.

A winning combination of thoughtfulness and exuberance.

The lovely, unpredictable comedy Duck Season marks the arrival of a fresh talent in writer-director Fernando Eimbcke. His script is vibrant with unforced humanist observations, the performances are natural and endearing.

In his interactions with his band, with Fine, with his family (eldest daughter Carnie Wilson appears in the film but isn’t interviewed), the documentary is a portrait of friendship and love as much as it’s about music. And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds

What resonates beyond the brawls and blood is a profound affection for the people onscreen — those grace notes provided by a fine cast, with Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy stirring undercurrents that are particularly affecting precisely because they’re never explicitly examined or explained.

Accomplished and affecting art house fare.

Nossa Chape is a testament to how moving forward does not require leaving the past behind.

In massage parlor reception areas and backrooms, working-class restaurants and karaoke bars, Tsang and her strong cast, with superb contributions from production designer Evaline Wu Huang, have captured something evanescent and life-giving, and grounded it in kitchen clatter and workplace chatter, the gritty day-to-day.

The emotional impact of A Little Prayer doesn’t so much detonate as unfold, a series of quiet epiphanies, well-observed and elegant in their awkward yearning.

The film is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the fate of the mountain region and the legacy of the Dalai Lama.

At once impressionistic and precise,The Tiniest Place (El Lugar más pequeño) is a beautifully rendered memory piece that insists on the necessity of memory.

La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus is just what the title indicates — and that turns out be an intimate and vivid report on a surprising connection between North and Central America.

Wolfe has made an admiring but nuanced feature that doesn’t aim for biopic completism or cause-and-effect formula.

A documentary that's insightful, sweet and often hilarious.

The thrilling premise of Morgan eventually gets muddled amid standard thriller-action, blunting the intended impact of a final sequence that should produce chills, but instead merely provides information. Still, those seeking smart, edgy genre fare will find plenty to savor in this well-cast drama.

I Am Not Alone is an inspiring portrait of democratic self-determination.

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.

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.

The rivalrous power dynamic between Jones and frontman Jagger is captured in brilliant subtlety in the glances between them during an impromptu interview. But the deeper throughline of The Stones and Brian Jones involves the primal wound of a prodigal son.

Impressively realized on all levels, this transgender spin on the road trip boasts an extraordinary central performance.

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.

In Binoche's masterfully contained performance, Camille's clouded eyes sometimes brighten. If we didn't know how her story will unfold, that spark might have been comforting.

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

My Octopus Teacher is not the first documentary to plunge us into the otherworldly flora and fauna of Earth's oceans . . . But it is the first to chronicle a single sea creature's story from such a personal, openhearted perspective, revealing not just emotional connections but animal behaviors previously unknown to scientists.

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.

In his feature debut, writer-director Eric Byler demonstrates a refreshing trust in his material and his audience, crafting a compact, intriguing drama from understated performances and a subtle visual sensibility.

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.

A poet warrior of the first order emerges in this riveting chronicle of the brief life and times of rap superstar Tupac Shakur.

With its chilling evidence of fetus-centric policies in practice, Birthright shows Big Brother in action, and at his most misogynistic.

Honoring the primacy of language for his characters, Levine deftly reveals the ways they wield it to seduce, attack, manipulate, repress and, occasionally, to communicate.

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.

The ground-level view of New York — high-energy, semi-farcical — avoids clichés while finding its own romantic pulse with Duris' charmer the compelling center of the buoyant and bittersweet storm.

The film flirts with upper-class stereotypes, but in the nuanced writing and the work of the strong cast, led by a terrific Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, it goes far deeper.

The quiet but stirring effect is a dreamscape of eye-opening geography, existential longing and the enduring workaday.

Mehta explores matters more complex and unsettling than movie-tidy, against-the-odds heroism. In Tailang's fine performance, the enormity of Mahendra's mission registers in all its devastating weight.

In unexpected and wonderfully satisfying ways, A Taxi Driver taps into the symbiotic relationship between foreign correspondents and locals, particularly in times of crisis.

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

Woody's back on solid ground with his first memorable pic of the new millennium.

What unfolds is a match of artistic intellects, thrilling to behold not just for its dynamic array of topics — religion, the Oedipal complex, revolution and, above all, what it means to be a filmmaker — but also for its public unveiling after half a century gathering cobwebs in Welles' celluloid archives.

One of his most piercing inquiries yet. ... Herzog is the clear-eyed student — at times amazed and delighted, and, at others, skeptical and alarmed. Amid the cryostats and nanoparticles and fiber optics, the clunky gadgets and impenetrable-to-the-layperson diagrams, he summons a wry and lyrical mix of awe and foreboding.

In its genial, low-key way, the film, premiering at Sundance, is a chilling account of cyberbullying, perpetrated on a disturbingly wide scale over many years.

Touch the Sound is at least as inspiring and in some ways more rewarding, thought-provoking and subtly visceral.

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.

As the film moves elegantly between past and present, Brooks proves a keen observer of behavior and the pitfalls of overthinking. Finding complex beauty in what would be merely obvious in a lesser work, her delightful feature taps into a rarely broached, generally female coming-of-age dilemma: the fear of losing yourself before you know who you are.

The film is a bracingly romantic drama that's alive with a mature sense of passion and mystery.

These are people at the frontline of idealism in action, working to alleviate suffering, one patient at a time, in some of the most devastated places on Earth.

One in a Million feels both ultra-specific and universal.

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

In Hilma, Hallström delves into the fiery and sometimes messy personal story as well as celebrating, in fittingly enthralled, immersive fashion, the singular fusion of nature and spiritual mystery that drove her.

Neither the screenplay nor the agile direction insists on neat resolutions for any of the characters, and there's a double-edged charge as the foursome make collective and individual progress, slide back and try again: the women recognizing each other in ways they otherwise never would have imagined, the half-sisters slowly becoming friends.

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.

The place Beecroft stumbled upon is fueled by girl power, and the story she and her collaborators have created is wise and messy, keenly aware of the dark places at the margins as it burns bright with life.

With its sensory immersion in nature and its yearning characters, the gorgeously shot film is a memorable study of solitude and connection.

It comes on like gangbusters and keeps generating belly laughs well past the halfway point, slowing down then to take a GPS-directed turn into familiar romance territory.

Rather than a plot-driven narrative, it’s a collection of keenly observed scenes, and the lack of hyped-up drama, intrigue or sentimentality is one of the strengths of the low-key but visually expressive movie.

A work of powerful humanism.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland deftly choreographs the story in her vibrant documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, at once a capsule history of Modernism and a poignant personal portrait.

Grossman doesn't step back for a broader, contextualizing view of the Middle East; the film contains a single comment on the 1948 war's ramifications for displaced Palestinians. But as an oral history of the pilots' experiences, it's indispensable.

The handsomely shot, expertly button-pushing scare-fest has the polish and the cast to draw older audiences who grew up on shockers built from performances rather than CGI.

Soufra's lasting impression is one of empowerment and the energizing sense of purpose and community that the women derive from the enterprise along with their incomes.

Rock ’n’ roll mythologizing is one of the subjects of Squaring the Circle and Have You Got It, but it’s not their method. Rather than reaching for a neat or aggrandizing summing-up, they grapple with the passage of time and the perspective it brings.

A moving and complex homage to Barrett, Bogawa’s film also turned out to be his “goodbye to Storm,” who was ill with cancer during its making.

The documentary ignites a longing to see the movies, whether for the first time or the umpteenth.

If at times the dramatic balance feels off, or the passion exasperating in particularly Gallic ways (l’amour!), Desplechin and his superb cast convincingly bring the angsty emotions to a place of unexpected brightness and clarity.

The film is steeped in beauty at least as much as it is in sorrow, the dance of Mediterranean light — Salomon would spend a good portion of her final fears in the South of France — a vibrant counterpoint to the creeping shadow of hatred and violence.

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

Word-of-mouth should make it one of the best-performing nonfiction films of the year.

Francisca Gavilán's lead performance burns with a dark radiance that's anything but self-congratulatory.

You don’t have to be an animation buff to appreciate the chances this stirring saga takes.

That the story of someone so off-putting climaxes in a moment as profound and moving as the penultimate scene of Return to Seoul speaks to the subtle power of writer-director Davy Chou’s storytelling and the portrayal by Park Ji-Min, a visual artist making a strong impression in her first screen role.

Celebrating a great ranchera interpreter without sugarcoating her, this straightforward film honors her approach.

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

A Sinner in Mecca is a suitably messy mix of the gritty and the surreal, the wrenching and the transcendent, from the midst of the trek to Islam’s holiest site.

Schrader’s film gets into the nitty-gritty without losing sight of the alchemy.

Other than the actors, their costumes, and a few props, everything in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is digital illusion, and the effects are often exhilarating.

Captures the excitement of the game as well as the intimate drama -- and comedy -- of the human conflict.

The film is an impressive and affecting entry in the growing body of work addressing the effects of keeping wild animals in captivity.

With an immediacy and intimacy that news reports can't provide, this deeply affecting documentary explores the pedophile crisis that has shaken the edifice of the Catholic Church.

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.

Above all, it’s the warm, searching conversations between father and daughter, whether they’re seated side by side or she’s questioning him from behind the camera, that give the documentary its poignant immediacy.

The central trio of actors deliver engaging, pitch-perfect work.

Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story.

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

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.