Sheri Linden

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

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.

The filmmaker's grip on the storytelling could be tighter, especially in the second half, which at times seems to lose focus, much like the floundering protagonist. But when it clicks, the film is a provocative combo of emotional fumbling, droll asides and shrewd insights.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A terrifically engaging picture of life beyond the headlines, My Perestroika lifts the veil of Cold War mystery.

An exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure.

A decidedly upbeat number, centered on a good-hearted character.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A rich and illuminating piece of cultural history.

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

Though much of the drama is clunky and flat, the taut, visceral performances by David Oyelowo and Kate Mara never err.

Notwithstanding the talking-head commentary of friends, colleagues and exes, this is very much a first-person story, taking its narrative cues from Fonda's self-searching 2005 autobiography.

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.