Ty Burr

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.

Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers they ain’t. Stone’s singing voice is a soulful wisp of a thing. But this is the moment that convinced me the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, knew exactly what he was doing. What his stars lack in training they make up for in relatability. They sing and dance just a little better than we would.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.

In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.

Wild Tales rockets along with sleek, amoral charm and a masterful sense of cinematic storytelling; it’s worth noting that one of the producers is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar.

What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.