Zachary Barnes

Mr. Tirola has fashioned a portrait of the man that is engaging if not exactly revelatory, and occasionally a little broad in its attempt to fill out the social context, with footage of Hitler, Vietnam and the KKK coming in sweeping succession early on.

It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.

The movie has an elegant, almost symmetrical narrative economy. It’s at once orderly and disorienting, as though following a plan drawn by M.C. Escher.

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

The two lead actors, both superb, strike a delicate imbalance.

The Testament of Ann Lee is primarily a film about the pull and power of belief. Delivered in a style that evokes its historical moment while also cutting across time to the present, it lands with the enthralling, incantatory force of urgent prayer.

Father Mother Sister Brother is no doubt true enough to many a family gathering this Christmas—awkward, amusing, a bit dissatisfying, but not a disaster. Sometimes that’s reason enough to call for a toast.

Formally and dramatically, the movie has poise, which only strengthens its depiction of girls thrown off balance by growing up.

Running only 76 minutes, the movie is a veristic and voluble delight, an exercise in eavesdropping on a pair of smart, funny people who wear posterity—there’s a tape recorder running, after all—with wry lightness.

Ms. Mumenthaler has constructed her character study with subtly expressionistic imagination, deploying an enveloping, finely tuned sound design and finding a transporting musical motif in Holst’s “The Planets.” One daring sequence toward the end offers a vivid panorama beyond this woman’s world.

As the title suggests, this isn’t a film focused simply on the ruins of a relationship so much as one with an eye on what’s worth keeping.

The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.

The portrait that emerges is that of a fanatical protector of her public image, a movie star turned director for whom the camera was a miraculous and endlessly manipulable tool, no matter which side of it she was on.

Its title notwithstanding, the fascinating, frustrating Highest 2 Lowest ends up somewhere in the middle.

It’s a graceful, unassuming portrait of relationships old and new as a handful of characters consider their pasts and look wonderingly toward their futures, soju flowing freely all the while.

The film is more illuminating in its depiction of a distinctly contemporary war, in which men are augmented at every step by advanced machines.

The final act of the film turns into an extended shootout, made gripping through Mr. Kurosawa’s expert construction of the scene, which is methodically paced and adept at keeping us oriented within the labyrinthine warehouse in which it unfolds. But beneath the action-movie surface lies a more despairing subject.

If Sorry, Baby isn’t exactly an assured debut, it nonetheless has a sincere purpose, thoughtfully expressed.

Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.

Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past.

With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.

Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves.

By its end, “Misericordia” emerges as a drama by turns chilling and absurd, with some of its twists daring us toward incredulity. Yet Mr. Guiraudie’s mix of mischief-making and straight-faced conviction keeps us continuously unsettled, and continuously curious.

With “Seven Veils” Mr. Egoyan has done something more interesting, weaving a new narrative into and around the opera until the two become a dense, dark thicket of their own.

The performances are admirably committed, the scenario likably loony, and the jokes come in swift succession.

The heart of the film is the emotional triangle of Petey, Li’l Petey and Dog Man, as the two erstwhile enemies both find something like love for the kitten (voiced by Lucas Hopkins Calderon and full of disarming innocence) and something like forgiveness for each other.

Mr. Henry’s performance, by turns firm and funny, is the highlight of the movie.

Ms. Jean-Baptiste portrays a character on an extreme end of human temperament, and she brings to it an intensity of focus and feeling that abolishes the easy contours of caricature.

What makes Ms. Kapadia so clearly an artist is her ability to let a scene breathe, to be patient but not ponderous, suffusing the film with atmosphere and unarticulated feeling.

Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of Bird don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.

The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.

As a witness to some small rectification and the still simmering problems that surround it, Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.

No doubt this would flounder spectacularly without gifted actors, but Mr. Jacobs is lucky enough to have three.

Now age 84, Mr. Erice has made what is unmistakably an old man’s movie, and I mean that as a high compliment. Close Your Eyes moves with the serious, searching energy of a great artist through a cold and cloudy sea of memory, loss, grief and regret, pausing in the patches of warmth it finds in longtime friends and humble pleasures.

The director’s best-known film, “BPM,” drew from his later experience as an AIDS activist, and whereas that was an insular, immediate and impassioned portrait of a movement, Red Island takes a lusher, more leisurely approach to its mix of history and memory.

Last Summer is a provocation and a melodrama, and yet in Ms. Breillat’s hands these characters are precisely rendered humans—in their sensitivities, their wants, their vile follies.

One of the virtues of Ms. Baker’s spare style is the profundity that lurks in every line, which here comes out at its most clearly and movingly distilled.

The drama is by turns rushed and overplayed, but it has a haunting core and moments of slippery, surprising cinematic style that make the movie linger in the mind, if only for a little while

Advancing toward its end, Hit Man becomes the least predictable of romances and the most oddly riveting of thrillers, managing all the while to deconstruct the Hollywood fantasy invoked in its title even as it indulges in a yet more timeless one: that of two gorgeous people falling in love.

It is a modest, methodical movie-in-vignettes that demonstrates the far-reaching, constrictive force of Iran’s regime and the society it has created. It is also a canny representation of the kind of straight-faced authoritarian illogic that creates its own delusional reality, which is then forced upon a people.

While it contains little for the devoted in the way of outright revelations, it’s an affecting film around which admirers and newcomers alike can gather to bask in the unique beauty of her work, and to follow the similarly distinctive trajectory of her painful and abbreviated life.

The Beast has sequences of such insidiously effective suspense and arresting, even moving strangeness that the film could only have come from exactly those to whom it pays singular tribute: thinking, feeling humans.

The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace.

Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.

Problemista is a brilliant comedy of the surreal and the absurd, and it finds no shortage of either in the bureaucratic processes of immigration.

Tótem is neither tragedy nor tearjerker, exactly, though tears will probably be shed. It is an expression of life, deepened by death and rendered with an unusual and unerring sensitivity.

To his latest picture, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, Mr. Rogowski brings his typically deep interiority—one that tends to break out into the world in unpredictable ways. The film isn’t equal to his talents, but it gets by on style, vigor and some big ideas.

There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.

The film, though lush, thoughtful and at times affecting, never fully escapes a certain therapeutic mode. It doesn’t depict life lived, exactly; it depicts life theorized.

The Taste of Things is at once a delight for all five senses and an affecting drama of a relationship, as idiosyncratic as all loving ones are. Lingering on the tongue like a sip of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the film leaves one feeling a little drunk, desperately hungry and entirely alive.

This is not the kind of 3-D that sees things leaping off the screen, though a few wandering wisps of smoke appear to escape the frame; it instead lends these images a sometimes uncanny, sometimes mesmerizing sense of depth. While it doesn’t feel integral to the project, it does, now and then, enrich it.

The conclusion, grim and swift, makes the meaning of what preceded it wither slightly in the rear view, but there are some cinematic seductions along the way.

Fallen Leaves, though no radical departure for its maker nor a landmark of its medium, reminds us of a singular artistic personality, still vibrant after all these years. In a world of disasters large and small, surely that counts as consolation.

“All Dirt Roads” is difficult to firmly grasp, sometimes frustratingly so, but its textures linger.

The movie is both a thought experiment about individual choices (and the conditions that influence them) and a formal exercise in repetition and variation.

They both had a lot to lose, in other words, and Mr. Coppola was quite sure that they would: “The film will not be good,” he states at one point. He was wrong, but in watching “Hearts of Darkness” we can see why he might have thought so, as the making of his mammoth movie, requiring its director to wrestle art from chaos, seems to unfold in its very own fog of war.