When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River began construction in the early Nineties, an estimated 2 million people's lives were impacted. That's a staggering number to contemplate, but Up the Yangtze effectively personalizes that near-meaningless number by putting a face on at least a few of those 2 million.

Director Chen and screenwriters Lilian Lee and Lu Wei (based on Lee's original novel) create a tapestry of detail woven with visual spectacle, historical saga and human drama. At over 2 1/2 hours running time, Farewell My Concubine is both too brief and too luxurious.

The film opens with a camera slowly swirling around a skull. Red droplets splash on the cranium. In Michael Nyman’s score, a brass section booms rhythmically like blood in your ears. The effect is brooding and provocative. It’s pure drama. It’s perfectly Alexander McQueen.

So yeah, Booksmart is a different kind of teen comedy – clever and buoyant, proudly feminist and wonderfully reassuring that, yeah, the kids are alright.

Disturbing and grim in its portraits, Wise Blood is nevertheless marvelous storytelling and its performances are virtually divine.

Writing With Fire is at its best when emphasizing the barriers these women have to overcome daily to fulfill their desires to be journalists, and showcasing the importance of Khabar Lahariya’s work where corruption runs amok.

Focusing her camera on the rising cogs in the machine of China’s insatiable consumer culture, Jessica Kingdon expands on her 2017 short “Commodity City” with the visually stunning feature Ascension.

While viewers who expect a conventional suspense film may be disappointed in Lantana overall, it does succeed on a smaller, more intimate scale.

A genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a young(ish) scullery maid.

What the series means in the long run is anybody's guess; I just know I sleep better at night knowing it's out there.

The film is historical yet its characters are fictional. Well-captured is the controlled chaos of some of the political actions.

Pierces through your tear ducts in its ultimate path toward your heart.

The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything.

With a plot hinging on twists and turns that might not have worked as well with less electricity than Turner and Garfield generate, Postman sizzles and flares with crackling tension.

A brilliant, exhilarating piece of filmmaking. It may even be the best mainstream film of the year thus far.

Haynes brings the emotional underbelly to the surface, he also tricks up the visual surface with elaborate color schemes that provide unspoken clues regarding the characters’ frames of mind.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

Drawn from the true adventures of the Washington Post reporters and their illustrious editor Ben Bradlee, the movie heroically recounts the dogged journalistic sleuthing that cracked the story of the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

It’s in how Harris depicts the seemingly psychic bond between the sisters for silent conversation. In those sequences, she plays the same kind of cunning games with layout and design that she did in the published text of the script, showing a raw ingenuity that adapts the stylistic possibilities of the stage for the more realistic setting of the screen.

This is the way this ground-breaking monument was meant to be seen: in mind-boggling 70mm.

Twenty-four years ago, the original Toy Story broke ground as the first-ever entirely computer animated feature film. What’s more astonishing now is how all those ones and zeroes are harnessed to produce something so utterly lifelike.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

Haneke (Caché) has created a morality tale that concludes with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand: one more example of a solitary act of violence that unleashes a cataclysm.

In The Heights is unashamedly romantic, fearlessly thrilling, endlessly optimistic and given life and voice through sheer love of people, of place – of community.

It is a considerable amount of material to shape a narrative from, and Dosa and her editors artfully interlace their dangerous and often life-threatening adventures with letters and diary entries that reveal the couple’s more intimate bonds, enriched by a Francocentric soundtrack and subdued narration by Miranda July. What emerges is a portrait of two people who were equally and obsessively single-minded in their life’s pursuit.

As good as it ever was, and improved slightly by hindsight, experience, and extra cash.

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

Steeped in bleak, ominous atmosphere and period-perfect costumes and design, this is one of those rare genre films that gets under your skin and stays there.