Their most potent commentary is often their silence, their wordless responses to those questions that are unanswerable. Their restraint and dignity are an emotional sucker punch.

Gavagai is a curiosity and nonetheless remarkable in its own way. Slow (very slow) paced, it’s a meditative, haunting and lyrical film that explores the many layers of love and grief.

Part One, subtitled For the Sake of Gold, is original and intriguing.

Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and particularly an astonishing Olivia Colman find a perfectly pitched acid tone in harmony with the director's edgy vision.

Ridley Scott's direction seems even better than remembered, starting off languidly and picking up speed as the horrors mount. [2003 re-release]

The whistleblowers of the NYPD 12 definitely deserve a comprehensive chronicle of their struggle for justice, as their struggle affects so many. Crime + Punishment speaks well on their behalf, but not emphatically enough to close the case.

The songs, written by Gaga, Cooper, Lukas Nelson, Jason Aldean and Mark Ronson, are all terrific and will make a helluva soundtrack album, and Lady Gaga’s performances are electrifying. Combine that with the genuine-feeling romance between the co-stars and the heartbreak of its dissolution, and you have one soaring and searing piece of movie entertainment.

In their trailer, the gift of the religious do-gooder who owns the farm, the exigencies of survival subside, and the quiet brilliance of Foster and McKenzie’s performances surface.

It’s a perfect pairing of sensibilities; Jenkins and Baldwin share a nuanced, lyrical style that conveys the beauty and hope in even the most despairing of situations, with a focus on the emotional truths of their characters. Like the novel, the film is a love story, as well as a powerful indictment of systemic racism and the criminal-justice system.

McCarthy has found the right creative partner in Heller, who treads unchartered territory with a character like Israel: unfashionable, unfamiliar and unappealing to most viewers.

Fallout is the boldest of a series that has set a very high (sometimes literally so) standard for breathtaking set-pieces. By my count, the new film has at least seven of them—a generous gift to summer audiences from daredevil star Cruise, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood.

Ruizpalacios doesn’t waste the movie beating up on Juan’s foolishness. He’s painting a broader picture of ennui, lost suburban souls who seem to want nothing more than to tool around in their car and talk nonsense.

This is an astonishing filmmaking debut from Burnham, a renowned comedian as well as a musician—you might secretly wonder how a young male not only captured the point of view of an eighth-grade girl so exactly, but also expressed it with such emotional precision. Whatever the secret formula to his experiential accuracy and unexpectedly inventive directorial eye is, the outcome is a deeply serious coming-of-age film that is only light and charming on the surface.

McQueen, the exhilarating, heartbreaking documentary by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, presents an almost excruciatingly intimate portrait of this genius.

As it is, it’s a bit of a slog. A well-crafted slog. But a slog nonetheless.

Bombach’s respectful distance from her subject allows the audience to see in a way that one does watching a Robert Bresson film; in the slowly unfolding narrative, stripped of drama but not of emotion, Nadia’s spirit emerges.

A giant leap even for the youngest-ever Best Director victor, Damien Chazelle’s technically astonishing First Man is a poetic non-blockbuster of claustrophobic intimacy.

Custody embodies Legrand’s attention to detail, reverence for gripping storytelling, command of tension and, above all, direction of finely etched performances for characters major and minor. It is simmering entertainment that amounts to required viewing.

The seams definitely show in the film’s effort to contain all the comment, comedy, horror, romance and drama, but Lee handily orchestrates the layout of the period and players.

An awesome and inspiring doc from the team behind Meru.

Araby stays so grounded in acutely observed behavior, while still sufficiently elliptical in its storytelling methods, that it successfully avoids getting up on any particular soapbox.

It's the camerawork by director of photography Brett Lowell and cinematographer Corey Rich (along with many other contributors) that impresses the most here. Close-ups show just how precise and physically challenging the climbers' moves are.

On the strength of its authentic storytelling voice and galvanizing lead performance, The Hate U Give delivers a powerful message that all the rallying and rioting and impassioned pleas in the world won’t change anything if they fall upon deaf ears.

Deliberately paced but shot with a quiet magnetism and close-in immediacy,The Citizen benefits in comparison to other immigrant dramas because even though this is a story suffused with empathy, it doesn’t center on either a good deed being done by a white Westerner for a helpless dark-skinned foreigner or that foreigner’s two-dimensional pluck.

Sibling filmmakers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s riveting Nossa Chape (Our Team) reveals at first a team and a town that have been utterly destroyed by the unimaginable. Then, with the tension of a well-plotted sports drama, the documentary tracks the team’s rise from the ashes of grief back to something like normal.

If there is any "message" to Monrovia, Indiana, it may be that we all share the same fate.

At any moment, We the Animals might look and sound gorgeous—yet the film unfolds with a naturalistic pace that plods like a too-lazy summer day. This gorgeous view demands ample, ample patience.

Nyoni’s title articulates her uncompromising, feminist stance, and her characterizations of Mr. Banda and the male villagers explain how patriarchy plays out in Zambia, but it is in her sublime direction—lengthy close-ups, clever tableaux and skillful scoring—that the writer-director accomplishes a social critique so cinematic as to defy description.