More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, All These Sleepless Nights is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young.

Greene's patient, understated portrait renders a universal rite of passage in strangely alluring, poetic terms.

At a time when even horror lovers are petrified of isolation, Mother of Flies festers with feelings too scary to keep inside. It’s imperfect, better for it, and even languishing in grief, a clear cinematic legacy ready to start.

In Another Country is a paragon of any given Hong movie's intrinsic charms, and yet it also manages to break from the pattern by including an English-speaking character as one of its leads.

Ever as it casts their future prospects in doubt, Virunga concludes by envying the apes’ perspective most of all.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

Through Bresson's unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence. [16 Feb 2018]

The movie is an impressively realized work of minimalist storytelling that foregrounds Redford's physicality more than any other role in his celebrated career. His performance defines the movie to an almost shockingly experimental degree.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is best understood as a basket of jokes and non sequiturs that simply need some kind of framework to keep things semi-coherent. That’s a compliment, of course, as these are very, very funny jokes.

Apatow shoots her mother with obvious affection, especially in her scenes opposite Dora. Yet, it’s the dudes who steal the show. Feldman and Hoffman have that magnetic chemistry.

It’s an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.

The Witch becomes a focused portrait of fixed rituals crumbling in the face of inexplicable forces, evoking the fear of change lurking in the shadows at every moment. Despite the setting, its scares are uniquely contemporary.

Smart in spite of its irreverence, "Future Folk" is the weirdest, most enjoyable fusion of genres you'll see this year.

The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz.

The seven filmmakers at the center of “The Year of the Everlasting Storm” do give a slash of cathartic release, a dash of humor and a large batch of necessary pathos to make the world feel a little less lonely, a little less small.

An arrestingly beautiful and philosophically imposing bilingual historical drama about the arrogance of mankind in the face of nature’s unforgiving prowess, the inherent failures of colonial enterprises, and how these factors configure the cultural identities of individuals.

[Martel] makes the case that the Chuschas put up a hard-won, long-won, impossible battle that already began centuries before, coming at the material with a visceral filmmaking point of view that never overshadows the material.

A disorienting puzzle of a movie with many exhilarating pieces, Anomalisa nevertheless maintains a straightforward trajectory involving Michael's internal strife.

It’s a striking combination of analysis and creative innovation that communes with the past and present, uniting them as a beautiful, absurdist tone poem about the struggles facing those dealt less fortunate hands in life.

The story transitions from a believable portrait of young culture junkies into a showcase of Matt's burgeoning rage so well that it practically implicates viewers in the process.

Both introspective and entertaining, Betts never forgets that her young nuns are still teenage girls, and Novitiate rings as true as any other film about coming of age.

Although it tells of a production gone ostensibly wrong, My First Film is, at its core, a movie not about upheaval but about yearning — and about how, sometimes, giving that yearning up can be a beautiful, generous act of creation all its own.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

Thru You Princess develops a fairy tale quality that calls into question the nature of its production. However, the air of manipulation throughout the story only helps to pronounce its themes.

The tense, involving result confirms Sciamma's mastery over the coming-of-age drama, a genre too often reduced to its simplest ingredients.

The way the editing (by Alain Dessauvage and George Hanmer) so gracefully unfolds from present to past suggests a kind of cinematic Proustian madeleine, conjuring how involuntary memories can be jolted again by encounters in the present.

A tribute to those children of immigrants, especially those in families divided across borders, pulling for their own aspirations while carrying on their backs their parents’ hopes for a life without fear, “Mija” beams with the knowledge that in its specificity it speaks to millions. That this documentary soon becomes a rock in an avalanche and not an isolated bright star of representation is the hope.

A hyper-stylish and unexpectedly sweet rebuke to the idea that screwing people is a good way to get ahead, Gavras’ second feature manages the almost impossible task of mining something nice from the me-first mentality that’s been sweeping across modern Europe.