Ultimately, Contemporary Color captures the essence of the event in question with expert craftsmanship, and the filmmaking prowess doesn’t overwhelm the show.

The movie ... sometimes sags into a lethargic pace and unwieldy tangents. ... But there’s no doubting the presence of a focused, intelligent vision guiding the small-scale material along.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of voting rights won’t find much new information in the film, but it’s a rousing and well crafted piece of educational media that takes aim at what research has found to be its most crucial audience: Young voters.

As much as the film repeatedly pays tribute to their relationship— its unaffected honesty, their political influence, the beautiful and often alienating art they created — it can’t compete with the view of their cozy apartment. “All I want is the truth,” Lennon once sang; he knew that it’s much simpler than you could ever imagine.

Intimate and involving as it can be, The Painter and the Thief increasingly leaves the impression that Kysilkova and Nordland are holding something back.

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

As Levine unravels clever jabs and jibes at current culture — few recent features have so smartly picked apart both feminism and caveman culture with such insight and humor — tenuous bonds break down.

For all of its self-insistent detours and high-minded indulgences, I’m Thinking of Ending Things rarely feels like a concept in search of a movie. There’s a fullness and vitality to it that shines through even when the film is chasing its own tail, which is basically all it wants to do.

Angels Wear White brings into relief the bureaucratic corruption and class tension that inform the power dynamics of such situations.

If Lurker eventually succumbs to certain genre tropes and a handful of story bumps, it makes up for its limitations in perspicacity and the overall strength of its filmmaking.

Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either.

Indignation doesn’t break any fresh ground, and at times plays more like a series of engaging moments than a cohesive whole, but its craftsmanship is impeccable.

Viewed as a single experience, Oki's Movie is a curious oddity worthy of multiple viewings and lengthy contemplation, but its tricky formalism makes it less overtly satisfying on an emotional level.

Speak No Evil is the most cunningly depraved horror film in years, offering a piercing commentary on the ways we accommodate others to the point of self-subjugation.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

Gandolfini deserves an Oscar for Enough Said not because it's the culmination of everything that came before it but rather because it goes in a completely different direction. And his least characteristic achievement is also one of his best.

These are two magnificent women who live in the shadows of their own legacies, surrounded by petrified images of their former selves.

Fox is nothing if not a likable figure, and he and Guggenheim have crafted a likable film about both his suffering and resilience without turning him into a martyr. It’s not without some of the conventional beats of a star-driven documentary, but it also refuses to turn maudlin when it so easily could.

By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction.

Sr. serves a few too many thematic masters, trying to be multiple different films at once without ever committing to any of them, but anyone who has any emotional investment in Robert Downey Sr.’s rebellious body of work will at least appreciate how he tries his best to make one last movie in his own image.

Kim Jee-woon will always gravitate towards the bleaker side of the things, but “The Age of Shadows” suggests that his stories might benefit from just a little bit more light.

An intimate psychosocial character study that — true to the film’s title — unfolds at a national scale. This isn’t a story about one affluent woman’s gradual radicalization against authoritarianism, it’s a story about the illusion of not taking sides.

The scalding final sequence of Ly’s film is powerful enough to obliterate the occasionally clumsy path by which it gets there.

July’s style is at once cerebral and irreverent, but “Kajillionaire” doesn’t always find the most satisfying way to juggle those dueling tones. However, its spell lingers as July’s biggest concepts take root, and the movie turns from tragic to hopeful at an unlikely moment in tune with the artist’s previous works.

A blunt, breathless, and astoundingly unsentimental morality play that’s told with the intensity of a ticking-clock thriller, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx is every bit as ominous as its title suggests, and far less fanciful.

A work of tremendous lyrical potency, even more intricate in meaning and scope than the pair’s earlier stunner, Sujo thunderously demonstrates why Valdez and Rondero stand among those soon to be regarded as the new masters of Mexican cinema.

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

With a good deal of zippy snark à la “The Social Network” and a sense of deadpan comedy straight from the “Succession” playbook, BlackBerry is the kind of mid-budget marvel that doesn’t seem to come around often anymore.