With its subject still behind bars and the Russian government on the brink of reelecting Kremlin's United Russia party, the biggest triumph of Khodorkovsky is the case it makes for a sequel.

This is yet another instance where the film’s short runtime seems to have shortchanged the depth of reporting.

It’s a remarkable educational experience for anyone eager to go back to the basics. In the process, it arrives at a deeper understanding of the underlying impulse, while delivering an emotionally resonant narrative with plenty of cute animals to spare.

The movie contains an epic scope that feels out of sync with the smallness of its plot; you get the idea by the first act and then Laurence's world simply hangs there for another two hours like a slo-mo shrug.

These aesthetic flourishes are as necessary as they are nice to look at, and go a long way toward making the darker shades of Hounds of Love less of an endurance test.

As a showcase for his stellar casting abilities and knack for heartwarming storytelling, Griffin in Summer is a very fine feature directorial debut.

A Most Wanted Man allows Hoffman to go out with not only one of his best performances, but one that epitomizes his strengths.

Spaceship Earth touches down as a grounded and even clinical analysis of our natural skepticism towards dreamers — of how our hope can sour into hostility as soon as it loses an iota of its shine.

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.

The movie makes its points in grand, emotional gestures more than policy nuances, but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up in immediacy. The drama acts as a visceral of ode to the nature of activism under dire circumstances.

Blurring the lines between past and present, Memory Box floats in and out of two parallel stories, never quite allowing either one to take hold. As the focus shifts from daughter to mother, the audience is caught in the middle. Much like memory itself, the threads never fully coalesce until the very end.

Austen fans might balk a bit at how much this one goes off-script into its own territory, but the spirit of Austen runs deep.

Chiseled as a haiku, director Wayne Wang’s Coming Home Again opens a window onto dying days in all their ugliness, but also onto their possibility of redemption for a mother and son.

The World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

While Johnsen competently follows Ai over the course of more than a year of contemplation and anger, "The Fake Case" doesn't introduce anything new to the equation, and mainly succeeds by virtue of its subject's inherent appeal.

Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.

Wind River may not blow you away, but this bitter, visceral, and almost parodically intense thriller knows what it takes to survive.

Air is a slam dunk and ultimately one of the best sports movies ever made.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

Giddy, exhausting, and breathtakingly violent.

American action movies are almost entirely defined by cutaways, blaring music cues and grunts. The Raid: Redemption, a hyper-energetic Indonesian martial arts movie, delivers an effective rebuke to that meek norm. Bones break, blood flows and swift, excessively complicated fight choreography puts virtually everything released in North America since "The Bourne Ultimatum" to instant shame.

Sorry Angel doesn’t strain from too much ambition; it’s a sharp snapshot of two men at pivotal moments in their lives, and ends on a note not too different from the one it starts on. But that cycle is central to its gentle intellectual flow.

In its haphazard search for facts, it happens upon a great many truths about how we see each other, and the price we pay for looking too closely.

As with most miracles, Sunset Song is more likely to evoke awe than any one particular emotion; it accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm.

If the film gives us hope for anything, it’s that such a miscarriage of justice can never happen again — and if it does, many will be there to answer the call.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

For all its filmic flourishes, this a sweet film at its heart, one interested in the darker side of childhood, not just the fears we have as children, but the anger as well.