Cocoon: The Return is the best kind of sequel: It doesn't merely cash in on the success of the original but actually continues its story in new directions, eliciting fresh meaning and emotion. [23 Nov 1988, p.C1]

A singular amalgam of humor, heartache and self-help that won the U.S. dramatic audience award at Sundance, “Brittany” resolutely goes its own way, entertaining us as richly as anything that’s come out in awhile.

With sci-fi touches and sanctimonious eroticism, the incisive satire intently takes on the influence of evangelical Christianity on the state — namely the far-right movement that elected populist Jair Bolsonaro.

With exquisite poise, wry humor and delicate swells of feeling, The Farewell addresses and gently critiques the stoicism that Asians and Asian Americans are often taught to project as a matter of pride and dignity.

Harrill is awfully good at ambivalence, at teasing out the feelings of people who are uncertain what they want and in no hurry to talk about it — a condition that afflicts more characters than we often see in American movies, independent or otherwise.

The Sound of Silence, anchored by a superbly modulated performance by the always intriguing Peter Sarsgaard, is fascinating, original and, yes, deeply resonant.

The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.

A warm, emotional and completely involving film about the celebrated tenor.

Just sit back and enjoy.

In lieu of poetry, [Ozon] has composed an exemplary piece of prose: clear, direct and quietly illuminating. At the same time, you would hardly describe this movie as neutral or devoid of anger. On the contrary, its moral outrage is all the more pronounced for being so controlled.

Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.

This isn’t an easy movie, which is to say its meanings and motives have no interest in announcing themselves. But neither is it especially difficult, and if you let it, Schanelec’s gentle, supple stream of images and their attendant associations will bear you dreamily aloft. The meanings, if not necessarily the motives, will follow.

A searing, maddening, explosively brainy movie about the mutability and immutability of the self that, appropriately enough, never stops changing shape.

Varda’s playful tour of her life’s work in the movies is nothing less than an opportunity to get to know one of cinema’s greatest treasures.

Treading topical waters with an incisive flair, de Jong offers no didactic salvation or pessimistic prospects. Goldie’s sole assurance is to trudge one rocky step at a time, and that’s all any of us can do.

This stunning, unjustly neglected 1981 release unfolds much like a Ross MacDonald Lew Archer mystery as it becomes a singularly devastating indictment of the plight of the neglected Vietnam veteran. [13 March 1988, p.2]

A brazen mix of head-through-the-glass violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick, with a dash of Capra-esque working-class comedy for good measure, Police Story is remarkably seamless in tone and execution.

Booksmart leaves you feeling unaccountably hopeful for the state of humanity — and the state of American screen comedy too.

Anchored by delicately moving performances from O’Sullivan and the amazing Williams, Saint Frances is a quietly riveting film that slowly but surely draws you in.

One of the most dramatic and emotional of sports stories gets the expert film it deserves in The Russian Five, a documentary that is moving in ways you won’t see coming.

Working Woman is more than a feature that makes compelling drama out of workplace sexual harassment; it’s an excellent work by any standard, a subtle and insightful character-driven drama that will compel anyone who cares about the interplay of personalities on-screen.

Director Seet’s gorgeously filmed production proves to resonate as much today as it did 40-plus years ago.

Wonderfully atmospheric and culturally enriching, The Burial of Kojo truly qualifies as a spellbinding experience.

It may feel as if these are loosely structured vignettes, but there’s an accumulation at work — the steady drip of dimensionality that the best movies about people at their jobs know how to turn into a complete picture.

Like leading lady Williams, the exterior of The Perfection is flawless, covering up the darkness that lies beneath. The wild ride in store is both supremely disturbing and unpredictable. But rendered with such care, skill and sheer glee — it’s utterly divine.

Director Ben Masters’ compelling, gorgeously shot, super-timely documentary The River and the Wall should be required viewing of anyone charged with making a public case for or against a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

If Scorsese’s 2005 Dylan documentary “No Direction Home” was the exhaustive origins portrait that reveals how a man and myth were launched, “Rolling Thunder Revue” is the home movie party that energizes and humanizes while still preserving a counterculture god’s mystique.

Masterfully directed by Martín Rodríguez Redondo, who wrote with Mariana Docampo and Mara Pescio, this brief, if deliberately paced picture, features far more silence than words: Dialogue is doled out “as needed” while those silences, which simmer with loaded looks and pointed observations, speak volumes.

The film is a tough, vital lesson in love, valor and compassion.

Memories in popular music are notoriously short, and if you’ve forgotten how extraordinary a singer Linda Ronstadt is, how wide a range of material she’s explored and how deep her commitment to the art and craft of music is, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a potent, mind-expanding reminder.

Firecrackers isn’t just a confident feature debut from Mozaffari, but a daring one, the kind of fast and furious feminine filmmaking that heralds the arrival of several exciting new talents.

Far more than simply “The Longest Yard” with hoops, the remarkable Q Ball serves as a potent illustration of the redemptive powers of team camaraderie.

What begins as a realist snapshot of the global migrant crisis gradually expands into an aching story of love, loss and the return of the repressed.

But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.

Ly’s considerable skill aside, what makes Les Misérables such an immersive experience is the crackling sense of authenticity that is the film’s birthright.

It’s a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction.

The brilliance of Beanpole is that it begins as the story of a collective horror, then becomes utterly, fascinatingly specific.

The Lighthouse is a ferocious battle of wills, a tour de force of cold, clammy suspense and a protracted descent into cabin-fever madness. It is also a gorgeous piece of film craft, a chance to savor the visual glories of a bygone era of cinematic artisanship.

To watch it is to feel Miike’s industriousness and partake of his pleasure: The cinema is his first love and likely also his last.

It’s elegant and diabolically poised, a familiar story expertly retooled for an era of tech-bro sociopathy and #MeToo outrage, but also graced with an insistently human pulse. Studio brand extensions rarely feel this intimate, this personally unnerving.

An exceptional tribute.

What “Edge” is especially good at is detailing how Costa gradually began to see things differently, to see the corruption investigation as an attempt by the oligarchy to reassert itself, to take power via a kind of legislative/judicial coup because it could not do so by the ballot.

Favored with copious amounts of footage shot during the voyage, as well as Genovés’ collected data and writings, Lindeen forged a riveting and illuminating study of the unscrupulous endeavor.

It's an ode to heroism, idealism and romance that still sweeps us away.

Kreutzer, who wrote the screenplay, proves especially adept, in conjunction with editor Ulrike Kofler, at the natural suspense of pinging between Lola’s professional and personal lives, and where the vulnerabilities in one bleed into the other. It’s a steady tension that’s greatly enhanced by Kreutzer’s spatially conscious visual style.

An across-the-board winner, an exuberant crowd-pleaser that marks its writer-director-star Cheech Marin's first effort apart from his longtime partner Tommy Chong.

The difficulty of turning mass spectacle into moral edification, of getting the public to think and care about history in ways that go beyond simple-minded patriotism, is a problem that this brilliantly multifaceted picture both critiques and embodies.

Made with a restraint that enhances the heartbreaking nature of its narrative, Rosie is also fortunate in having top-of-the-line Irish actress Sarah Greene, who is wrenchingly involving as a character teetering on the edge of complete desperation.

One of the most genuinely fear-provoking movies of the year, Luz shines for the calculated sensory stimulation it inflicts and its contained intent, as if it had been built to prove omnipresent evil lies unnoticed. It’ll render you unexpectedly rattled.

Bold, sneaky, brilliant Punchline works its change-ups unmercifully. I can't remember laughing this much with tears still streaming down my face, or beginning to weep while my sides still ached from laughing. The closest to it was "Terms of Endearment." [30 Sept 1988, p.C1]

It’s both an overstuffed box of postmodern delights and a classically Dickensian repository of whimsy and charm.

As Ramona, a one-woman supernova who reigns over a New York strip club, Lopez gives her most electrifying screen performance since “Out of Sight,” slipping the movie into her nonexistent pocket from the moment she strides out onto a neon-lighted stage in a rhinestone bodysuit.

Here, it seems to be saying, was an extraordinary human being who, by offering the gift of his time and attention, couldn’t help but profoundly affect those he met. To watch this movie is to encounter him anew — not in the flesh, but in nearly every other way that matters.

Directed with relentless tension and diamond-hard intelligence by Josh and Benny Safdie (who earlier this month won directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle), Uncut Gems is a thriller and a character study, a tragedy and a blast.

it’s an unexpectedly unnerving film that’s at least as terrifying as it is beautiful.

It’s a stirring and delicately reflective piece of work.

Murphy is back, and both his old gifts and some new ones are on engaging display in the rowdy, raunchy, inescapably funny Dolemite Is My Name, a gleefully profane biopic and a passion project the star has been nurturing for years.

True History of the Kelly Gang, for its part, strikes just the right balance of scary and crazy, and it subjects both to an impressive measure of discipline.

Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.

La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.

Sentimentality and violence have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning of the movies, but seldom have they been carried to such extremes and played against each other with such effectiveness as in writer-director John Woo’s The Killer (Nuart), an example of the highly addictive, supercharged, go-for-broke Hong Kong cinema at its most deliberately outrageous.

Laced with medieval magic, it has stalwart knights and tremulously fine ladies, heavy-hoofed horses who might have clattered straight out of German fairy tales and broadswords so heavy you or I could never heft them. Most of all, it is a bold, beautiful, marvelous vision.

The absence of God, the trauma of war, the weight of history: None of these are new ideas for Andersson, a fact that reaffirms the wisdom of this movie’s title. But the implied grandiosity of those themes is dissipated, again and again, by the exquisite lightness of his touch and the startling tenderness of his gaze.

It conveys a sense of moral quagmire, of sinking into squishily dangerous terrain, honeycombed with tunnels and traps, all hell exploding around it. That’s the imagery of the movie’s first battle scene, a taut prologue for a superb film.

Not surprisingly, considering that it is a Spielberg production, Batteries Not Included is a handsome film, impeccably (and ingeniously) designed by Ted Haworth and enriched by a superb James Horner score that brings a melancholy tinge to its brassy big band sound. Batteries Not Included is in the best Hollywood tradition of raising serious questions in a thoroughly entertaining way.

Muscularly directed by Gavin O’Connor, whose facility with emotional dramas with sports connections goes as far back as 2004’s Miracle, The Way Back is elevated and transformed by one of Ben Affleck’s strongest and most convincing performances.

By the end, you almost want every recording artist with Springsteen’s compassion and lyricism to introduce their newest material the way he does in “Western Stars,” like a docent of everyone’s damaged soul, pointing to the parts that make not just the music, but the musician, too.

Among the virtues of The Two Popes, a sparkling confection with a serious side, is that, given its prosaic title, its crowd-pleasing attributes come as pretty much of a surprise.

A small gem of focused filmmaking, Ága tells a minimal story so beautifully it holds us completely.

This is intensely physical filmmaking, drenched in Florida sunshine and magnetized by the beauty of the actors’ faces and bodies. But it is also deeply rooted in its characters’ consciousness, alert to the feelings of dread, shame, rage and despair that threaten to bring these fast-moving lives to a standstill.

This is cinema that pushes beyond the medium’s usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation.

Though she’s a first-time director, Costin has put together a film that’s a savvy cinematic education as well as pure fun. If you care about the movies, don’t even think of staying away.

Cunningham makes good on its stated goal of doing justice to the man’s spirit of inventiveness.

Heartfelt but not cloying, Rocks is a radiant must-see.

By zooming in and out of his protagonist’s consciousness, Marder casts aside any pretense of omniscience; he empathizes, but he also knows when to detach. Ruben’s journey is a privilege to witness, but it’s one he’ll ultimately have to walk alone.

With this film, Bustamante creates a Llorona full of self-assertion and intent, an indigenous woman assuredly facing the source of her pain. This is a Llorona who is no longer trapped in the past. She has landed fully in the present. And she is ready to extract what is due.

As signaled by the hilarious visual gag that opens the story, In My Room is a mysterious and surprising movie about the frustration of the unseen and the poignancy of paths not taken.

Its imaginative fantasies and enchanting acting won’t solve our ageless woes of the heart, but will certainly trigger a smile for their relatable absurdity.

No disrespect to Bela Lugosi, but Klaus Kinski delivers a mesmerizing performance as the original vampire in Werner Herzog's hypnotic adaptation of the horror classic. [16 Feb 2014, p.D1]

Cultural distinctiveness, in tandem with stylistic boldness, renders it an unprecedented feat. Thankfully, the proficient English-language dub aids in our ability to register the plot’s intricacies.

The visually poetic film offers an appraisal of Cash’s life and craft that is both painfully candid and often revelatory.

This riveting documentary should be required viewing for all.

With its blend of the archival, the interviewed, and modern-day footage, the first miracle of the film is that it never feels overstuffed with talking heads, or perfunctorily assembled, or rushed in covering its many glories across nearly a century. It’s a real beating-heart tribute, always streaked with feeling, whether joyous or poignant.

Delgado Aparicio’s reflective direction with a patient eye for lived-in behavior and kinetic symbolism bears artistically ripe fruit in an affectingly measured, near-perfect tour de force that demands serious attention.

A terrifically effective scare show, a virtuoso work of cinematic terror incorporating superior cinematography and production design -- and, most important of all, comic relief. [04 Nov 1991, p.F6]

As Colewell sinks in, it reveals itself as the cinematic equivalent of a deep exhale after having attained peace within.

Reflected in its native language title (“My Lens”), Chinese Portrait is a personal reflection on the country’s past and present. Brimming with humanity, Wang’s contemplative, minimalist approach forces us to consider the day-to-day lives of these people, and perhaps our own.

The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.

Searingly well-acted.

Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.

Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma may be the most important documentary you see this year.

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc’s immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness. Acasă, My Home is much more complicated, as any thorough portrait of our modern world is when progress is a balance between old and new ways and people like the Enaches find their notions of survival and independence challenged.

Jezebel is a reminder that in everyday human stories is proof that the world is wide, and that in going behind the doors that movies rarely open, there are even more worlds worth discovering.

José is hardly the first movie to spotlight a young person navigating their homosexuality in a repressive and perilous environment. Nonetheless, this sophomore feature from Chinese-born director Li Cheng, who co-wrote with George F. Roberson, feels like a singular and essential entry in that subset of LGBTQ coming-of-age films with an international beat.

What ensues amidst Jia’s indelible, gliding visuals of modern Shanghai are ruminative testimonials from the breadth of an older citizenry — former soldiers, descendants of gangsters and politicians, and (lots of) artists who endured the city’s turbulent evolution, and who in their stories of family, love and survival form a tapestry of memory and wisdom.

DaCosta, who made her directorial debut with the remarkable abortion drama “Little Woods,” firmly announces herself as an artist at work with Candyman, a genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment, the product of centuries of racist power structures.

Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.