If every picture tells a story, the body of work displayed in the hauntingly intriguing documentary “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” speaks volumes on the life and times of the artist in question.

Lindon’s youth is remarkable, because her point of view on the experience of the teenage girl is so immediate. But such a confident and self-assured debut would be remarkable for a filmmaker of any age, as “Spring Blossom” is a finely wrought, sensitively felt and artistically bold work.

Vreeland’s documentary serves as both a wonderfully evocative time capsule and a candid tribute to a pair of artistic legends.

The film is a vital historical corrective, inscribing the names of these women into history as the innovators, independent thinkers and trailblazers they were.

What these five and others have to say may be familiar to many by now, but the experiences they lived through are so terrible and told in such riveting detail it’s as if you’re hearing about the Holocaust for the first time.

In eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

The ability to pull off that kind of moral reversal, to draw you into an almost Hitchcockian complicity with characters at their lowest ebb, is one of Farhadi’s signature strengths as a storyteller.

It’s a ‘70s paranoia movie in the best sense. And this is no hackneyed tribute; it’s complex, murky, propulsive.

[A] deft and delightful romantic comedy of errors.

The result is a ride that feels smooth and bumpy in all the right places. You are pulled along by the seductive glide of Soderbergh’s filmmaking, by the jazzy riffs of David Holmes’ score and the suavity of the camerawork, only to be jolted into high alertness by the nasty, bloody surprises in Solomon’s script.

A Crime on the Bayou never explodes with fury. But that doesn’t mean you won’t feel enraged while taking in the maddening series of systematic wrongs committed against Sobol and Duncan.

Clear-eyed, compassionate and compelling, the documentary “The Price of Freedom” efficiently unpacks and debunks the myths it posits the National Rifle Assn. of America has deployed to further its all-guns-all-the-time agenda and foster a culture war.

Red Rocket is both a laser-focused character study and a scrappy, scrupulously observed portrait of a tight-knit community.

What Arnold manages to make tangibly cinematic in Cow is the soulful spirituality of these animals, their beauty and their emotions. It is as moving as it is devastating, and although this film requires patience and fortitude, it rewards with a singular and perspective-shifting cinematic experience.

Mostly, Audiard leans assuredly on his actors, gently pushing each one toward a simple, ordinary, never-irrelevant question — what does your character want? — and coaxing forth an utterly unique answer.

Even Hansen-Løve’s characteristically light, unassuming touch feels like a playful rejoinder to the weight of the Bergman mystique, a refusal to let him dictate the terms of the argument.

I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.

Ahed’s Knee means to shatter your complacency, and also the complacency of its chosen medium. You could see this as a childish act of revolt, or you could see it as Ladiv, much like Y himself, refusing to submit to any agreed-upon parameters. He delights in coloring out of the lines, not least because he knows it will make all the right people mad.

A taut, strikingly beautiful drama.

This movie is uncompromisingly discomfiting, meant to remind people of all those drunken nights where they overreacted to every well-intentioned joke, and woke up choking on the stench of burned bridges.

Death and grief may exist in the soul of “D-Man in the Waters” but “Can You Bring It” is full of vitality and energy, a testament to the power of art in the face of tragedy.

Through an economy of exposition, Eyimofe, (translated as “This is My Desire”) delivers a timeless, universal portrait of human resilience while establishing Arie and Chuko as a welcome new addition to the filmmaking brood.

With Sabaya, we witness documentary filmmaking at its boldest; we find hope in seeing not only the triumphs of the Yazidi Home Center but also what the medium can do.

Pig is a rich character study, marked by several riveting Cage monologues.

Through her unfussy direction and sly editing, Kingdon’s collection of vignettes is a reminder that the destructively frenzied cycle of consumption and waste always trickles down.

In White on White, what permeates is a merited sense of dread, by design too starkly impenetrable on emotional grounds, but direct in its fierce thematic intent.

Old-fashioned in form but modern in psychological dynamic, it’s a film that you can lose yourself in, that washes over you like a warm and enveloping mist.

It’s with a gut-wrenching helplessness that we watch the ingredients assemble for what has become our seemingly most preventable modern scourge — someone far gone, armed with what’s all too available.

Nobody here actually calls Julie the worst person in the world (that insult is reserved for another character entirely), but you can imagine her thinking it about herself as she considers the mistakes she’s made and the people she’s hurt. But over the course of this charming, wistful, ineffably tender movie, you also see her learn to embrace the possibility of good in herself and in every precious, unhurried moment. It’s time well spent.

While Serebrennikov may be banned from leaving Russia, his imagination, as well as his cast and crew, have been left gratifyingly free to roam: In its form-bending construction and surreal imagery, Petrov’s Flu plays like the work of an artist thrillingly unbound.

It is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, rigorously controlled in ways that he doesn’t always evince: It’s a bone-deep sensory immersion that never feels merely sensationalist, anchored by two performances of astonishing commitment and emotional power.

What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.

Gorgeous, humbling, looking out-, up- and inward, the documentary The Velvet Queen is the rare nature film about not only beauty and beasts but also the very human urge to make sense of our place in it all.

To call this movie timely would be both an understatement and a bit of a misnomer, since the battle for women’s bodily autonomy has never not been a timely issue. It might be more fitting to praise Happening for its urgency, not just because it arrives in American theaters under particularly fraught circumstances, but also because of the gut-clutching suspense and the wrenching intimacy that the director brings to the telling.

It’s not at all surprising that Gyllenhaal has arrived as a filmmaker with such a bold, conflicted paean to unorthodox femininity. But it’s thrilling just the same.

The royal family’s travails have long been likened to that of a soap opera, but Spencer, even as it conjures the emotional extravagance of a first-rate melodrama, refuses to be hemmed in. It’s a historical fantasia, a claustrophobic thriller and a dark comedy of manners, all poised on a knife’s edge between tabloid trash and high art.

Western is a delightfully subtle and perceptive blend of romantic comedy and road movie. [07 Aug 1998, p.F8]

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

The nimble, naturalistic performers are uniformly terrific.

The sly genius of Întregalde is how readily its characters — who can be cruel and decent, self-serving and well-meaning, often in the same instance — encourage the viewer to take their own moral inventory.

It’s a war cry that’s simultaneously a galvanizing call to action, a message of hope and a reminder that a different world is possible.

In Swan Song, [Ali] lives in both drama and sci-fi worlds as he crafts a man coming to grips simultaneously with his own mortality and the dawn of something new for humanity.

Unassumingly electrifying and amusingly elusive, this modern-day fable focuses on the marks we leave behind in others when paths diverge and physical distance grows.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an immaculate vision: coldly efficient, aesthetically faultless, splendidly acted. I do wish it had a bit more blood in it.

Special kudos go to Martin Ziaran’s innovative, at times vertiginous and even upside-down camerawork, which lends a you-are-there feel to the film’s already viscerally unnerving action. It’s a master class in cinematography.

Viscerally disturbing and achingly humanistic.

This is a lyrical ode to the glories of summer and the collaborative joys of filmmaking, suffused with the hope that we will never be deprived of either for long.

Some 40 years in the making, the remarkable Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is a gorgeously rendered, unexpectedly moving appraisal of the life and craft of one of the best-loved literary voices of the late 20th century.

Villeneuve has made good on one of the great Hollywood gambles in recent memory, delivering a two-part epic of literary nuance, timely significance and maybe even the promise of another film or two.

Scenes of the Irish countryside are dazzling and Ford’s version of Ireland is all homey and warm-hearted, with a distinct Hollywood glaze.

No one in this movie has a complete understanding of what’s going on, but Wandel proves that a sensitive enough camera can provide a fuller picture than most.

An achingly poignant testament to the unwavering strength of parental and filial bonds.

When JR turns his gaze toward a person and pastes their image on a wall, he’s inviting others not just to participate in this project but also to look their way, to pay attention to someone or something by seeing it differently in the world. It takes a village, but all they need is paper and glue.

Jules Furthman penned the uncompromising script; Edmund Goulding directed with a master hand. [05 Jun 2005, p.E12]

With specificity, sweep and urgency, occasionally terrifying and bloody when capturing violent police tactics, Chow’s movie is a true epic of meaningful resistance.

The multiple perspectives in Hold Your Fire add up to a fascinating look back at a still-raging debate over the true purpose of policing.

Girl Picture is designed to feel as closely observed as a diary, but it’s also like being pulled along by a friend eager for you to experience what they go through, see things the way they do, to just get it and have a great time too. That’s a special kind of invitation, and Girl Picture is more than enough movie to make its compassion for the lives of teenage girls a swirling, swooning high.

A harrowing yet sublime work that has to do with the exceptionally cruel fate of an 11th-Century noblewoman, played by the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka. [12 Aug 1985, p.2]

It doesn’t just offer up the most palatable aspects of horror as a genre; instead, it pushes it to its limits through a complete, and undoubtedly satisfying, reworking.

Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.

A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.

As crafted by Bahrani, this fascinating portrait of a hero/villain who comes across as both affable and unpleasant, often simultaneously, is a Greek tragedy and a Shakespearean comedy with a touch of “Tiger King” all expertly rolled into one all-too-pertinent cautionary tale.

As Leonor Will Never Die parties to its close, Escobar reminds us that while life is unerringly finite, cinema is the complicated, messy, riotous love affair that never has to end.

The geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months since this sleek, smartly assembled and almost indecently entertaining movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won two audience awards), and as a result, it can feel timely and outdated, relevant and redundant, disturbing and escapist all at once.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a snapshot, a memorial, a knotty philosophical detective story and a devastating account of Nazi atrocities. It’s also an extended rumination on the illusory, entropic nature of the cinematic medium itself.

For all the commendable directorial moves Benaim makes, it’s the miraculous casting of first-time actor De Casta that propels Plaza Catedral into exceptional territory.

The documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen is as wondrous, buoyant and heartwarming as the film it celebrates.

If this is satire, it’s satire so generously attentive toward its targets that mockery and love become virtually indistinguishable.

This at once deeply creepy and strangely moving movie is ultimately about a girl in distress, unsure of what to do when the change she’s been desperate for turns out to be worse than the misery she’s already learned to handle.

The structuring theme of The Novelist’s Film may be artistic frustration, the kind that can spur a writer to call it quits, an actor to take a break and even an established director to reconsider his calling. But it’s also very much about finding creative renewal in unexpected places — a bookstore, an outdoor trail, a movie theater — and learning to embrace, rather than resist, life’s beautifully meandering flow.

The larger point of this movie is that our own pasts sometimes seem like a fantasy — a dream we half-remember — where what actually happened and what we merely imagined both now seem equally impossible.

At its best, 32 Sounds gets us to consider the transformative, context-rich qualities of any given swath of audio.

Juxtaposing nature’s comforting placidity and an urban mélange in which freedom is always in flux, “Wood and Water” breathes with unforced majesty about what’s sad and beautiful in moments of great change — story, mood and near-documentary-like observation are in a wonderful harmony here.

Till is more understatedly effective, and Deadwyler’s performance at its most powerful, when Chukwu resists and even undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making.

With care, thoughtfulness and rigor, Schrader and the filmmakers of She Said craft a film that shows the process of building this paradigm-shifting piece of journalism in a manner that is simultaneously thrilling and grindingly methodical, aided greatly by Nicholas Britell’s score.

Like all great storytellers, Spielberg knows the value — the beauty — of artifice and embellishment, as well as the permeability of truth and fiction. The Fabelmans is as slick, transporting and painstakingly orchestrated as anything in his filmography, and also as funny, stirring and implacably sad.

The production values are incredible; in both drama and visuals, I'd put this sea tale up against the unsinkable "Titanic" any day. It's emotionally engaging too, though it's a different kind of love story. Director Victor Fleming (before "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind") makes chopping fish heads seem romantic. [04 Mar 1999, p.F18]

It’s marvelous to have Cronenberg back and to behold his undimmed, unparalleled skill at welding the formulations of horror and science fiction to the cinema of ideas.

Wielding chaos into cinema — rather than creating an accumulation of factoids and anecdotes told by those who knew the performer — Morgen manifests a sensorial invocation of Bowie’s spirit, suited to delight acolytes and nonbelievers alike, for a tribute worthy of his unclassifiable genius.

Demolition is a state of mind in White Building, Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang’s sad, beautiful feature debut, an urban elegy about what’s thick in the air when the home one has always known is not long for the world.

Day Shift is a damned delight. One would be tempted to call it the best horror comedy of 2022 so far, but it mixes so many genres it’s more like 2022’s best horror-buddy-cop-cartel-drama-bounty-hunter-martial-arts-action comedy (so far).

Ozu cherishes tradition but accepts the inevitability of loss and change, and is as all-embracing as Jean Renoir. His people may judge and not forgive, often understandably, but as one of the greatest filmmakers he does not do so. [04 Oct 2007, p.E13]

More than once in Showing Up, her wry and wonderful new movie, the director Kelly Reichardt gives us something that feels rarer than it should in American cinema: a lingering moment in the presence of an artist at work.

One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.

[A] beautifully bittersweet and generous movie — which, like life itself, draws no distinction between the significant and the insignificant.

Mungiu is a master of the long, talky slow burn, and if R.M.N. often feels less focused and more sprawling than some of his earlier movies (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Graduation”), that’s a testament to its expansiveness and ambition. The story becomes increasingly gripping as it meanders and lingers, broadens and deepens, putting peripheral characters into play and bringing latent hostilities to the surface.

Overall, Corsage shows a tantalizing way forward for the hopelessly staid biopic genre: honoring, provoking and upending with verve and humor as it liberates a complex woman from iconography’s deadening glamour.

Happily, the movie doesn’t exist only on paper. It lives in Marinelli’s and Borghi’s beautifully harmonized performances, in their expressive physicality and intense if sometimes hesitant emotions; in the soft-polished grit and enveloping romanticism of Daniel Norgren’s songs; and especially in the heart-stopping grandeur of Ruben Impens’ square-framed compositions.

The real point of “Since I Been Down” — and what makes the movie so powerful — are the scenes that show these still-incarcerated men and women today.

I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage.

Buoyed by two superb performances, writer-director Aly Muritiba’s tenderly electrifying new feature is part sensual queer romance and part moving character study.

In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.

The problem with this priest — one of them, anyway — may not be an excess of spiritual fervor but rather a dearth of it, a lack of reverence for the beauty that Pálmason’s camera exalts in every magisterial frame. Lucas may be a blind wretch, but the creation through which he stumbles is a source of never-ending awe.

Ozu uses his austere style to express warmth, occasional humor and and a spirit of reconciliation; as usual, his repeated shots of people crossing a corridor suggest the passage through life. [19 Jan 1990, p.F10]

Arguably one of the best translations to film of any Broadway musical. [15 Nov 1991, p.F26]

Lynne Littman's unforgettable, uncompromising and understated Testament is quite simply the most powerful anti-nuclear dramatic film ever made and stars Jane Alexander, superb as a woman trying to hold her family together in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. [10 Aug 1986, p.4]

Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of [Nolan's] storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold. That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy.

In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.