West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

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.

Down to the Bone emerges with an aura of authenticity so strong as to be mesmerizing, thanks to a superior script brought to life with infallibly natural performances.

Daring and edgy, it's a German co-production (critical for avoiding censorship) that's filled with the intoxicating excitement of creating images for the screen.

A beautifully mounted and directed film that, despite the presence of Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, is unexpectedly lacking in emotional impact.

The strength of sensational material joined to excellent acting, superior filmmaking and uncanny political relevance has made The Manchurian Candidate into exceptionally intelligent entertainment and a high point of director Jonathan Demme's career.

I don't know whether the tall man is happy, but I do know that Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is intellectually and visually groundbreaking, and most certainly a film.

Happy Valley is especially good at revealing a mass desire to shift blame, showing how everyone the scandal touched wanted to focus on the aspect that made them the least responsible.

The clips Armstrong and her team have rounded up make us appreciate how, in a whole range of situations, costumes express character.

Its emotional reserves are deeper and more capacious, its sense of mystery more profound, than in just about any American movie of any scale I’ve seen in recent memory.

The Panama Papers serves as a reminder of the important work reporters do in fighting abuses of power and the way that work is evolving in an increasingly fractured global landscape.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

High-spirited, emotional and funny, Sound City is, of all things, a mash note to a machine. Not just any machine, however, but one that helped change the face of rock 'n' roll.

Any comic relief it affords comes with such an undertow of repressed emotions and displaced anger that it all starts to feel more depressing than dramatic.

By turns opaque, harsh, self-aware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It's never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.

A mind-bending and mesmerizing thriller that takes its time unlocking one mystery only to uncover another, all to chilling and immensely satisfying effect.

The loose structure of Five Star lends to the realism and documentary feel of the film but can often make it a bit hard to hook into the narrative. However, it's eye-opening to see an indie approach to this genre.

While the boxing is kinetically directed, Morrison grasps that the movie’s fiercest stands are taken outside the ring, when Claressa — faced with tough choices about her future — asserts herself to the people who need to hear it.

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short. [06 Apr 2007, p.E17]

What's best about it is that it seems real by the logic of childhood - it looks as things SHOULD look, if kids had it their way.

A tenderly intimate, affecting documentary portrait.

Helped by Ennio Morricone's trademark score, especially the haunting playing of pan pipes by Gheorghe Zamfir, this is a work whose overall mood is one of overwhelming melancholy and sadness, of youthful yearning, mature regret, and the transcendent but fleeting nature of memory itself. [10 Jul 1999, p.F1]

A vital, urgent and infuriating look at the devastating failures of the juvenile court system and the insidious reach of prison privatization.

It’s a simple but resonant tale, but Encanto is a charmed and charming film that just might offer a bit of healing too.

Rather than being a film about an artist, it’s an attempt to show us what it's like to actually be an artist.

Though it is only now receiving a U.S. release, it says something about the ever-prolific filmmaker’s consistency and extremely high level of proficiency that the film still seems fresh and enchanting, by turns delicate, romantic, mysterious, witty and crushing.

This isn’t just a necessary or powerful story; it’s a well-told one.

The Hit is something special: thoughtful, perfectly performed and carrying the clear stamp of an extremely interesting director.

A meditative piece that is by turns hypnotically beautiful and painfully slow. It's the kind of film perhaps best appreciated in smaller doses, in the same way bench rest can help sustain a tiring museum visit.

Its beauty lies in its empathy — something currently in short supply and therefore very welcome in the stories we consume.

Subtle, unsettling, slyly amusing, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer takes some getting used to because it's the kind of film we're not used to seeing.

Tom gradually chips away at the preening facade to seemingly unmask a complex woman whose self-image was largely shaped by her appearance-obsessed father. However, the deeper he digs, the more elusive his subject becomes.

Lucas is as irresistible as its slight, brilliant, bespectacled 14-year-old hero (Corey Haim), a kid who in his spare time catches insects in a net--but only to study them, not to kill them.

The story that Kiss the Future tells — culminating in U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement — offers an admirably potent blend of darkness and light. Specifically, the light that can emerge from darkness.

It takes a director with exceptional talent, skill and experience to explore ambiguity in all aspects of human nature and behavior, and Oshima has created a film of resilient, downright tensile strength that ends on a satisfyingly ironic note.

Aviva Kempner's warm and intelligent mash note to a man who clearly deserved it.

A quintessentially wised-up insider comedy, ideally cast and filled with sharp writing from start to finish.

A whole world can be fit into 76 minutes, and that's what the splendid documentary OT: our town manages to do.

Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.

A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

This may sound like a suspect enterprise, a musical gimmick impossible to embrace, but the reality is otherwise. For what the members of this uncanny chorus lack in pure ability they make up for in irrepressible spirits and a desire to simply have fun.

Verbinski's greatest triumph is that he allowed the animation to free rather that confine him. There is indeed a new sheriff in town, with Rango destined to become a classic.

Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.

Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.

Waiting for August" is an impressive, if muted, debut documentary.

Barnard’s grounded yet kinetic filmmaking — her collaborators include director of photography Ole Bratt Birkeland and editor Maya Maffioli — catches you up in its own infectious, wittily syncopated rhythms.

Plaza doesn’t have to steal scenes in Emily the Criminal. She plays the title role, and nearly every moment — starting with the one where Emily storms out (not for the last time) of a degrading job interview — rightly belongs to her.

Newton draws us persuasively into the sheer normalcy of his characters’ world — and forces us to imagine the feeling of having that normalcy suddenly ripped away.

Odd, offbeat, somehow endearing, the bleakly comic Frank has its own kind of charm as well as some pointed, poignant things to say about the mysterious nature of creativity, where it comes from and where it might all go.

This man whose family was almost entirely wiped out must feel like he's the recipient of a great cosmic joke, with his survival as the punch line. Europa Europa does justice to the joke.

This jazzy crime melodrama is engrossing and exhilarating because of Espinosa's impressive command of a wide range of filmmaking skills.

The Kindergarten Teacher may offer a less audacious, more stylistically muted version of its predecessor, but by the time its quietly perfect final shot arrives, the movie has reached the same provocative conclusion. It’s not poetry, exactly, but it’s pretty shattering prose.

Energetically entertaining if a bit one-sided.

The year's most pungently offbeat comedy and the most improbable love story since King Kong sighted Fay Wray.

As snapshots go of bright kids facing the next step, Try Harder! is winning enough, but considering how much more there is to follow up on, here’s hoping it’s only part one.

As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.

[Schaffer's] Naked Gun doesn’t want to regress; it wants to surprise and surpass while never punching down. The film is so committed to its PG-13 rating that it manages to pull off some truly filthy, bawdy slapstick without exposing a frame of skin.

[An] impressive and deeply felt documentary.

From crisp academic arguments to sick burns, words spew, stutter, and startle, and as delivered by a totally committed Worthy, a soulful Jackie Long, and a posse of actors and rappers from the scene, the wordplay is dizzying, mesmerizing and intoxicating.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

A dark comedy that reveals the stultifying rigidity of Japanese office life - which the film persuasively suggests endures to this day.

An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.

As a filmmaker, he (Leconte) doesn't have anything profound to say but does say his something with craft, visual flair and professionalism. Depending on your mood, that can be either too little or just enough.

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

My Little Sister is frank and poignant. With a distinctive angle and the rawness of the cast’s first-rate performances, Chuat and Reymond elevate a premise that could have, in other hands, veered into the realm of the uninspired.

That Hawke so closely aligns his cinematic style, inventive as it is, with the story’s disorderly, scruffily offbeat characters and settings is both a strength and a liability. His kaleidoscopic, at times ghostly, approach proves a valiant if studied effort.

The humor of Down by Law is marginally easier to describe than Stranger Than Paradise, but only because, by now, we have a small idea of Jarmusch's style. It's still a kind of humor that evaporates as you try to explain it. Also eluding description is the beauty, the street poetry and the precision of the images caught by Jarmusch and his cameraman, the great Robby Muller, whose black-and-white photography illuminated the early films of Wim Wenders. They have created a dream New Orleans, more succinct and more haunting than the city itself, and Lurie has set it to music.

If it weren't for the masterful work of director Dover Kosashvili, this rich, evocative film wouldn't have nearly the impact it does.

The film is enough to prompt soul-searching among parents, educators and the LGBT community on how to provide adequate guidance and support for LGBT youths.

This Is Congo is a vivid and immersive — if not all that neatly structured or focused — documentary about the Democratic Republic of Congo.

While the cast is uniformly superb, Garfield ("Lions for Lambs") deserves special mention for his deep, extraordinarily expressive performance.

The potent image-making and performative ferocity turns what could have been a crime thriller into a near-metaphysical showdown.

The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.

[Labaki] finds a magically resonant space between documentary-like vibe and dramatic performance that honors the characters’ inherent humanity while memorably framing the wretched circumstances that dictate their actions.

Although “Dark” eschews overly graphic depiction of the more horrific physiological aspects of MND and barely touches upon the financial toll the illness clearly takes, this is as real a human story as it gets.

The gripping story of how hawk-turned-dove Ellsberg's explosive actions circuitously led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon and, in turn, an end to the Vietnam War is comprehensively detailed in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's evocative documentary.

A film of rough edges and no easy answers, nearly perfect in its imperfection.

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.

Director Cohen, whose “Facing Fear” was among the 2014 Oscar nominees for documentary short, lends this classic David versus Goliath story a playfully retro feel.

Smart, thorough and thoughtful, this disturbing film unfolds like a slow-motion nightmare that has taken half a century to fully reveal itself, a trenchant examination that deserves to stand next to compelling Israeli documentaries on similar themes, including “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers.”

The man is the movie, and the long stretch of lived road Frank describes as an immigrant grappling with his adopted country’s faults is revealing, at times heartbreakingly so.

Rendered in Japanese ink wash, it is a surreal look at nuclear family dynamics. [21 Oct 2014, p.D5]

Terrific aerial footage and fine performances. [24 Dec 1998, p.F12]

From the mundane to the eventful, the movie takes a fairly unflinching, yet respectful view of Dina and Scott’s world.

The Retrieval comes at you like a haunting slip of a memory, one that writer-director Chris Eska retrieves from a mostly forgotten era in unforgettable ways.

Brydon and Coogan's discourse over breakfast, lunch and dinner is captured with a casualness that makes the eavesdropping delicious.

Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.

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.

Beautifully wrought and wonderfully acted, The Flower of My Secret is in fact the kind of film that George Cukor often made - and he surely would have been delighted at Almodovar's deft blend of humor, tenderness and wisdom. [13 Mar 1996]

Wolf’s strange, sad and finally exhilarating portrait is one of radical consumerism turned into a searchable legacy — the viewer as activist.

Like the best of personal, independent cinema -- it is both marvelously observed and completely individual. There is no film like this film, and that is something you don't hear every day.

When the melodrama does get strong, and it does, when bad things happen on a dark and stormy night, we go with it rather than resisting. The film has won our trust, given some heft to its characters and involved us in their lives, come what may.

Terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling.

Under their all-encompassing tutelage the band originally billed as the High Numbers would go on to international renown as the Who, and the extent to which Lambert & Stamp can take credit for that transformation is thoughtfully weighed in this revealing film.

Propelled by lovely, engaging writing and wonderful performances, Stan & Ollie, the story of the bittersweet final bow of legendary duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, should move and delight fans of the beloved performers while enjoyably exposing the less initiated to these comedy giants.