As a slice of ultra-orthodox life, Menashe offers an unusual — and unusually sympathetic — look inside a world that is often hidden from view.

Novitiate sure-handedly takes us inside the world of belief with care, concern and a piercing, discerning eye.

A chilling documentary that firmly positions McVeigh not as some delusional loner but rather as a product of a far-right subculture that looked on the U.S. federal government as one of the most dangerous forces on the face of the Earth.

Watching the elephant work the room, so speak, interacting magisterially with all and sundry, is always a treat.

The threat of violence churns beneath nearly every frame of this poised and coolly disturbing movie, but Finley's diabolical sense of mischief is held in check — and in some ways amplified — by his discretion.

Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis were among those on the front lines of the protests against police violence and their on-the-ground, from-the-heart documentary Whose Streets? communicates that urgency from the inside out — not as news story or social theory, but as communal experience and awakening.

Brigsby Bear becomes a winning tribute to the joys of amateur filmmaking, one whose lovingly crafted sets and props recall the handmade sensibility and do-it-yourself spirit of other independent movies.

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.

If you are familiar with his mesmerizing work, nothing more need be said; if you’re not, this feast of dance illustrates why others are.

In its visualization of a life that feels exceptional as well as ordinary, In This Corner of the World draws us in with the beauty of its animation and the specificity of its detail.

Filmmaker and Columbia professor Joseph, and playwright Beaty, in his feature writing and acting debut, infuse the movie with an intense New York City realism and an evocative street poetry that conjure up early John Cassavetes and Spike Lee.

The final moments of It Comes at Night go beyond the usual standards of horror-movie bleakness to achieve an almost unwatchable cruelty — a powerful accomplishment that also feels, in this context, like a limitation.

On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t as accomplished as Hong’s 2015 collaboration with Kim, the masterfully bifurcated “Right Now, Wrong Then.” But it’s more than worth seeing for Kim’s exposed nerve endings alone, and also for the way in which Hong’s typically playful sensibility seems to tilt at times into a surreal, menacing strangeness.

While the conclusion to The Other Side of Hope is open-ended, Kaurismaki unashamedly believes in brotherhood, and among other things his film celebrates people who do the right thing without making a big deal about it.

Whatever else you think about Marx and his ideas, it's hard to imagine him as hot-blooded and young. Director and co-writer Raoul Peck, as it turns out, not only understands those contradictions, he is committed to embracing them, which is what makes The Young Karl Marx the audacious, engrossing film it is.

There may be no fancy filmmaking steps in “Alive and Kicking,” but the jaw-dropping improvisations and physical intimacy of the dancers make it an action film par excellence — joy-fueled and gravity-defying.

This lyrical and ethereal film mixes the stark style of a crime story into a love story, capturing the highs, lows and the deepest, darkest recesses of grungy, stoned teenage life; a life always yearning for more.

If it verges on being a little too pleased with itself for its own good, that's an acceptable price to pay for something that makes you smile.

Liu gives you plenty to listen to, but don't forget to look: Beyond the formulaic thriller plotting and the showy verbiage, it's the movie's richly textured vision of urban decay that stays with you.

Through its keenly observed small moments and the presence of the charismatic Nafar and his infectious, socially charged raps, Junction 48 sensitively yet powerfully conveys the considerable challenges inherent in attempting to reconcile those rocky crossroads of coexistence and cultural identity.

This is an unapologetically warmhearted comedic drama, a fine example of commercial filmmaking grounded in a persuasive knowledge of human behavior.

It’s a testament to Jack Bryant’s lovely script and Kerstin Karlhuber’s thoughtful direction that this controversial concept is handled with such even-handedness and grace.

Though Holofcener's films invariably make us laugh in rueful recognition of the inane complexities of lives that manage to echo our own, "Steady Habits" also conveys a melancholy darkness, a more somber cast than usual. Everything seems amusing until suddenly it is not.

The affecting work by Almanzar, Rodriguez and the rest of the ensemble in this immersive film tenderly speaks for itself.

Jalali peppers this darkly funny, often absurdist piece with enough socio-political messaging to add heft but not didacticism. It all makes for a singular, well-observed balancing act.

Chazelle seems to be trying to both uphold and transcend the narrative template established by astronaut dramas like “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13,” with their scenes of hard-working men barking orders from ground control (Kyle Chandler does the honors nicely here), and of astronauts’ wives worrying that they may soon be widows. Even his missteps...underscore his desire to tell a story of collective accomplishment through one man’s extraordinary perspective.

Young’s vision of quiet middle-class mayhem, drawn from the three-handed struggle between young Vicki and her tormentors, is bold and unflinching.

In The Death of Louis XIV, Léaud shows us stray glimmers of the droll conversationalist and irrepressible bon vivant the Sun King once must have been. But his performance is finally a magnificent stare into the abyss, a sustained contemplation of things we would rather not dwell upon but will ultimately have to face.

The story of how Wiseau turned his great cinematic lemon into zeitgeist lemonade is both heartening and instructive, but it also hints at darker secrets and unknowns that this movie’s upbeat dimensions can’t entirely capture.

Tickling Giants surprises us on several levels. It reveals Egypt’s familiar Arab Spring experience through a lens, that of satiric comedy, which is very different from the way we usually see it. And it has the personal element of Youssef’s involving story, showing what can happen when your dreams come true to a completely unexpected extent.

It’s hard not to feel stirred, even moved, by the sheer improbable fact of this picture’s existence: Moment by moment, you’re held by its loony flights of lyricism and gorgeous images (shot by Caroline Champetier), and by the mix of sincerity, irony and Sondheimian dissonance that animates every sung-through line.

With her debut, Wells demonstrates that she's more than a comedic talent with a wonderfully weird sensibility. As a writer-director, she puts her own stamp on a standard premise, resulting in an unconventional but genuinely enjoyable film.

The film is an astute character study that is analytical but never unemotional.

Set on a dairy farm in southwestern England, The Levelling is a modestly scaled, superbly crafted drama with a powerful sense of place.

Enjoyable and entertaining.

Shot in evocative black and white, Karl Marx City is a sleek, absorbing detective story, a fascinating primer on mass surveillance in the pre-Snowden era, and a roving memoir of East German life.

The camera work is meticulous and exquisite in its expression, creating a sense of tense foreboding throughout, linking characters and images with a creepy omniscience.

The film is a true dramedy that wrestles with the darker, sadder elements of life in a frank, funny and deeply relatable way.

Thank You For Your Service is more effective, more disturbing than you may expect, and that is very much a good thing.

With Grace’s sure hand and the strong work of lead actors Wyatt Russell and Alex Karpovsky, Folk Hero & Funny Guy is the kind of road trip movie where it’s a pleasure to ride shotgun.

The movie is a straightforward, even familiar, tale of survival and recovery, but its grave respect for the unique extremity of its protagonist’s ordeal cancels out any impulse toward exploitation. It doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that your tears are its natural entitlement, which is precisely why you might find yourself shedding a few before it’s over.

Its wrenching honesty provides a potent counter to the simple-minded let’s-all-be-friends-and-sing-a-song inanities of “My Little Pony,” “The Emoji Movie” and other recent American animated features.

One Week and a Day keeps an impeccable balance between absurdity and sadness, comedy and heartbreak. Increasingly outrageous but always plausible, it applies its pitiless, pitch black sense of humor to a very particular situation.

[An] endlessly fascinating, bracingly up-to-the-minute Netflix documentary.

At just 81 minutes, The Cage Fighter has been whittled down to its fighting weight, trimmed of every ounce of fat. Unay tells Carman's story without interviews or narration, but the film lands every punch without their help.

The better one knows Stanton’s life and his movies, the more the long silences and gently meandering rhythms of Lucky resonate.

The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world all its own.

The film articulates a concept of universal humanity. No matter the religion or circumstances, we all have the same desires for peace and connection throughout life.

There has been no shortage of films tracking the immigrant pursuit of the American dream, but few have been as laugh-out-loud delightful as The Tiger Hunter, a sparkling first feature by Lena Khan.

Celebrating a great ranchera interpreter without sugarcoating her, this straightforward film honors her approach.

This folk tale braids together the primordial and the divine in endlessly surprising ways.

But though the new ground it breaks is visual rather than dramatic or emotional, this is a polished, satisfying entertainment that just about dares you to look a gift lion in the mouth.

While Cruz wins us over with her emotionally charged amateur sleuthing, the weight of a constant struggle to not just gain acceptance, but survive fighting for it, gives France’s documentary a stirring poignancy.

A Gray State disturbingly traverses the blurred boundary between reality and performance all too inherent in today’s social media-fed climate of cultural narcissism.

Theater lovers and Italophiles alike should savor the documentary Spettacolo.

An increasingly disturbing film, it offers no relief for its central character, or for its audiences for that matter. Akin was inspired to tell the story by real-life political events in Germany, and his skills as a filmmaker are such that escape from this unsettling film is not in the cards.

Vividly photographed by René Diaz and adroitly edited by Dan Swietlik, A River Below skillfully — and quite compellingly — navigates the murky complexities of contemporary reality filmmaking.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Director Piscatella maintains an engaging grip on his unassuming subject’s ascendancy.

Persuasive rather than polemical, it's the unusual issue film that deals in counterintuitive reason rather than barely controlled hysteria.

Though he is on less certain ground during the narrative's moments of warmth than when things are grim, director Cretton manages it all successfully. With Woody Harrelson as its dependable lodestar, "The Glass Castle" never loses its sense of direction or its belief in where it’s going.

Ward directs his actors as adroitly as he has written for them, and the vulnerability that he allows his three stars to reveal is really what makes the movie work. No one, not even baseball fans, should go to Major League hoping for "Bull Durham's" sex, raunch and sophistication. But "Major League" has its own ingratiating charm.

While “32 Pills” is a devastating depiction of the effect suicide has on families, it’s more so a heartfelt tribute to her sister’s work and the connection that they shared.

This movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last.

What keeps "Gaslight" burning is its tantalizing aura of mystery. [10 Feb 1994, p.5]

Icaros is a mini-epic of serene, intelligent mind-body wooziness.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

Savage Steve Holland's One Crazy Summer is a zesty hot-weather tonic, light and sparkling, and a fine follow-up to last fall's "Better Off Dead," Holland's knockout debut feature. As impossible as it seems just now, Holland actually finds fresh approaches to the youth comedy. [12 Aug 1986, p.C5]

Afterimage may depict a losing battle for one uncompromising artist, but it’s also a bracing final dispatch for the uncompromising artist who survived long enough to tell of it.

It's not every day that you end up rooting for a bank, but the story Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells is no ordinary tale.

Looking at combat from all sides, examining the pride, the anger and the regrets, is what this fine documentary is all about.

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

What gives the film its surprising coherence is not only the fluidity of Ozon's technique but also his mastery of tone, the ease with which he applies serious craft to a resolutely un-serious endeavor. The filmmaker's cackle is always audible beneath the story's glassy, deadpan surface.

That the film is animated, yet feels so thoroughly real, is a testament to its vivid use of rotoscoping as well as a solid script by director Ali Soozandeh, an Iranian expatriate.

Although rife with pratfalls, near-misses, crazy coincidences and mistaken identities, “Lost in Paris” is a whirligig contraption that never turns frenetic or throws too much at you. It’s like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet farce on Xanax, with a soothing dose of Wes Anderson whimsy for good measure.

Buenos Aires and New York are forests of romantic entanglement, identity-searching and adventure in Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s artfully frothy Hermia & Helena.

As a portrait of a man who surrendered his career and much of his life to the service of a master, Filmworker proves compelling, particularly for those with a passing interest in Kubrick.

Lover for a Day, which completes a thematic trilogy of sorts with Garrel's "Jealousy" (2014) and "In the Shadow of Women" (2016), is one of his more enchanting specimens.

For Huppert, most celebrated for her uncompromising severity in films like "Elle" and "The Piano Teacher," the movie is an opportunity to cut gloriously loose; no less than Claire herself, she seems to be enjoying her holiday.

As the film moves elegantly between past and present, Brooks proves a keen observer of behavior and the pitfalls of overthinking. Finding complex beauty in what would be merely obvious in a lesser work, her delightful feature taps into a rarely broached, generally female coming-of-age dilemma: the fear of losing yourself before you know who you are.

Everything old is shockingly, stirringly new again in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the rare sequel so unexpectedly enchanting that it plays less like a rehash than a reclamation.

The film captures the intense emotion of the October 2014 performance that capped Whelan’s 30-year career. But more crucial is the way it shows her creating new challenges for herself, turning the terrifying prospect of irrelevance into a shot at reinvention.

A sweet-natured, high-spirited comedy, that rare movie that plays effectively to all ages. Even rarer, it celebrates genuine sportsmanship, placing the emphasis back on how the game is played in the face of the winning-is-everything philosophy that permeates every aspect of contemporary life. [1 Oct 1993, p.F4]

A beautifully filmed, subtly political travelogue with some central conundrums.

Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.

It’s a touching glimpse at a community solution to an inclusion problem, where the water’s more than just fine.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a jaunty, amusing patchwork of truths, half-truths and pure fiction that cleverly combine to recount the story of the whirlwind creation of Charles Dickens' famed novella "A Christmas Carol."

The film elegantly unfolds as if someone had peeked inside a steerage trunk and thumbed through the brittle pages of scrapbooks showing sailboats on the Euphrates and hieroglyphics in the moonlight.

Writer-director Amanda Kernell’s assured first feature has a classic sheen, but with its powerful sense of place and sensitive performances, it’s no fusty museum piece.

Romantic and preposterous all at once, it's actually a funny, endearing fable about courage, love and faith...So endearing that the flatness about its last few minutes manages not to sink the picture. [9 March 1990, p.C1]

Cohn’s slickly edited verité-style storytelling lets each person’s humanity rise to the top, just enough to mix expected poignancy with a simple clarity about the struggles of low-income, opportunity-challenged souls.

The House on Coco Road is a remarkable document of how social forces affected the lives of Baker and his ancestors. It might lack the scope to encompass all of the story it wants to tell, but it’s a compelling conversation starter.

While Tag doesn’t get every character beat right, it nails the energy and enduring companionship that the game has engendered among the friends. It’s the kind of frothy escapist fare that goes down easy on a hot summer day, with a big old beating heart to boot.

Fukada’s take on family is genuinely bleak — what he sees is loneliness together instead of real companionship, and all the problems that arise from manufactured togetherness. But his storytelling instincts are solid, and his actors always bring humanity to their darkest impulses and saddest epiphanies.

Escapes is as unconventional as its subject, demonstrating the charming things that can happen when a life in no way ordinary gets documented by a filmmaker most unusual.

Village of the Damned is a good-looking, well-wrought film with some knockout special effects, some dark humor and crisp portrayals.

The film is a moving experience for both its subjects and the audience.

King and Romero are a natural match, and though this isn't the best of the King-derived horror movies--The Shining and The Dead Zone probably are--it's close.