No Man of God is impeccably and carefully directed by Sealey, and the craft on display is remarkable.

Accepted is remarkably affecting, thanks to the way Chen works his way back to what his doc is really about.

Sisters on Track is a lovely, immersive look into the lives of three Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, girls.

Fusing exquisitely shot color 16mm footage from 1964 of the team’s training sessions, drone-like music and splices of animation, we get a delirious sense of what these committed women endured six out of seven days a week.

Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name.

It’s a different register for Rapace, who remains controlled, with a few explosions of emotion. But she is present and instinctual, imbuing Maria with a steely but soft power: decisive, persuasive and feminine.

Titane is nothing if not a triumph of engineering, to the point where the slickness and sophistication of its technique sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rigor of its ideas. Still, it’s hard not to admire the sheer verve with which Ducournau ultimately welds those ideas together.

In part because of the depth of Seydoux’s performance, the film becomes less an allegory of a nation and more a gripping character study, a portrait of a mask of personal and professional regard slowly slipping away.

Despite the unwieldy narrative complications, Hosoda achieves an adroit, ultimately instructive balance of kinesis and stillness.

Having abandoned for a while the portrayal of real people, Streep demonstrates here that what great actresses do is show us ordinary people in an extraordinary light.

In the highly suspenseful 1976 Two-Minute Warning, directed with terrific energy and control by Larry Peerce, a football game takes on a subtly symbolic aspect as the cops pursue a mad sniper on the loose in a packed football stadium. [05 Jun 1988, p.2]

What Gaines does not miss is Gregory’s spirit, and its effect — amusing, bemusing, inspiring — on the world around him.

Preferring to maintain his focus on the tender relationship between father and son, as well as the gently amusing camaraderie that exists among groups of males in both countries, Koguashvili challenges conventional notions of masculinity to often delightful effect.

Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) have made an inspired jumble, a surprisingly graceful Franken-Steinway of a movie.

This is a messy, riotous film worthy of Lunch herself, and just like Lunch, it isn’t asking to be liked.

Re-Animator is a hard act to follow, but Gordon only falls a notch short here, creating some genuinely gruesome thrills as well as an unsettling current of sexual hysteria.

My Stepmother Is an Alien is solid, wide-appeal holiday fare. It makes the best use of Aykroyd’s warmth and proven talents in quite some time, and it does even more for Basinger, showing that she can be as funny and smart as she is sexy.

It’s a veritable crazy quilt of ideas that manages to engage our attention while our heads continue to dart away from the shocking images on screen.

Imamura's mastery of tone has always matched his capacity for compassion and acuteness of observation. [18 Sep 1998, p.F16]

The Danish director, whose film Pelle the Conqueror won the best foreign-language film Oscar, has turned out a thoughtful and accomplished piece of filmmaking, skillfully acted and beautifully put together with a kind of discreet elegance that the biggest budget (roughly $10 million) in Swedish film history made possible.

It’s a sprawling, rowdy, vital film laced with both outrageous absurdist dark humor and unspeakable pain, suffering and injustice.

Thanks to the synthesis of adaptation, direction and ensemble — especially its leads — The Valet rewardingly finds its own way.

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

"Everything” — anchored by strong performances from Marceau and Dussollier — is a refreshingly in-the-moment chronicle of what it means to love someone enough to grant them something so final, and, in a society that doesn’t fully accept it, to see it through legally and logistically.

There’s something particularly pleasing about the harmony that Turning Red achieves between the lyricism of ancient Chinese legend and the synthetic creaminess of teeny-bopper pop.

In its interlocking parts and willfully impenetrable details, Serebrennikov wants you to know that being Russian is too complicated to foreground one emotion or experience, or to rely on the safety of the linear when one day can feel like nothing and everything. This brazenly packed movie isn’t for everyone. Neither, we grasp, is being Russian.

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.

If the story is a welter of subplots, tangents and ideas — to the point of being overly taken at times with its own conceptual daring — Peele’s visual craft shows an admirable finesse and discretion.

Notable for its on-screen vigor and two off-screen bits of drama: star John Wayne's recovery from lung cancer and supporting player Dennis Hopper's reunion with Hathaway after their legendary 78-take standoff in the 1958 From Hell to Texas. [23 Jul 1989, p.2]

Mona Lisa’s story is at first bizarre, and then tense, and then genuinely moving as the escapee figures out what she actually wants from the outside world.

Official Competition is a coy satire that makes welcome use of biting meta-commentary and self-reflexive critique.

This is a poignant and poetic film, where the strife just outside the characters’ little bubbles is ever-present and always visible.

Thieves further assures Techine's place in the front rank of international filmmakers. [27 Dec 1996, p.F2]

Witty, intelligent and quintessentially French, it is an unusually involving costume drama that takes us into a decadent world few will know existed, a place where “vices are without consequence but ridicule can kill.”

Shouting in all-caps about unions and shortages of food, Călinescu symbolizes the power of individuals that dare to discern from their own personal trenches, regardless of how insignificant they may seem.

Hard Luck Love Song is a happy but gritty marriage of material, filmmaker and star. Much is asked of Dorman, and he delivers all.

Sometimes Wolf is slight, relying on mystery and metaphor to build suspense, but Biancheri’s sense of narrative adventure imbues this survivalist picture with more than uneasiness. She gives it tenderness.

Copshop is an enjoyable, slow-burn action movie featuring a smart script, sharp direction, strong cast — and the emergence of a possible star.

An excellent but often overlooked 1968 Western about a kindly sheriff (James Stewart) battling a gang of bad guys, with Henry Fonda playing the chief villain. [03 Jun 1994, p.F22]

Rifkin has spun a pitch-black fable of show business at its sleaziest and most ephemeral.

Lelio and his co-writers have made a smart, subtle disquisition on the necessity of both skepticism and faith, with a particularly keen understanding of religion’s uses and abuses.

This is a movie at which some will shrug and some will love. It’s a spiritually probing, deeply personal, stubbornly idiosyncratic work of art. It’s an Abel Ferrara film.

Its reflection of the Westerns makes it more accessible to an American audience than some of his other movies and, although his characters have complicated moral shadings typical of Kurosawa films, Yojimbo can be enjoyed on a surface level. The simple plot moves and carries you along. [11 Apr 1991, p.13]

Rather than exploiting her sorrow-fueled mission for a “Taken”-like revenge spectacle, the verité social drama understands Cielo’s determination to find answers not as mere courageousness, but a tragic, nothing-left-to-lose lack of concern for her own safety.

Elegantly intoxicating in its atmospheric construction, “Fever Dream” maintains its incantation to its very final twist. Even as clues inch us closer to a logical explanation for the collective malaise, the mystical undercurrent Llosa sets in place fosters our doubt.

While 7 Prisoners doesn’t pack many surprises, it is remarkably well drawn, featuring gripping performances and a vividly squalid setting.

The word “visionary” gets tossed around too much, but there’s really no better way to describe the spectacularly bleak animated science-fiction film Mad God or its creator, Phil Tippett.

The film’s beautifully painted mountains are particularly striking, and the climbing sequences are among its standouts. Live-action has nothing on the way these scenes convey both the majestic scale of the peaks and the technical skill necessary to attempt these summits (as well as the physical toll involved).

As breezy primers go in a life that’s as full as it gets, this collection of the archival and the anecdotal, with the occasional preparing of dishes as mouth-watering interludes, is decidedly more feast than fast food.

The Rescue is a gripping, unsurprisingly moving early account, one that emphasizes the pluck and ingenuity of its heroes and the resilience and beauty of its survivors. To say that it feels necessarily incomplete is to acknowledge the extraordinary and extraordinarily multifaceted story it has to tell.

Like those early shorts, then, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is essentially a mockumentary, though one with a far more complex visual scheme and a more ambitious tonal range.

In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.

It turns out that the screen provides a surprisingly hospitable frame for a musical that is quite purely and unabashedly — at times even downright earnestly — a work of theater.

Narrator-hosts Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly offer more than routine continuity with their timeless class and superb timing in their first film appearance together since the 1946 Ziegfeld Follies. [26 Jun 1992, p.F22]

Up until the final scenes, when every tension flares unambiguously into the open, Kusijanović assuredly avoids the obvious, instead telling her story with deft, implicative strokes: meaningful glances, offhand dialogue and insinuating body language.

While the events that transpire are minimal, the poignancy of “Montana Story” resides in watching these two strangers, once inseparable, reconnect now as different people but with the same scars.

Is The Humans a haunted-house movie? Maybe; Karam is not above unleashing a good jump scare or two. But for all the creeping dread he summons here through sheer formal concentration, the nature of the horror he’s addressing turns out to be much harder to pin down.

With sun-kissed cinematography by Paul Guilhaume and the construction of the story in miraculously intimate closeups of touching moments, “Little Girl” plays almost as if it were an aesthetically verité, yet scripted fiction film from the Dardenne brothers. It’s only the handful of interviews where the family speaks to the camera that breaks the spell.

Ultimately, if Miller and Pollard don’t paint a particularly warts-and-all portrait of Ashe, they don’t set him up as some sort of saint either: just a certain man of a certain era with an amazing talent. It’s a fitting tribute.

Becoming Cousteau may not be as deep a journey as some would hope, but for having to chart a lot of years, it hits its points about passion, fame and activism smartly, even movingly.

A rich, unstable alloy of history, legend, musical pageantry and cinematic psychedelia, it mounts an argument for mind-expanding, complacency-rattling art in a world that often prefers the opposite.

Don’t go into the immersive, observational documentary “Bitterbrush” looking for profound insights or roiling conflict but rather a captivating and meditative look at two intrepid young women surviving — and seasonally thriving — in a traditionally male-dominated field: cattle herding.

Herbulot and Diop have made a movie that is bold and exciting, combining bits of reality with outsized myth, in a tale of crime, revenge, and literal monsters, set in a wonderland where it seems anything can happen.

It’s such an astute and warmhearted journey that it’s hard not to succumb to its underdog charms.

Despite its omissions, the film proves a rich and satisfying meal and should be embraced by Chaplin fans and completists.

There are times when The Tale of King Crab seems like it could have been made in the silent era, so dedicated are Rigo de Righi and Zoppis to the simple, dramatic power of what they choose to show us. Their characters search for love, justice and gold while the filmmakers make clear what they treasure: ageless tales like these.

The story possesses a true depth of character; there is every reason to hope that Anno’s multiple meanings become increasingly clear in the subsequent installments.

The Haunting of Julia is an instance of the perfect blending of role and performer, with Mia Farrow cast as a young woman who may be either the victim of a ghostly possession or slowly disintegrating into madness. [26 Aug 1990, p.4]

Taking a cue from its taciturn protagonist, I Was a Simple Man prefers to let its soulful poetic imagery do the bulk of the talking.

For an adoptee, the notion of “family” is so much more complicated and layered than it might be for someone else, but what Found powerfully argues is that within these many layers, there is an abundance of a unique kind of love, and understanding, to be found. You just have to look for it.

Williams has been making taut, gritty genre films and TV programs in the U.K. for two decades now, which is evident in the confidence of Bull.

It’s a surprise contender for Best Christmas Movie of the last several years.

This film, deftly directed by Mark Rydell (Cinderella Liberty, The Rose, On Golden Pond), is a celebration of simpler times and gentler hearts. It is an absolute joy to watch. [24 Sep 1992, p.12]

The absorbing romantic drama Cicada feels as real as it gets.

Beyond Glenn-Copeland’s magnetic onstage presence and rich, sonorous, still-flawless vocals, it’s the candid moments in which he dances to the music, riffs on spontaneous beats in between sets and shares meals on the sidewalk with his younger bandmates that leave a hopeful grace note on Glenn-Copeland’s legacy.

Exceptionally well-crafted, Made in America is the kind of picture Hollywood often aspires to but rarely succeeds in bringing off -- smart and sophisticated with a wide appeal. [28 May 1993, p.F1]

The movie is nothing if not unnervingly timely.

Talkington not only has style but also a terrific way with actors, giving them the confidence to go over the top while having fun doing so.

The result is as poetic as it is insightful as the Yanomamis’ current experience coexists onscreen with their mythology.

That’s Entertainment! III is the sunniest of memento mori, a showy tribute to the flabbergasting musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that emphasizes both how delightful the genre was and how inescapably extinct it’s become.

Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

A uniquely compelling, exhaustively researched documentary by Israeli filmmaker Maya Sarfaty that never settles for pat answers.

Prey works because the filmmakers don’t overcomplicate it. A “Predator” story should have well-crafted and excitingly staged scenes of humans fighting an alien. This picture has plenty.

They don’t often make them like this anymore, a story cut, folded and stitched together with care. So “The Outfit” is worth slipping into and savoring.

Disconcerting in its justified bluntness, Myers’ brisk film is more monologue than movie, but undeniably essential in jolting everyone out of the collective complacency induced by the false perception of progress for all in this country.

Satisfyingly emotional without ever feeling sensationalized.

As can be expected from a film intended for children, Even Mice Belong in Heaven is a pretty straightforward story that touches on a lot of familiar lessons. But the magic is in the way that it’s told.

Crammed with ideas, jokes, laments, non sequiturs and some terrific actors you’ve seen before (if not nearly enough), the movie comes at you like a warm hug wrapped in a kung fu chop: It’s both a sweet, sentimental story about a Chinese American family and a wild, maximalist sensory assault.

Soderbergh, shooting and editing under his usual pseudonyms (Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively), has a gift for satirizing corporate mundanity, and for making everyday minutiae mesmerizing. He can turn typing fingers and blinking cursors into the stuff of quietly engrossing drama.

Throughout, both the character and the film constantly keep one guessing as to whether Margrete’s driving impulse leans more in the direction of the maternal or the Machiavellian.

On all fronts, “Bob Spit” is a welcome rarity in a medium suited but seldom used for the subversive in feature form with this world-class quality of technique and design.

Even at its most emotionally awkward or loose, it signals a filmmaking sensibility where Bellocchio — whose nearly 60-year career has been built on a provocative rendering of the social and political fractures around him — is refreshingly averse to viewing his own past through rose-colored glasses.

If you’re game for an emerging filmmaking talent’s stingingly uncanny foretelling, The Pink Cloud is an arresting examination of what it can look like when existence is misshaped into a compromised destiny.

[An] absorbing, entertaining and lovingly crafted documentary.

Who We Are, a revelatory, albeit stiff documentary, anchored by Robinson’s personal anecdotes and footage of his 2018 lecture at New York City’s Town Hall Theater, uncovers startling research while surveying the country’s unimaginable racial crimes.

A Love Song has the narrative economy and the sneaky emotional power of a well-crafted short story, plus a feel for isolation and rootlessness that harks back to some of the great drifter portraits of American independent cinema. It’s a testament to the lyricism that Walker-Silverman conjures here that I sometimes wished he would slow his narrative roll even further, immersing us even more deeply in the story’s quotidian rhythms.

This is a film that seems to know a lot about future psychology. May we never know such mournfulness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.

As the movie dances right up to the conventions of this well-worn genre, then deftly slides (To the left! To the right!) to avoid them, you might just find yourself clapping along in spite of it all being terminally uncool. Uncool can be a lot of fun.