These twin tracts of darkness and light, the sordid and the sublime, quite effectively submerge the viewer into a closed world.

The chillingly twisty plotting is dispensed in painstakingly measured increments that allow for maximum dread and, ultimately, well-earned shock value, while his four leads deliver equally subtle performances that sync with the pacing beat for beat.

Instead of sinking into crude, one-night-stand joke territory, Night Owls roots around for the spark of real chemistry and, in the winning turns of Pally and Salazar, finds it.

There’s little that’s not dispiriting about Among the Believers and its measured, direct entrée into a closed world of hopeless boys and girls memorizing the Koran, but forbidden from learning its meanings.

Again and again, Van Dormael delights in finding romantic solutions to existential problems, in forging the kinds of topsy-turvy emotional connections between his characters that enable them to overcome their natural impulses toward suspicion, hostility and even violence.

Rather than stooping to horror-genre antics, Mallhi weaves a tale that is spooky but sensitive and focused on interpersonal relationships between mothers and daughters.

Efficient and effective in Eastwood's experienced hands, Sully has interwoven a crisp and electric retelling of the story of the landing we know with a story we do not.

[A] poignant, funny and well-seasoned portrait of autumnal fervor.

A droll romp through prehistoric times, filtered through Park's beyond antic imagination.

In the new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do an ultra-fine job tracing a born provocateur's commitment to his calling.

Kusama reveals and conceals the geography of the house, parceling out just enough information to understand its logic, while leaving certain dim recesses mysterious.

It's a sweetly funny, charming and poignant depiction of this very specific time in life — at once universal and specific — when anything seems possible. And with killer pop tunes to boot.

As written and directed by Xavier Giannoli, Marguerite is a thoughtful examination of an unusual, deeply eccentric woman.

An intriguing entertainment that’s invigorated by smart filmmaking and potent acting by the virtuosic Weisz and her fine costar, Michael Shannon.

By turns coolly observed and disquietingly compassionate — qualities that also describe Rebecca Hall’s brilliant central performance — the movie drifts alongside its subject, Charon-like, through the hell of her last weeks.

Sutton’s vision is unsettling and immersive, his technical precision immaculate. The sound design alone — long, ambient silences disrupted by a flashbulb-popping hallucination or a sudden scream — is reason enough to see the movie in a theater, whatever unpleasant associations the ending may conjure.

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.

You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.

Much like the father-son bond at its center, the comic drama is warmhearted but never cloying.

Once again, truth proves stranger than fiction in the raucous and provocative documentary Weiner.

Lovesong is a character study of this relationship, casually yet carefully sketched out by Kim in subtle but meaningful gestures and glances. Much is communicated through the eyes, searching for answers in the void of what’s not said, but felt.

A vibrant, affecting piece of filmmaking that’s sure to widen Hesse's following.

This movie has a rhythm. It's exaggerated, loud and consciously vulgar, but the breezy self-assurance carries it along.

A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.

Philadelphia filmmaker Cheryl Dunye has such a light, easy touch both in front and in back of the camera that you're in danger of not noticing how skillful a craftsman she really is or how deftly she raises serious issues of race and sexual orientation in The Watermelon Woman.

As shaped by Villeneuve and his masterful creative team, especially production designer Dennis Gassner and cinematographer Roger Deakins, this film puts you firmly, brilliantly, unassailably in another world of its own devising, and that is no small thing.

The film traces Cernan's career trajectory, going back to his days in San Diego as a hot-shot naval aviator, blending terrific archival footage with contemporary perspectives to quietly poetic effect.

You don't have to be a baseball fanatic or for that matter a historian or a physicist to appreciate Fastball.