Intoxicating and meditative by turns, helped by Fred Frith's minimalist score, this film opens a portal into a singular creative mind.

Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.

The Second Mother is a satisfying contradiction. It's a soap opera with a social conscience that casually mixes dramatic elements about serious class issues with a crowd-pleasing audience picture sensibility.

As captured through the ceaselessly unflinching lens of Sharif’s borrowed video camera, Nowhere to Hide offers an uneasy prognosis that is at once graphically gut-wrenching and doggedly life-affirming.

Refreshingly devoid of talking animals and anthropomorphic vehicles, Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses is a lovely surprise of a stirringly original animated feature.

Smith has crafted a visually and artistically compelling portrait about a distinctive figure in a pivotal and exciting time.

Finds Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien at his most intimate and romantic. The deceptive simplicity of these vignettes, written by Chu Tien-wen, throws into relief Hou's formidable storytelling strengths and visual acuity - his way with actors, his subtlety and expressiveness.

The result is also one of the year’s most memorable theatrical experiences, because it’s Wenders’ return to 3-D (after 2011’s “Pina”), proving again how versatile and intimate the format can be when skillfully applied outside the genre of blockbusters.

Hit Man makes for an undeniable good time. Sometimes all you really need is a couple of impossibly attractive people enjoying each other’s company, captured by a filmmaker who knows when to stay out of their way. And if that’s not a movie, well, then, I don’t know what is.

This is a beautifully life-affirming fable about the power of art to heal, but really, it’s the people making the art that do the work. Ghostlight is a stunning and incredibly moving tribute to that process.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

The last thing you see in Ajami should be the first thing on your mind about this compelling new film from Israel. That would be the closing credits, written in both Hebrew and Arabic, separate but equal, side by side, mirroring the creative process behind this potent work and the story it has to tell.

Just as sports mirror society, so do the best sports films not only take us inside games and those who play them but also provide insight into our world and how it works. “Wrestle,” a superb sports documentary, does exactly that.

In the end, 127 Hours is one man's incredible, unforgettable journey; it took the extraordinary alchemy of Boyle and Franco to also make it ours.

Author Coben, who says he is a fan of "stories that move you, that grab hold of your heart and do not let it go," has gotten a film that does exactly that.

There is something magical about The Illusionist's world, and that's as it should be.

By letting the archival material carry most of the weight, Pettengill creates an instructive kind of time-travel experience for viewers of all political persuasions, transporting them to a past hauntingly similar to our present.

Some not great things happen in Mars One. And there is agony. But there are also the good things done in response that keep families like these soldiering on.

Exceptionally well-made and completely fearless in its depiction of the widest range of romantic emotions, this is a film as fiercely committed to passion as its heroine, and that's saying a lot.

James Ponsoldt's magnificent The End of the Tour gives us two guys talking, and the effect is breathtaking.

It's a chilling, completely fascinating documentary.

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

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.

When juxtaposed against a history of Iranian cinema that has often relied on child-centric allegory and non-specific narrative to make its societal critiques, There Is No Evil practically blisters with the intensity of specifically living in Iran as it exists now, as a state once believed to carry out the most executions of any country outside China.

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc’s immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness. Acasă, My Home is much more complicated, as any thorough portrait of our modern world is when progress is a balance between old and new ways and people like the Enaches find their notions of survival and independence challenged.

Superb -- Crammed with incident, and bristles with passion and energy. Tavernier treats his actors, every last one of them impressive, as an ensemble.

A heck of a story splendidly told, Maiden succeeds by combining the athleticism of “Free Solo” with the enriching, across-the-board emotional appeal of “RBG.”

It would be hard to overstate just how singular this picture feels in its seriousness of purpose and in its cumulative power to enthrall and astonish.