The rousing Indian drama Lipstick Under My Burkha, co-written and directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, takes on the repressive traditions around gender and sexuality in that country with refreshing candor and humor.

It’s raw, powerful, moving and candid. This is what it is like to be on the ground in Aleppo.

An eloquent, heart-tugging Civil War epic about the first black infantry regiment to march off to battle for the Union. And epic is the word. Not since John Ford has a film maker created such dramatic large-scale Civil War battle scenes in a major theatrical film.

Heal the Living reveals a gift for joining skillful visual filmmaking with moving, affecting storytelling, all in the service of a story that unfolds in surprising ways.

"Let It Fall" understands the value of allowing its interview subjects to talk at greater, more involving length than is usual for documentaries, a technique that illuminates the complexities of reality and gives listeners a sense of the emotional textures of these people's lives.

In Widows, diversity isn’t an opportunity for showy tokenism or liberal pieties. It’s a matter-of-fact reflection of a city’s seething internal dynamics, an opportunity to probe inequities of race, class and gender that few American movies, let alone American genre movies, ever attempt to address.

The machination is comic, and the repercussions carry the awkward tinge of threadbare farce, but the vibe is pure melancholy, echoed in the clinically beautiful monochromatic cinematography and the tinny, weeping musical phrase Hong often leans on to close his extended takes of dialogue.

If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)

The 100-minute film does a phenomenal job detangling the numerous scenarios that led to Syria’s civil war and current bloodbath, dispelling the notion that this conflict is too complicated for those not versed on the Middle East to understand.

Beautiful gems of wisdom and life lessons are contained within Buena Vista Social Club: Adios. The picture is an edifying celebration of this music, humanizing and contextualizing it beyond its popularity, locating its roots within a history informed by politics, colonialism, oppression, and racism.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

The Square means to send you out of the theater arguing, and its success on that front should not eclipse its more lasting, unsettling achievement. It affirms that art, this movie very much included, can tell us things about ourselves that we’d prefer not to know.

Though it takes its time, Wonderstruck — like the best tales of wonder — resolves all its mysteries as the plot's disparate strands come together in a lovely way.

From the shockingly raunchy dialogue to the ironic yuletide pop songs, this movie is a fun kind of nasty.

Faces Places turns out to be a road movie in more than a merely literal sense. It is at once a roving journey into environments we rarely see in cinema and an incomplete but invaluable map of Varda’s memories.

Once again, the director draws upon the sketch-comedy gifts he honed on “Key & Peele” to achieve an artful, ruthless balance of horror and hilarity. Us is a tour de force of comic tension and visceral release, a movie that weaponizes our chuckles against us and reminds us that laughing, screaming and thinking are not mutually exclusive pleasures.

Unrest is a sensitive and arresting rally cry for increased awareness about this disease, and an existential exploration of the meaning of life while battling a crippling chronic illness.

The unexpected thing about Dolores, finally, is that if its political story makes it important, its human story makes it involving.

There is energy and inventiveness enough here to stamp it as one of the year's most interesting films. Although it's virtually impossible to look at anyone else when Newman commands a scene, and although each man is exploring his character at completely different depths, Cruise is at least willing to extend himself; he gives the sense of a young actor who is working to grow. Add the edgy, indolent Mastrantonio and you have an electrifying unholy trio. The picture is, however, in the pocket of the old pro, who is still, in Fast Eddie's own words, some piece of work.

The film alternates between triumph and tragedy, but there’s never a moment that doesn’t feel intimate and authentic in its 96-minute running time.

Because of King's phenomenal popularity as a master of the comically macabre, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis has stinted on nothing to bring these tales alive. This means that the special effects are impeccable and Giorgio Postiglione's production design meticulous and inspired. Yet it's the well-drawn characters, plus the brisk, stylish direction of Teague and superb camerawork of Cardiff, that make it work.

Beneath its off-color jokes and curse-laden rants, Last Flag Flying offers a pointed consideration of the hard choices that Americans of all generations have made to serve their country, and of the betrayal they have felt when that country has not risen to the level of their sacrifice.

As he spins his mesmerizing story of the fixing of the 1919 World Series, John Sayles moves to a new level of dexterity as a writer-director.

As we hang on the film’s plot twists, we also quietly absorb its points about the power of community and the purposeful determination of immigrants to create better lives for their families, not as special pleading but as something powerful and convincing.

From Russia with Love, the second of the Bonds, remains one of the best. It finds Sean Connery's 007 going up against a diabolical Lotte Lenya and a psychopathic bleached blond, Robert Shaw. All the usual ingredients have been blended in just the right proportions under Terence Young's direction. [10 Apr 1988, p.2]

A spare, smart, seductive piece of real movie making with (almost) every loophole covered, a superlative cast and enough tension to keep us all hyperventilating for hours.

No Way Out's greatest prize is Costner, a leading man at last: fiercely good, intelligent, appreciatively sensual in a performance balanced perfectly between action and introspection. It's a movie that lends itself to more than one sitting, and when you go back, armed with full understanding, Costner's work seems even better than the first time, richer, more complex and many layered.

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a joyfully idiosyncratic little jazz-burst of a film, full of sensuous melody, witty chops and hot licks