The visually poetic film offers an appraisal of Cash’s life and craft that is both painfully candid and often revelatory.

This riveting documentary should be required viewing for all.

With its blend of the archival, the interviewed, and modern-day footage, the first miracle of the film is that it never feels overstuffed with talking heads, or perfunctorily assembled, or rushed in covering its many glories across nearly a century. It’s a real beating-heart tribute, always streaked with feeling, whether joyous or poignant.

Delgado Aparicio’s reflective direction with a patient eye for lived-in behavior and kinetic symbolism bears artistically ripe fruit in an affectingly measured, near-perfect tour de force that demands serious attention.

A terrifically effective scare show, a virtuoso work of cinematic terror incorporating superior cinematography and production design -- and, most important of all, comic relief. [04 Nov 1991, p.F6]

As Colewell sinks in, it reveals itself as the cinematic equivalent of a deep exhale after having attained peace within.

Reflected in its native language title (“My Lens”), Chinese Portrait is a personal reflection on the country’s past and present. Brimming with humanity, Wang’s contemplative, minimalist approach forces us to consider the day-to-day lives of these people, and perhaps our own.

The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.

Searingly well-acted.

Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.

Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma may be the most important documentary you see this year.

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.

Jezebel is a reminder that in everyday human stories is proof that the world is wide, and that in going behind the doors that movies rarely open, there are even more worlds worth discovering.

José is hardly the first movie to spotlight a young person navigating their homosexuality in a repressive and perilous environment. Nonetheless, this sophomore feature from Chinese-born director Li Cheng, who co-wrote with George F. Roberson, feels like a singular and essential entry in that subset of LGBTQ coming-of-age films with an international beat.

What ensues amidst Jia’s indelible, gliding visuals of modern Shanghai are ruminative testimonials from the breadth of an older citizenry — former soldiers, descendants of gangsters and politicians, and (lots of) artists who endured the city’s turbulent evolution, and who in their stories of family, love and survival form a tapestry of memory and wisdom.

DaCosta, who made her directorial debut with the remarkable abortion drama “Little Woods,” firmly announces herself as an artist at work with Candyman, a genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment, the product of centuries of racist power structures.

Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.

For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

Directed with bristling immediacy by Rashaad Ernesto Green (“Gun Hill Road”), Premature could be classified as a love story, a coming-of-age drama, a cautionary tale (the title offers a clue) and a portrait of young black women and men finding their way in contemporary New York. But it also strikes me as a movie about the uses and occasional uselessness of language, with stop-and-go verbal cadences that seem particularly attentive to what its characters say and don’t say.

The sly achievement of The Forty-Year-Old Version is to turn a critical eye on the very idea of success (by whose standards?), and to ponder exactly what level of compromise is acceptable to secure it.

For its merits as a dynamic nonfiction piece incisively dealing with a pivotal issue from heartbreakingly human angle, Us Kids is indispensable viewing for anyone who genuinely cares about the future of this country beyond “thoughts and prayers.”

As in his previous films, the Oscar-nominated "How to Survive a Plague” and “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” France, an investigative reporter, presents ordinary citizens doing remarkable things. If only our governments could learn to follow suit.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s clinical and fascinating 135-minute assembly of this priceless archive is a categorically weird, thrillingly immersive distillation of four days of official, cultish pomp and mourning for one of the 20th century’s biggest monsters.

Remo Williams is a slam-bang action-adventure loaded with surprises. Just when you think it's going to be just another bone-cruncher steeped in patriotic paranoia, it sends itself up hilariously. Remo Williams has some of the funniest, brightest dialogue heard on screen all year.

The moment-to-moment pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.

What comes through most in Hawke’s brilliantly internalized performance is Tesla’s intense commitment to his work, as well as his weariness about having to continually explain and defend it to men of deeper pockets and lesser minds. The progress of human civilization can be infuriatingly banal, which doesn’t mean our biopics have to be.