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.

What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.

Gorgeous, humbling, looking out-, up- and inward, the documentary The Velvet Queen is the rare nature film about not only beauty and beasts but also the very human urge to make sense of our place in it all.

To call this movie timely would be both an understatement and a bit of a misnomer, since the battle for women’s bodily autonomy has never not been a timely issue. It might be more fitting to praise Happening for its urgency, not just because it arrives in American theaters under particularly fraught circumstances, but also because of the gut-clutching suspense and the wrenching intimacy that the director brings to the telling.

It’s not at all surprising that Gyllenhaal has arrived as a filmmaker with such a bold, conflicted paean to unorthodox femininity. But it’s thrilling just the same.

The royal family’s travails have long been likened to that of a soap opera, but Spencer, even as it conjures the emotional extravagance of a first-rate melodrama, refuses to be hemmed in. It’s a historical fantasia, a claustrophobic thriller and a dark comedy of manners, all poised on a knife’s edge between tabloid trash and high art.

Western is a delightfully subtle and perceptive blend of romantic comedy and road movie. [07 Aug 1998, p.F8]

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

The nimble, naturalistic performers are uniformly terrific.

The sly genius of Întregalde is how readily its characters — who can be cruel and decent, self-serving and well-meaning, often in the same instance — encourage the viewer to take their own moral inventory.

It’s a war cry that’s simultaneously a galvanizing call to action, a message of hope and a reminder that a different world is possible.

In Swan Song, [Ali] lives in both drama and sci-fi worlds as he crafts a man coming to grips simultaneously with his own mortality and the dawn of something new for humanity.

Unassumingly electrifying and amusingly elusive, this modern-day fable focuses on the marks we leave behind in others when paths diverge and physical distance grows.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an immaculate vision: coldly efficient, aesthetically faultless, splendidly acted. I do wish it had a bit more blood in it.

Special kudos go to Martin Ziaran’s innovative, at times vertiginous and even upside-down camerawork, which lends a you-are-there feel to the film’s already viscerally unnerving action. It’s a master class in cinematography.

Viscerally disturbing and achingly humanistic.

This is a lyrical ode to the glories of summer and the collaborative joys of filmmaking, suffused with the hope that we will never be deprived of either for long.

Some 40 years in the making, the remarkable Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is a gorgeously rendered, unexpectedly moving appraisal of the life and craft of one of the best-loved literary voices of the late 20th century.

Villeneuve has made good on one of the great Hollywood gambles in recent memory, delivering a two-part epic of literary nuance, timely significance and maybe even the promise of another film or two.

Scenes of the Irish countryside are dazzling and Ford’s version of Ireland is all homey and warm-hearted, with a distinct Hollywood glaze.

No one in this movie has a complete understanding of what’s going on, but Wandel proves that a sensitive enough camera can provide a fuller picture than most.

An achingly poignant testament to the unwavering strength of parental and filial bonds.

When JR turns his gaze toward a person and pastes their image on a wall, he’s inviting others not just to participate in this project but also to look their way, to pay attention to someone or something by seeing it differently in the world. It takes a village, but all they need is paper and glue.

Jules Furthman penned the uncompromising script; Edmund Goulding directed with a master hand. [05 Jun 2005, p.E12]

With specificity, sweep and urgency, occasionally terrifying and bloody when capturing violent police tactics, Chow’s movie is a true epic of meaningful resistance.

The multiple perspectives in Hold Your Fire add up to a fascinating look back at a still-raging debate over the true purpose of policing.

Girl Picture is designed to feel as closely observed as a diary, but it’s also like being pulled along by a friend eager for you to experience what they go through, see things the way they do, to just get it and have a great time too. That’s a special kind of invitation, and Girl Picture is more than enough movie to make its compassion for the lives of teenage girls a swirling, swooning high.

A harrowing yet sublime work that has to do with the exceptionally cruel fate of an 11th-Century noblewoman, played by the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka. [12 Aug 1985, p.2]