If It Was Just an Accident lacks the conceptual audacity of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film or 2022’s No Bears, the film’s straightforward narrative proves to be just another feint, disguising the writer-director’s anger and sorrow at his own mistreatment and that of so many Iranians

It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.

Filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

Rian Johnson’s darkest, funniest and best installment yet in his three-film detective series.

Bigelow making a movie in which most of the story takes place in rooms full of people talking would seem like a misuse of the talents of one of our great action directors. It’s not. A House of Dynamite is a tightly wound dynamo, elevated by her production team.

There are many heavy hitters still to come, but Hoppers feels like the first great animated movie of the year. At a time when our right to protest is under siege, this sci-fi yarn exalts the way an individual’s conviction can plant seeds of change, leading to a stronger sense of community.

The movie glides by so unassumingly, you may be stunned how moved you are by the end.

A haunting, elegaic reverie of a movie; its opening battle scenes recalling John Ford’s cavalry westerns.

What’s quietly miraculous about Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, considering its added tragic weight, is what the force of Hassona’s personality and Farsi’s filmmaking choices still manage to do: speak to what’s ineffably beautiful about our human capacity for hope and connection.

With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

This story of two strangers who take a job on a fishing boat — their lives are irrevocably altered once they return to shore — slowly pulls you inside its disquieting design. By the time you get your bearings, you’re ensnared in its net.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.

The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of Silent Friend — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source.

The gently transcendent, tear-inducing conclusion that “Little Amélie” reaches suggests that memory serves as our only remedy for loss. As long as we don’t forget, what we cherish won’t become ephemeral.

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone.

Hokum is a fabulous horror film for all tastes.

It feels daring for how it wants to actually examine the emotional costs of contemporary grown-up life, bringing wincing laughs of recognition.

This movie’s nail-biting, sorrowful power comes from what internalized destruction looks like.

Reunion is a beautiful elegy to friendship in all its complexities and seeming contradictions and its astonishing emotional capacity to endure.

Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

With masterly directing by Mervyn LeRoy of "Little Caesar" fame, the film sparked protests against prisoner abuse and actually led to changes in the penal code. [15 May 2005, p.E10]

Though it has its over-caffeinated aspects and its missteps, this Star Trek has in general bridged the gap between the old and the new with alacrity and purpose.

Instead of a thriller, war movie or western, the director has turned out a stirring drama about South African leader Nelson Mandela, blending entertainment, social message and history lesson.

The writer-director is up to his old tricks, creating an onion of an experience -- a movie within a movie within a movie, irony in each layer, poignancy that stings and whimsy that bites.

The dialogue is fresh-prince clever, the themes are ageless, the rhythms are riotous and the return to a primal animation style is beautifully executed.

This is a smartly told story, and as fresh as any contemporary romance.

The film belongs to Foster. The actor always makes the most of what is handed him, though he's usually required to find his footings around the margins, as he did as the crazed cowboy in "3:10 to Yuma" or the crazed druggie in "Alpha Dog."