In the end Foxcatcher proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in performance, direction and makeup, along with a certain clumsiness in the way that it tries to use its profoundly sad story to make some kind of grand statement about American values, or the lack thereof.

The melancholy that falls over this chapter is hard to shake but its tempered slightly by the love Gomes has for his characters, bad habits, ingrained sadness and all.

Demme’s concert films aren’t just recordings of events—they’re cinematic embodiments of their musicians, capturing in a moment an energy that transcends time.

Huerta is such a commanding figure, and the array of historical footage marshalled on behalf of her story is so impressive, that the film makes a strong impression.

Gutnik keeps the film’s narrative progression steady and unsettled, positioning his film as a ground-level dispatch from the conflict’s frontlines.

The archival footage Pollard uses has people saying the same things they’re saying today, and the same negative ideas are being thrown around in regard to the rights of Black and brown people.

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

Gottlieb (the director) uses a very light touch throughout. This is a family affair.

To its mild detriment, Beginning stays on a cerebral plane even at its most ravaging and emotionally intense. But in its muted havoc lies a potent intellectual laceration.

It may not sound like it on the surface, but Raw is absolutely a celebration of female power — of realizing who you are, what you want and how to go after it, albeit with brutally bloody results.

Despite the compact running time, it is easy to feel that you have come to know—and likely admire—Elizabeth Murray. So, mission accomplished.

It’s a series of comedic sketches about people who are too self-involved to empathize with each other. It’s also a plaintively blunt wake-up call, and an effective demand for viewers' vigilant sensitivity.

Coupled with the talents of cinematographer Ludovica Isidori and music by Rob Rusli, Ford’s Test Pattern is an engrossing human drama, one that examines the intersections and inequalities between race, gender, and healthcare in a poignant and powerful way.

Mungiu doesn’t traffic in easy hero and villain narratives. He’s more interested in revealing how easily anyone can be both.

Inherent Vice is a film about a stoner which itself seems stoned. This is just one small part of what makes it distinctive.

Although unintentionally funny throughout, its evocation of life in a totalitarian society is ultimately chilling. The happy picture the North Koreans struggle to present implies unfathomable depths of violence to the human spirit beneath its glossy surface.

With its frequent dramatizations, zippy editing, and song-driven soundtrack, Three Identical Strangers may be said to indulge in the most potentially egregious of mainstreaming devices used in contemporary documentaries. Yet because the story itself is so, well, juicy, and the subjects one-time pop culture phenoms, the approach feels acceptable if not entirely “right.”

It’s a profoundly Catholic work, whose slippery sense of sin and living instils great confusion and consternation to those occupying the narrative’s solemn monastery setting.

The film we need right now, from a filmmaker we need right now: French writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who makes her stunning feature debut with a rape-revenge fantasy that’s as brutal as it is thrilling.

This is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success."

So many documentaries cut away from performances, thinking we only want a glimpse of it to get the gist before shuttling on to the next thing. What a joy to be given the space to settle in and let Tina take you where she wants you to go.

American Fiction trips over its own feet in its final act, stumbling between daydream sequences and multiple storylines before finding a final, underwhelming resolution. But the attentive lens that the film devotes to its concept and themes is what will be remembered.

An unnerving character study that often borders on thriller territory, “The Things You Kill” is a psychologically intense piece of genre filmmaking.

Walker’s film might have worked better as a docuseries—one feels its two-hour length—and she has a habit of over-writing some of the narration, but it’s still a detailed piece of work, a surprising angle on a terrifying new reality about living in certain parts of the world, and an inquiry as to whether or not we’re going to do anything about it.

Brutal, sad, funny, and disarmingly sweet-natured, Riders of Justice is not so much a revenge movie as a movie about revenge.

Filmmaker Nancy Buirski has an elegant, judicious way of imparting the facts of the case, taking not just the political temperature of the moment (boiling) but finely sketching the character and minds of the people involved.

Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister, inescapable form of hypnosis.

Along with Jarmusch, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave.

Like “The Shining,” there are a number of different ways to interpret Jordan Peele’s excellent new horror movie, Us. Every image seems to be a clue for what’s about to happen or a stand-in for something outside the main story of a family in danger. Peele’s film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light.

It really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging, but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be "American Horror Story."

If the dominant mood of "This Is Not a Film" was defiant, the main feeling here is melancholic. In implicitly confessing to suicidal impulses (as his mentor Abbas Kiarostami did in "Taste of Cherry"), Panahi shows how low his confinement has brought him.

Moana would have been enormously entertaining regardless of when it came out, but its arrival at this particular moment in history gives it an added sense of significance—as well as inspiration.

Writer-director Frank Berry’s film never devolves into melodrama – if anything, it may be understated to a fault – but he grounds her plight in an authentic mixture of daily frustrations and sporadic joys.

South Korean horror-mystery hybrid The Wailing crosses that line several times, but somehow remains effectively atmospheric.

The movie has a small story but a big theme; the theme being experience, and it conveys the emotions and moods of its characters by taking things nice and slow.

Once the action kicks in, though, Shadow is on rails. Zhang, co-screenwriter Li Wei, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, production designer Horace Ma, and costumer Chen Minzheng work in seemingly perfect harmony to create a visual scheme that the director has said is based on the brush techniques of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

Like her brilliant 2012 debut feature, “Elena,” which recounted the “inconsolable memory” of Costa’s older sister prior to her suicide, the director’s latest work, The Edge of Democracy, is haunted by loss.

Gimme the Loot is thrilling, although there aren't any stereotypically "thrilling" sequences. The thrill comes from the compulsively watchable dynamic between the two leads (non-professional actors, both of them), the excellent supporting cast (also non-professionals), and the fun use of multiple locations throughout the bustling metropolis.

Pollard’s choice to end with a stirring a capella number by Son House still provided the uplift needed to fight another day.

At times, Premature has the same fly-on-the-wall, near-improvisational and casually meandering qualities of a Cassavetes film, though its refreshingly honest and direct depiction of Black sexuality made me think of early Spike Lee or Bill Gunn.

Like a less-cluttered Wes Anderson film, Amanda has quirky, precocious young characters who deliver aphoristic pronouncements in monotone, deadpan voices amid beautifully composed settings.

It’s a gorgeous film, but it’s also an emotionally intelligent movie, one that shifts and flows between comedy and tragedy, reminding us that life can only be lived forwards.

The documentary from directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes briskly tells the story of The Jane Collective, which helped thousands of women obtain abortions when they were still illegal in the late 1960s and early ‘70s...the story of their daring remains frighteningly relevant nearly 50 years later as it appears that Roe is increasingly in jeopardy, providing an undercurrent of tension throughout.

Suffused with fantastical elements, dreamlike sequences and hallucinatory images, A Fantastic Woman stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress, and her performance roots the film in a kind of intimate verisimilitude.

It’s a beautiful, captivating piece of work that gets off to kind of a rocky start but achieves remarkable momentum toward an emotional, powerful ending. And you won’t see a better-looking animated film all year.

Entertaining and richly sourced documentary.

It’s a character-driven drama populated by sketchy characters who are mostly compelling thanks to the movie’s strong ensemble cast and Haugerud’s typically sensitive direction. So unfortunately, the suggestive power of Johanne’s journey fades as the movie slowly heads to its inconclusive finale.

Waititi’s film defies its convention through grounded characters, witty dialogue, compassionate filmmaking and inventive storytelling. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is consistently clever and even moving. It’s proof that we’ll keep listening to the familiar stories if they’re this well-told.

Disturbing the Peace is a courageous and uplifting film that deservedly earned a rapturous ovation when it screened at Ebertfest this year.

The movie feels instructional without getting too preachy, taking time to explain various inequalities and barriers facing black Americans, typically in exchanges between father and daughter.

The film is true to Gibson’s persona, which is marked by everything you expect from a poet: thoughtfulness, tenderness, and thorough self-awareness.

The film weaves a spell with its rhythms, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, all accompanied by a vivid and haunting sound design.

It's a deeply empathetic film that displays an ability to balance the lyrical and the genuine while telling the story of a young man trying to figure himself out through two very different male role models in his life.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

An intelligently staged and executed creepfest that takes one of the most universally compelling of notions — the unbreakable bond that exists between a mother and her children — and approaches it in such a formally and narratively bleak manner that it makes the works of fellow countryman Michael Haneke seeming almost benign by comparison.

It’s certainly like nothing else you’ll see this year.

The clever details, amusing name-drops, and precisely pointed digs at vapid celebrity culture keep Johnson’s movie zippy when it threatens to drag.

It sometimes feels like Palmason is being a bit self-indulgent with his slow pace, but Ingvar Sigurdsson keeps the film grounded, and ends it with such a devastating, powerful final shot that it alone erases most criticisms. It may take a bit longer than it needed to get there, but the destination packs a wallop.

This is not a film for children, but the camerawork and the emotional undercurrents most often evoke the physical viewpoint, level of understanding and sensory processes of a child. We as adults must deduce the film’s most crucial pieces of information as they fly over Frida’s head.

Starred Up is HEAVY with slang and accents. You won’t understand a third of it. But there’s so much going on in between the lines of dialogue that you won’t care.

There’s a strange peace and acceptance in the film, painful as it is, that life did not work out in favor of the youthful hopes and dreams of its characters. Perhaps it’s because so many of us have had to mourn some sort of loss and move on with our lives like the family.

Part of the allure of The Guardians comes from the casting: The radiant, real-life mother and daughter Baye and Smet play mother and daughter Hortense and Solange.

I dislike much of Mirai because most of the film's Kun-centric scenes (which take up 90% of the movie) are split between the character's un-imaginative daydreams and his full-blast fits.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is just incredibly fun. It feels half its length and contains enough memorable action sequences for some entire franchises.

Benediction bears the distinctive stamp of its writer/director, Terence Davies, a man whose films feel more like poetic meditations on moods, emotions, and events than straightforward narratives. It’s as if we are floating above the material, touching down in different places at the filmmaker’s discretion.

A War, as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience.

She Dies Tomorrow has the feel of a horror film, and is sometimes scary, but it's really an existential meditation on mortality.

Bill Nighy is a fun, uninhibited actor, but there's an abashed, melancholy quality to him that hasn't been fully explored until Living, a drama about a senior citizen reckoning with his life.

Wright is a brilliant director of turbocharged exposition, elegant but bruising action sequences, and graphically bold comedic overkill.

Some interesting things start to happen in Thy Father's Chair as the cleaners make headway, room by room.

Chinese Portrait is a stunning work of photography and a simple work of empathy that asks, "How much goes into making sure we all get to just live?"

An engrossing and frequently extraordinary feature.

There are points early in this documentary where you might wonder if it really needed to be a feature (one can imagine a cut-down "60 Minutes" piece doing the job just as effectively) but when Lane gets away from the man himself and focuses on the details of the business of music, a new frontier of understanding opens up.

Alex Schaad’s feature debut “Skin Deep” is a stripped-down sci-fi drama that takes its time to explore the social and romantic ramifications of its simple premise.

Partly a tribute to the routine occurrences that collectively make a place feel like one belongs, Monica Sorelle’s delicately galvanizing slice-of-life debut “Mountains,” set in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, overflows with such details.

Both a restaurant makeover journey and the portrait of a child who grew up to have enough cash to purchase his personal Disneyland, this amusing documentary bears witness to Parker’s at-all-costs mentality, even when the more advisable choice would be to abandon the project.

Xavier Giannoli's film adaptation of Balzac's book leans heavily on voiceover, so much so that some sequences are practically an audiobook with images attached. This could be seen as a negative, but in practice the voiceover-heavy sections are some of the film's most successful.

Here is a film dedicated to recognizing our most common obstacles, its quiet storytelling largely accompanied by those feelings at the bottom of anyone’s gut: guilt, shame, defeat. Menashe is a gorgeous ode to everyone's inner screw-up.

More than an explainer of motives behind a single person mass shooting, Nitram is a character study wrapped in a tone poem, an unpacking of a man who feels like he has run out of all potential paths to happiness and believes that acts of violence spark action.

A thoughtful and dynamic blend of genres, Benedikt Erlingsson’s contemporary environmental fable Woman At War continually thrills with a side of laughs.

There's more going on here than meets the eye. The Night of the 12th runs deep. The film's effectiveness lies in its matter-of-fact surface and its roiling wordless interior, the stealthy way it makes its points (without announcing "This is The Point").

Writer-director Sean Durkin ("Martha Marcy May Marlene") has delivered a nearly perfect film here — the cinematic equivalent of of those substantial, long-but-not-too-long short stories that says everything about its subject without actually saying everything.

If all I saw was the first half, I would have given it a shrug and left in a semi-foul mood. But the whole is greater for being two parts in this case, making me glad that I have finally lost my Hong Sang-soo virginity.

By respecting the spiritual journeys of his subjects, Karslake affirms that he is more concerned with reaching across the aisle than preaching to the choir.

Damon is superb in the kind of role he excels at: a man of integrity who gets steered off the path and is subsequently righted. Lest all of this sound heavy, I should assure you that Ford v Ferrari is exactly as fun, maybe even more fun, than its well-put-together trailer makes it out to be.

The structure dispels the idea that there is a “right way” to navigate the Kafkaesque complexities of an oppressive regime, as is made plain by the ultimate fate of Hind and the two ambulance first responders, Youssef Zeino and Ahmed Madhoun.

It sometimes succumbs to that animated problem of choosing hyperactivity over all other storytelling options, but it’s also a whip-smart action film, a movie with nearly “Fury Road”-esque momentum in its asking of the question, “What if the only family that could save the world was as dysfunctional as yours?”

Slow, steady, and with an exacting eye for detail, Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid is a painfully astute observational drama about a young woman working in one of Mexico City’s posh hotels.

Mistress Dispeller” isn’t really about Wang, or her methods...It’s about the mysteries of the human heart. Its exploration of these subtle depths is sensitive, as are its conclusions.

As it turns out, "Norte" is not quite the epochal work of cinema greatness that some have suggested but it is hardly a miss either. There are moments of staggering beauty and power on display here and yet there are also moments when it seems to be ambling around with no clear idea of where it wants to go.

Stritch is a documentary subject as fearless and raw as her stage persona.

The organization of the film, jumping back and forth in time, is distracting. But the subject is never less than enthralling.

Huesera doesn’t necessarily re-invent either of those subgenres. But it does present them in a vessel that’s so artfully crafted, and filled with details that bring the characters and their relationships to such vivid life, that it accomplishes a lofty goal for genre cinema: Taking a familiar formula and turning it into a personal statement.

Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl is one of the world's best directors of actors, and he nears some kind of a peak in Rimini, a blisteringly funny and often touching film about people struggling towards happiness despite having experienced lifetimes of disappointment.

Olds’ poem about her parents concludes: “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.” That is what Bellingham does here, in a brutal film about brutality. With its very tamped-down emotion, Bellingham's decision not to attempt insight or empathy is the most telling display of the consequences of his story.

Teyana Taylor holds her head high through it all. Even as the film falters narratively, she’s a force of nature embodying a person more than just playing a role. She captures the soul of a woman who knows her son needs her to navigate this dangerous world. And that she needs him too.

Israelis call the events of 1948 The War for Independence, while Palestinians call it Nabka, or The Catastrophe. It's hard to imagine how the two could be reconciled, and "Tantura" doesn't try. It has its hands full just trying to establish what happened, and encouraging participants and beneficiaries into accepting what it meant.

If there’s one misstep to “The Bone Temple,” it’s the ending, which features a cameo that alters the tenor of the picture’s emotional hostility.