At times, Hale County This Morning, This Evening evokes the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” tell the stories of people and places primarily through their visuals.

In "The Taste of Things," no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one."

This is melodrama of the highest order, which is a compliment, for melodrama is not a bad thing. It is part of some of the greatest works of art, and in the right hands, it can elicit an ennui-shattering response from the audience.

Hall, Grau, editor Sabine Hoffman, and composer Devonté Hynes do an excellent job of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience. This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements.

The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually.

With her harrowing film In the Same Breath, Wang has established herself as the preeminent documenter of the pain inflicted by oppressive regimes on their people.

It's fascinating that while the movie deals with exceptionally grim material, it never becomes too unbearable to watch.

Honeyland is both an immersive experience and an undeniably gorgeous reflection on our relationship to nature.

The Beasts may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

A tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism, and while director Lee never abandons his things-as-they-are approach, he tells a love story by letting magic in at unusual angles.

Close to Vermeer is a gentle, thoughtful documentary, populated by knowledgeable individuals like Vandivere, experts at the top of their fields who have maintained their passion and love for the subject.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

While Loznitsa’s films, particularly his documentaries, often have a terrifying epic sweep, “Two Prosecutors,” as its title implies, is an altogether more intimate undertaking. And no less terrifying for all that.

This film, directed by Zhao Liang (acclaimed here for his 2009 “Petition”) is a kind of poetic documentary. It’s all images and sounds, no interviews, no talking heads.

Another brilliantly mounted drama concerning fracturing families, hidden motives and the difficulties of attaining stability in a rapidly changing world.

Pillion is a quietly devastating ode to the power of that self-discovery, a reminder that perhaps one of life’s greatest tragedies is that we can’t always remain in a relationship with the people we learn the most valuable lessons from.

The result is absolutely delicious, a svelte piece of entertainment that feels like a vintage yarn yet very much represents our own current anxieties, questions of sustaining trust in relationships and high-stake careers.

Wang and Zhang's film ends with an explication of a new “two child” policy, a celebration of the one-child-policy’s overall success. The propaganda for his policy is as cheesy as that for the old one. A sense of dread as to how this policy will be enacted intermingles with a strange feeling that a true reckoning with the old way is still very far off.

Identifying Features has a subtle frantic quality, a kind of restraint in bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors facing countless others who must stay silent.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most deeply personal films of his long and brilliant career, I am not just indulging in a bit of critical hyperbole.

It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.

To this viewer, it develops into a pretty nifty piece of genre work, a thriller that’s expertly made even if it doesn’t quite hum like the best Park films. The fact that a good, well-made thriller feels almost like a disappointment given this creator’s pedigree is just a testament to the work he’s produced before.

There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance.

You think [Spielberg's] giving you everything and that it's all right there on the surface, but the movie lingers in the mind, and the longer it stays there, and the more times you re-watch it, the more you realize it's giving you something different from, and better than, what you saw the first time.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

Directed by Madeleine Gavin, Beyond Utopia is a bracing and frequently jaw-dropping look at, first and foremost, the discontented people of North Korea who attempt defections doggedly. It’s a more difficult trip than you’d probably imagine.

Vermiglio, about the lives of villagers in the mid-century Italian Alps near the end of World War II, is the rare movie set in the past that seems attuned to the consciousness of the time it depicts.

I imagine even Billy Wilder would’ve gotten misty-eyed during the final, perfectly-pitched moments of this extraordinary film.