Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a film that will reward you for seeking it out.

What comes across most vividly in this movie, ultimately, is the fact that what happened almost half a century ago is a trauma that still weighs heavily on the people of Vietnam. And many Americans.

The fact that it was made by her nephew, actor/filmmaker Griffin Dunne, gives it a warmth and intimacy that might not have graced a more standard documentary.

This cool, unhurried movie is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated performance by Caillee Speeney.

The resulting episodic narrative is light on dialogue and heavy on ambiance; it's precise to an unsettling degree since a number of scenes start and stop whenever Lizzy can feel her way in and out of them.

Pham Thien An’s contemplative drama “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” blurs the line between surrealism and realism, faith and loss in a subdued search for purpose in the wake of a tragedy.

It’s some of the absolute best work of Hopkins’ lengthy and storied career.

It is delicately told, sweet but never sugary.

David Freyne’s charming afterlife comedy “Eternity” takes a simple premise of a person forced to choose between two prospective suitors and elaborates the concept with clever world-building and emotional relationship dynamics.

Santambrogio’s extraordinary cast of non-professional actors convey a lived-in, personal, and impossible to fake connection to the pleasures, struggles and intricacies of life in Cuba.

It's truly refreshing to watch a film where nobody has anything figured out, where life proceeds messily and imperfectly. Saint Frances is unpredictable in a very human way.

One of the intense pleasures of Ruben Brandt, Collector (astonishingly, it is Krstić’s first feature) is how it suggests that theft (i.e. "collecting") is the only way to manage obsession.

While the themes here are, of course, redolent of neorealism, the filmmakers don’t make ostentatious nods to cinema past. Their voice is their own; the camera is mobile when it needs to be, but stands still much of the time, letting the excellent cast build their characters as the events of the film test their endurance.

These movies are not WHOdunits as much as WHYdunits, and it’s everything that’s under the murder and its resolution that makes this sermon so entertaining and so powerful.

Thank You For Your Service, an involving and often wrenching drama about Iraq War veterans adapting to civilian life, is a film that teaches you how to watch it.

The ethereal essay provides a bounty of poetry, in the form of a measured narration by international treasure Tilda Swinton, and an extensively labored assembly of 200 black-and-white film clips.

Swallow draws on how feminine perfection can so often be associated with self-destructive behavior.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

Control Freak is a film so raw, messy, and sincere that it seems to have been torn from the bodies of the people who made it.

More than anything else, though, Decade of Fire succeeds as one of the best explanations in recent cinema of what the phrase "systemic racism" means.

Trust me. It was worth the wait. Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch have distilled the mythology-heavy approach of the last couple chapters with the streamlined action of the first film, resulting in a final hour here that stands among the best of the genre.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

One of Us is so strong as-is that its more harrowing sections — particularly Ari's account of his childhood suffering and the details of Rachel's fight for freedom — are so already hard to watch that you might want to turn away.

The most fascinating thing about the film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of fighting it.

Arnold's films elevate the potential of youth, and for this one, it takes a little magic to fulfill it.

Delivering an unforgettable breakthrough performance, Abita is phenomenal in pitching Lyz on the slippery slope between an adult wannabe and a little kid, boldly wearing even the smallest nuances of her character’s rapidly shifting emotional world on her resolute face.

First Date feels like a throwback caper to something you'd find on cable, funny yet full of action with a generous helping of a timeless romance for good measure. It’s the kind of movie you come across and have to see how it ends.

Coexistence, My Ass! bears witness in a powerful way, offering viewers a pause from the noise while galvanizing them to continue the fight for justice and freedom.