The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.

One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

Movement and progress are the organizing principles throughout Abbas Kiarostami's final, posthumously released film.

The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.

Claire Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings.

It may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications.

The film is yet another of Phillippe Garrel's densely anecdotal studies of romantic fidelity.

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.

Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.

Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Equally self-reflective and enjoyable is the score by Marc Shaiman and Thomas Richard Sharp that cuts a sweeping western theme into the waltz and college-sports tunes that color the film’s animated title sequence and then throughout its more comic set pieces—not even cutting out entirely during Crystal and company’s rendition of the Bonanza theme song. Rather, like the film itself, it beautifully accents Crystal’s high notes.

Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

Long takes are used frequently, whether in a seven-minute exchange between Rose and Huston in bed or a staggering high-angle shot that frames Rose in front of a football field while using a payphone, before craning down to capture her in close-up. These visual cues, along with Midler’s presence, give the film an immediacy and dynamism.

Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience.

It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.

Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster because it’s cannily crafted, in part, as a ripping adventure yarn, director Franklin Schaffner staging a long desert trek for survival by Taylor and his two surviving shipmates in the opening half-hour, a brilliant “hunt” sequence with gorillas pursuing the human brutes as targets and trophies (memorably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant, percussive score), and a lengthy chase sequence where the escaped spaceman leaps and dodges past hairy denizens of church, museum, and marketplace.

The Last Detail is so perfectly tailored to the star that it could’ve been mapped out from a Pythagorean theorem.

There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

Redford ultimately holds Downhill Racer together with the performance of his career.

A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.

In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.