The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.

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.

Julia Solomonoff's film ripples with a palpable sense of the sheer distance between the down and out actor at its center and his goals.

There are hints that the film will scale itself to the broader historical context of this era, but the screenplay never elaborates on the ethnic strife the undergirds the Cambodian genocide.

It both feeds off of and perpetuates nostalgia for a time when the nation seemed more politically conscious and therefore more capable of creating lasting social change.

Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.

The film meticulously yet concisely probes how, why, and when our understanding of the greenhouse effect went from a scientific certainty to it being up for debate.

The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.

J.C. Chandor's fondness for situational irony is empowered by the spartan efficiency of his method, and that of most of his performers.

The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.

In the film, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.

Good Luck's political implications—most prominently that the almighty dollar is humanity's enduring slave master—are expertly woven into the hallucinatory aural-visual fabric of the film.

Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from very familiar pandemic struggles.

Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.

Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.

Like the movie itself, every character is a beautiful swirl of contradictions.

With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.

Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.

Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.

The film brims with hilarious dialogue, lightly satirical observations of a culture that treats art as a commodity, and satisfying payoffs to a number of story elements planted early on.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.