The film is often unfocused, and—at a highly condensed 89 minutes—it makes only a cursory attempt to uncover aspects of this legend’s story not already included in her memoir. Maybe those interested should just read that instead.

Alfre Woodard captures with exquisite nuance the emotional and physical toll it might take on someone, spending years overseeing executions; she grounds the film, which otherwise strikes a balance between broad empathy and a pointed call for criminal justice reform.

While the grounded presentation is one of the movie’s greatest strengths, there are some chunks in the middle where things nod off.

A frenzied, sometimes overreaching biopic that paints in bold colors on a huge canvas, the film stars a never-better Leonardo DiCaprio--as perfectly cast here as he was miscast in "Gangs."

Wherever Chukwu places her camera, Deadwyler’s face makes us understand not just what Mamie is going through but rather the reality of what this country does to its Black citizens. It’s a performance of quiet strength and loud emotion, though Deadwyler is never loud or histrionic. She just simmers with profound pain.

De Oliveira wraps A Talking Picture with a simultaneous introduction and farewell--a bold curtain-dropper that's either a bleak joke or an imprecisely controlled scream of rage.

It's one wacked-out melodrama, but it's wildly entertaining.

In some respects a less tidy film than before, particularly when it veers off into a subplot involving a Nazi soldier played by Siegfried Rauch, the new cut mostly retains the original's virtues while adding details and episodes that make it more recognizably a Fuller film.

More than a slight, pleasant oddity, Hukkle shows Pálfi's keen attunement to the sensual possibilities, both in nature and in cinema.

Malick seems to see everything on a cosmic and microscopic scale simultaneously. Drop him in the middle of a suburb and he’ll consider the magnificence of the children playing, the beauty of the grass, and the centuries it took for the rocks to form. That’s why it’s always going to be a rare gift to look at the world through his eyes — especially when he lets the images speak for themselves.

Writer-director Catherine Breillat who adapted the film from her own roman à clef, seems content to let the story stand on its own two feet, as if it were something that she’d invented from whole cloth rather than experienced. It’s a laudable approach, in theory, but it backfires a bit in this particular instance, because what occurs is so psychologically inexplicable that Breillat’s alter ego comes across as terminally foolish.

Through clever cinematography, editing tricks, and a cast that’s fully committed to the director’s unnerving vision, Barker reimagines a classic horror idea for a new generation.

Poekel isn’t interested in something as mundane as a new romance. He’s basically trying to make Seasonal Affective Disorder: The Movie, and comes damn close to pulling it off. He has a tremendous ally in Audley, who gives one of the year’s best performances (albeit one destined to receive no awards and scant attention).

Trapped is hit-and-miss as a piece of filmmaking but effective as an argument, contending not only that some Americans’ rights are being systematically taken away, but that when only a handful of organizations stand up for those rights, they become a bigger target.

Liu is clearly inspired by live-action filmmakers (the Coen brothers and the Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano are acknowledged influences), but his casual side trips into the fantastic—say, an extended daydream sequence that’s part parody of Cultural Revolution propaganda, part karaoke video—can only work in drawing.

The film does the job; it holds your attention. Overall, though, this is a classic “Say, why not read a book instead?” situation.

What Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?

There’s something a little canned about the film’s emotional arc; the strings show more than they used to on Planet Pixar, even with DeGeneres providing empathy by the gallon.

Their bond lends this more or less conventional POW escape film resounding emotional depth.

Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.

It's a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers, but in spite of its crowd-pleasing ploys, it holds onto its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story.

Serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.

Uncompromising in her art, her teaching, and her professional relations, Boyd makes for a classic tough old bird of a character.

David Gelb's documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi shows what a meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro is like: each morsel prepared simply and perfectly, then replaced by another as soon as the previous piece is consumed, with no repetition of courses. Once an item is gone, it doesn't come back. That's why each one has to be memorable.

Everything about it, from the performances to the production design to the sickly quality of the light in scene after scene, is designed to make us not just question what we’re seeing, but stand at a remove from it, like we’ve just seen a wild animal behaving strangely. Like that wild animal might just lash out and bite us if we get too close.

The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Pivoting out of conventional horror-flick territory into the realm of psychodrama, and drastically blurring the lines separating its heroes from its villains, The Gift turns out to be much smarter and more troubling than it looks on the surface.

Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.

Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.

It walks a fascinating line between morbid humor and outright horror, and it consistently defies expectations by resetting them at every possible step.

Though Kore-eda began his career as a documentarian, his positions on social issues are far from neutral. He reveres the resilience of those who have been dealt a bad hand in life, a sentiment that certainly shines through in Broker.

In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it.

If the film seems head-and-shoulders above the average effects-driven family-matinee flick, it’s because it never gives the impression that it’s trying to be anything more (or less) than good-natured and fun to watch.

Women Talking is about as direct as cinema gets in portraying the complexities and nuances of the feminist struggle, and it achieves much with characters who wouldn’t likely consider themselves feminist or revolutionary.

So long as the film focuses on that spiky rapport, and on the authentic, lived-in textures of the American Midwest, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Unfortunately, the grittiness and weary pathos ultimately gives way to a disappointingly pat finale, undermining everything that came before.

Mother Of George is rarely boring to look at, but it might still have been better served by a starker, less showy aesthetic.

Wetlands makes the internal external; the secret, scary bits of female anatomy are on display in a way that isn’t meant to be particularly titillating to the male gaze.

While Winged Migration asks the audience to empathize with birds, Fly Away Home asks us to take a closer look at the people who love them, and to understand what gives their lives meaning.

Though the film suffers from Sidney's point-and-shoot approach to the Robert Alton-staged musical numbers, it's buoyed nicely by the songs themselves, a clever script, crisp Technicolor cinematography, and Hutton's spirited performance.

The affection audiences feel for A Christmas Story is related to the holiday spirit, yes, but specifically to Clark and Shepherd's awareness of how the true meaning of Christmas manifests in the real world, where a warm meal on a cold, dark day—and a surprising moment of parental grace—can ease a troubled mind.

The joys of watching a man carry out his own therapy onscreen are fairly limited.

There isn't much to Alamar--and González-Rubio sometimes seems to go out of his way to keep the film uncluttered by incident-but it's short and agreeable, and touching.

The Expedition To The End Of The World courses with the zeal of Robert Flaherty, the fearlessness of Werner Herzog, and the fatalistic humor of Lars Von Trier. While individual moments echo with a familiarly mordant sense of alpha-male adventure, together they cohere into something wild and new.

The filmmakers have cannily structured this crazed collection of shorts, using running time and general quality as organizational criteria. The best segments serve as bookends. The worst ones are buried in the middle.

It deviates enough from formula — especially in its arresting ending, which takes full advantage of Bielenia’s haunted visage — to be worth seeing.

Alternately entertaining and unsettling documentary.

Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.

Badham and company elide a lot of technical details of hacking, but the basics of the nascent computer culture still feel spot-on, right down to the body type and personalities of Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin, who play two of Broderick's techno-literate confederates (and work in Seattle, no less). More important is how WarGames plays up the contrast between teenagers—rebellious on the surface but conformist by nature—with a cynical adult world that has become convinced that nuclear annihilation might not be so bad.

It’s at once inspiring and heartbreaking to see a master with nothing left to prove still pushing the envelope in the final years of his life. He had plenty left to give us.

A lyrical character study inside a quasi-Western thriller, God’s Country features a never-better Thandiwe Newton embodying that ethical struggle to haunting, unsettling effect.

What’s most fascinating about Grass is the way Hong modulates the film’s atmosphere, gradually transforming its banal beginnings into something genuinely haunting and unresolved.

Red Riding’s depiction of the avarice and corruption possible when regions become kingdoms unto themselves feels simultaneously cynical and true.

The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.

Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.

Though the plot's soap-opera turns become tidy and predictable, the film shows remarkable attunement and sympathy toward a group of characters whose lives intersect and unravel on a cruel twist of fate.

The film's absolute conviction keeps it from feeling formulaic.

The beauty of the film is how organically its themes are presented - it's a slice of life that comes about its sweeping ideas with surprising delicacy.

The Ghost Writer may not go down as one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but if it does end up being his swan song, it’s the ideal denouement to a life and career of unsettling resonance.

As that ending approaches, the tone shifts from dark comedy to sentimental drama, adding a maudlin aftertaste to an otherwise appealingly bitter brew.

Special effects take pride of place in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories that is as technically accomplished as it is thinly conceived.

It’s a testament to the wealth of this material that the point is a passing one — just one incidence of institutional hypocrisy among many.

Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends.

Despite his confident and unfussy direction, Dickinson owes most of Urchin‘s success to his lead actor, Frank Dillane.

Porumboiu starts off making a mordant slice of life, but he gradually entwines the personal and the historical, then ends on a poignant note. The story and situation are slight, but in the best possible way.

Maines' big mouth and winning candor got her into trouble, but Shut Up & Sing suffers from filmmakers who are intent on playing it safe.

There’s a specificity to Mediterranea that at times makes it feel like an actual documentary.

While that may sound like a downer, the film itself is anything but, offering a genuinely uplifting testament to one woman’s resilience.

Ultimately, Jockey’s most compelling elements lie in the margins. Its major dramatic moments fall flat next to peripheral, off-hand details.

Though screenwriter David Mamet writes some chewy lines, director Sidney Lumet balances out any pulpiness with a somber mood, making sparing use of the musical score and creating a Boston awash in brown, beige, and gray.

There’s something undeniably affecting about that trajectory, which allows McConaughey to turn his character into an empathetic figure — one whose prejudice fades as his fighting spirit intensifies — without sacrificing his rapscallion spirit. He’s the same loudmouthed macho braggart at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning, but now he’s a loudmouthed macho braggart with purpose.

The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.

A sophomore film major would be lucky to get a passing grade with such material.

Makes a terrific case for the group's historical importance, even though its performances seem more fun to discuss than watch.

The Imposter strings the audience along, to get them to understand first-hand how easy it is to buy into a well-told story, even when there's no evidence to support it.

The B-Side feels a tad overextended—but it’s a pleasure to see a warm, creative, and not even remotely evasive individual in front of his camera for a change.

There’s something impersonal about Left-Handed Girl, like a greeting card written by a close friend with their non-dominant hand. Select words and phrases are legible, but the overall wobbliness has the entire sentiment feeling a bit fuzzy.

Even if Güeros doesn’t entirely work, it feels worthy: a film made independently and without interference whose reverence for the past thankfully doesn’t result in too much solemnity or seriousness.

There’s enough disreputable behavior bookending the righteousness, and enough solid jokes along the way, to make the effort moderately entertaining.

It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.

Through a miracle of timing, Davis landed the lead role in Gillian Armstrong's assured debut feature My Brilliant Career fresh out of performance school, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part.

I happen to think the film is woefully underrated, but it’s hard to imagine even its most ardent critics being able to find much fault with the way Scorsese and screenwriter Richard Price ease us into Fast Eddie’s world, expanding our view bit by tantalizing bit while making us wonder what’s happening just outside the frame.

While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.

Foster and Harrelson always stick to the Army's orders about what to say and how to behave. After a while, The Messenger starts to feel equally dogged about following a pat script.

Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.

By the time Feuerzeig gets to his final shot--an artful portrait of Johnston's parents, with their son looming over them like a curse--he's emerged with the most harrowing and aesthetically keen portrait of madness and artistic inspiration since "Crumb."

Fukunaga paints better outside the lines, working with cinematographer Adriano Goldman to offer vivid shots of the poverty and despair cutting through Latin America, of gang rituals and territorial skirmishes, and of ordinary people taking dangerous routes to a better life that may be a mirage. Next time, a few rewrites please.

Majidi masterfully balances the serious subtext with entertaining vignettes.

The film's strength lies in just how far it's willing to go-and to not go-in the pursuit of mythologizing its subject, a group of aging but unrepentant punks who treat the very idea of mythology like a bad joke.

There’s a tragic, moving resonance to the film’s vision of two marginalized characters—one Black, the other a woman, both stripped of everything—finding common ground in their parallel trauma and resistance. It’s there in the scenes between Franciosi and first-time actor Ganambarr, forging empathy and a mutual respect in the fire of survival, without a hint of bathetic sentimentality.

Filmed in long, quiet takes across gorgeous, all-but-empty landscapes, Mountain Patrol feels more like Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" than like the cops-and-robbers thriller its plotline suggests.

Sporting a blonde dye job and a haughty, impervious manner, Gheorghiu makes Cornelia a consistently compelling figure, at once monstrous and pathetic.

It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.

The Man Who Knew Too Much finds the director firmly back in his wheelhouse, extracting all the wit and suspense he can from a pulpy exercise in abduction and conspiracy.

Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.

I, Tonya may be more of a pop-biographical exercise than a deep interrogation, but there’s a resonance to the synergy between its star and its subject: one famous female artist reclaiming her professional narrative by playing another who never quite could.

An eye-opening, often-infuriating new documentary.

Evolution is the sort of film that doesn’t require you to “turn off” your mind, but does ask that you surrender certain expectations. Most of all, this is a vision that no other director would have imbued with such a potent amalgam of tender and twisted. It’s a pleasure to have her back.