Low-key but spanning a symphony of disturbing themes from personal relations and wildlife conservation to the threat of war, Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’ offers a fascinating, multi-faceted perspective on insular Japan today.

Expectations were rewarded with an intimate film and impeccable direction.

This director knows she is working with an issue that impacts women and their families everywhere and that’s how she puts the film together; it is personal and political.

Centered around Padilla’s three-hour “confession” in front of his fellow writers at the guild’s headquarters, the documentary distills the most dramatic moments and contextualizes them for present-day viewers, ending the film with recent images of artists protesting in the streets of Havana.

Stylistically limited by its strict adherence to Lerner’s vintage footage, Newport & the Great Folk Dream does little fresh with the music documentary format. But behind its deceptively austere, artless, hand-held aesthetic this deep dive into musical history is actually slickly edited and elegantly structured, with a strikingly clear, cleaned-up audio soundtrack.

Conceptually staggering.

Leni Riefenstahl and her controversial legacy are examined in fascinating depth in the new German doc 'Riefenstahl' by Andres Veiel.

Cinematically erudite and very playful in its use of music, Enea skillfully toys with expectations to keep the viewer constantly off balance.

Unfolding with faint whiffs of film noir, Meeting with Pol Pot boasts powerful performances from its cast, with Irène Jacob (Double Life of Veronique) and Cyril Gueï playing journalists whose professional demeanour unravels rapidly as they contend with the consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.

An epic tale of love, revenge, youth, rage, and class, Beating Hearts (original French title L’Amour Ouf) is an extraordinarily lively work of cinema.

Maybe the center of the drama is the obsession — love? passion? — Mathias has with Claude, and their rendezvous plays out in a rather melodramatic way. But the music imposes its presence. Strangely enough, Claude does not seem interested in music or the pianist´s career. And the film limits itself to offering a compromise in this impossible love.

The Eras Tour spotlights Swift’s musicianship as well as her showmanship: the acoustic section, where she accompanies herself on guitar and piano, could have been the entire concert, if one could build a stadium tour out of such intimate moments, but the bigger-than-life stagecraft on display never overpowers the music.

Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later.

The film’s epic nature embraces not only size and scope but also the exquisite craftsmanship on display, from the detail work of Janty Yates and Dave Crossman’s costumes to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s ability to differentiate a successful battle from a disastrous one simply through his lighting choices.

The latest sci-fi horror fable from Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is his most deliciously dark, richly allegorical nightmare vision to date. A bleakly satirical, sexually graphic, hallucinatory thriller about wealthy tourists resorting to debauched savagery in a fictional foreign country,

Boasting a barnstorming performance from Yuumi Kawai (Plan 75), Desert of Namibia takes a seemingly banal love-triangle premise and runs with it in the most surprising, gripping and anarchic fashion possible.

Blue Beetle is so singularly fresh and fun that Jaime Reyes and his family deserve to be front and center of whatever comes next.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

Even if the concert sequences don’t completely do justice to the thrill of seeing this show in person, this documentary offers an in-depth souvenir of both the show itself and of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of one of popular culture’s most intriguing, unpredictable, and powerful creators.

Visual delights, a sweet love story, and that potent Pixar sentimentality carry this animated feature past a periodic table's worth of script flaws.

For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works.

Wonka stands as an effective reimagining of a beloved literary and cinematic character — so long as you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

What we need is for the voice of the Yanomami and other groups fighting for their survival to be heard in the world. The filmmakers are achieving it with this documentary.

For Favreau, philosophy and world-building is obviously the stuff of the TV show; now that it’s a movie, it’s time for fun and thrills.

At 126 minutes, The Fall Guy overstays its welcome for a bit, but the stunts, the comedy, and the spark between the film’s dynamic leads make the movie a delectable kick-off to the popcorn pleasures of the summer-movie season.

Wherever it winds up going, the Judy-Nick friendship emerges as one of the more complex and satisfying bits of character interplay in contemporary Disney animation.

For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.