With superb performances across the board, particularly from her two young leads, and an adventurous use of visual and aural elements, Djukić has conjured an alluring fusion of spiritual awakening and adolescent confusion.

This is a rape retaliation thriller both tautly controlled and wildly over-the-top, executed with flashy style, sly visual humor and a subversive feminist sensibility.

Though its micro view limits its usefulness in big discussions of public policy — it's easy to imagine American partisans using it as evidence both for and against government-run health care — it is a vivid reminder that all such policies are lived out by millions of individuals, who die every day when things aren't well run.

The directors allow ample space for somber reflections without ever detracting from the fact that Tina, fundamentally, is a celebration, a unique survival story.

American Fiction is smart and, thanks to its fine cast, has genuine heart.

The frequently outrageous Il Divo follows the career of one of the best-known and most tenacious figures in Italian political history in a lively, sensory-overload, cartoonlike fashion reminiscent of "Amelie" and "Moulin Rouge." The fact that it's often over-the-top goes with saying, and is part of the fun.

A highly original film of uncompromising, other-worldly beauty. Leviathan demands to be seen, even if it means you never eat seafood again.

The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.

The drama does eventually come full circle, but it’s gone so far off the rails by that point that it’s hard to bring us back.

Anchored by an admirably measured performance from Gael Garcia Bernal as the maverick advertising ace who spearheaded the winning campaign, the quietly impassioned film seems a natural for intelligent arthouse audiences.

The individual personalities that emerge in interviews both from back in 1981 and now, with the actors in their 50s, are often delightful, both funny and rueful.

Choppily told but thoughtful and illuminating, writer-director Buirski’s latest film completes a trilogy about the civil rights era, begun with The Loving Story and The Rape of Recy Taylor, that showcases lesser-known warriors for civil rights.

Tinged with sorrow, compassion, forgiveness and, ultimately, love. More than 25 years after his father's death, Nathaniel visits his father's architectural works and speaks to the people who knew him.

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

All the action is staged with energy, but it gets relentless without anything really funny going on.

Only Tarantino could come up with such a wild cross-cultural mash, a smorgasbord of ingredients stemming from spaghetti Westerns, German legend, historical slavery, modern rap music, proto-Ku Klux Klan fashion, an assembly of '60s and '70s character actors and a leading couple meant to be the distant forebears of blaxploitation hero John Shaft and make it not only digestible but actually pretty delicious.

The ultimate effect of [Östlund's] studied techniques is more restricting than beneficial, which, combined with a protracted running time, faintly self-righteous air and a perplexing, misguided coda, produces a sense of letdown at the end despite the strength of much that has come before.

It's easy to see why this deeply thoughtful, self-made diplomat has succeeded where so many others have failed. It's thus all the more poignant that his own demons have proven far more difficult for him to tame than so many of the world's.

Beguiling in its strangeness, yet also effortlessly evoking recognizable emotions such as loneliness and the feeling of being stuck in a dead-end town and life, this moody and gorgeous film is finally more about atmosphere and emotions than narrative -- and none the worse for it.

By focusing on the students’ stories, honoring their choices and leaving considerable room for their ambivalence, regret and uncertainty, the doc provides a sobering and emotional look at what, if any, options exist for those who aren’t white or wealthy in an unequal system.

Clearly the work of an ambitious writer/director who can see himself inheriting the mantle of Rod Serling ... it offers twists and ironies and false endings galore — along with more laughs than the comedian-turned-auteur dared to include in his debut film. ... It packs a punch.

A terrific blend of farce and personal stories, "The Wedding Banquet" is no mere slapdash slapstick. With its graceful, character-driven screenplay and sympathetically zippy lead performances from Chao as dutiful gay son, Chin as the immigrant artist and Lichtenstein as the longtime companion, "The Wedding Banquet" is a tender feast of wit and charm. [04 Aug 1993]

On their own, individual scenes are effective enough in semi-farcically portraying the ignorance, avoidance and/or downright denial by the practitioners of bad loans. Together, however, they are wearying in their repetitive nature.

Stuffed with drama, both climbing-related and not.

While political and social context is kept to a minimum, the darkly poetic images they capture speak volumes about what the miners go through.

Closed Curtain is a moody, intellectually complex film that requires good will and brainwork on the part of the viewer to penetrate and enjoy.

In his latest, Fjord, the Romanian New Wave auteur brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama of parenting and education, in which a suspicion of possible child abuse escalates into a full inquisition during a head-spinning rush to judgement. It’s also a nuanced reflection on otherness, and how anyone failing to conform to the values of a community invites distrust.

Appealing equally to the eyes, ears, heart and funny bone, Moana represents contemporary Disney at its finest — a vibrantly rendered adventure that combines state-of-the-art CG animation with traditional storytelling and colorful characters, all enlivened by a terrific voice cast.

This tightly focused character study is a tiny film, with an emotional effect in inverse proportion to its size.

As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

Even a klutz could hardly make a bad movie about these compelling figures. Thankfully though, Guido Santi and Tina Mascara are superb filmmakers, fully alive in their terrific film Chris & Don: A Love Story to all the undercurrents of art, social class, sexual orientation, challenging relationships and, most especially, the touching love story at the heart of their film.

A slight anecdote expanded to slightly beyond its natural length, The Empty Hours is nevertheless time well spent.

Skilfully manipulating romantic and social frictions which in lesser hands might have come across as soapily melodramatic, Rauniyar and Barker construct a parable-like tale whose allegorical aspects are there for those who wish to find them. But their priority is the creation of believable characters in a pungently atmospheric setting.

The real star of the show here is the strikingly gorgeous, often almost bi-chrome visual universe, inspired by the tai chi diagram — more commonly known in the West as yin-and-yang symbol — and traditional ink-brush painting, with its distinct combination of rich blacks and fluid shades of gray.

A mournful but clear-eyed look at one of the many governments on the planet currently either going to or simmering in Hell, Petra Costa's The Edge of Democracy is as much essay film as a primer on Brazil's recent history.

Writer-director Adam Leon’s debut feature, Gimme the Loot, is a scrappy, funny, warmly observed delight from start to finish.

Benefits from a fresh angle that will particularly appeal to blues aficionados.

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino is one lethal storyteller. Reservoir Dogs, even for those of us with weak stomachs, is a masterful story setup, aided and abetted by all those colorful guys in on the thing.

This is an imperfect but stirring drama, by turns sweet, sexy and quietly wrenching.

A quietly marvelous travelogue condensing months' worth of observation into a single sleepless night, Bill and Turner Ross's Tchoupitoulas follows their widely praised "45365."

For audiences willing to embrace ambiguity and let the characters and images weave their spell, this masterfully shot film played by the director’s stock cast is a treasure.

Rescued from decay after the director's 2011 death and looking radiant in a 2K restoration, this quiet gem is a time capsule whose potential audience may be small, but will be transported.

Dramatically gripping while still brandishing a droll undercurrent of humor, this beautifully made film will certainly be embraced as one of the best Bonds by loyal fans worldwide and leaves you wanting the next one to turn up sooner than four years from now.

A greater argument for music education in our secondary school curriculum can't be made than Mark Landsman's doc about a Texas high school funk band that tore up the music scene from 1968 to 1977.

Poetically composed, with marvelous lumps of wit and perspective, Of Times and The City is a masterwork.

Though certainly not for everyone (and not for kids of any age), the regret-tinged film displays a distinctive voice and will be embraced by devotees of offbeat animation.

The artisanal spirit and abundant creativity of the enterprise is undeniable, immersing us in a vivid world crafted from clay, wire, paper and paint, without a single frame of CG imagery.

Speaking with a number of the women who broke the law in the name of justice, and others who were involved in their underground network, The Janes directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes have made an urgent and thoroughly engaging group portrait.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

Backed by a wealth of video footage, archival photographs and gig posters, Ellwood captures the determination with which the band thrust itself forward, neither glossing over nor digging too deep into the hint of ruthlessness with which early members — and later, original manager Ginger Canzoneri — were pushed aside as the band became big business.

Upstream Colors certainly is something to see if you’re into brilliant technique, expressive editing, oblique storytelling, obscuritanist speculative fiction or discovering a significant new actress.

[Waititi's] nimble adaptation here combines solid writing with an entire bag of filmmaking tricks that includes visual gags, unexpected cuts and quick montage sequences to score laughs from the get-go. He also cleverly exploits who these people are to get the audience in stitches.

A captivating if somewhat conventional documentary, Ballets Russes is a paean to the groundbreaking, 20th century ballet troupe that began as a loose group of Russian refugees, metamorphosed into the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and eventually split into two competing companies.

The best one yet.

It is an intelligently written piece that only falters during the finale.

Danfung Dennis presents a powerful depiction of the horrors and daily violence of our ongoing war in Afghanistan.

Loveling wisely avoids easy answers, and its deft mix of humor and melancholy never falters.

Viewers who've actually been in the protest trenches may long for a grittier take. But in sanitizing some aspects of this experience, The Hate U Give brings the world of protest and agitation a little closer to those whose privilege has made it relatively easy to ignore.

Come See Me in the Good Light is relentlessly emotional and intentionally uplifting, with an intimate quality that makes it feel like a home movie.

John Travolta takes on John Waters in Hairspray, and the result is anything but a drag in this appealingly goofy, all-singing, all-dancing screen adaptation of the Broadway musical based on the 1988 film.

Performances are what ultimately sets Bruiser apart as a debut and signal Warren’s potential as a director.

The gorilla is great, the girl terrific, sets are out of this world, creatures icky as hell, and the director clearly does not believe in the word "enough."

Marshall, a veteran stage director/choreographer who proved his cinematic skills with his television adaptations of the musicals Cinderella and Annie, does a superb job here, beautifully contrasting the gritty storyline with the hard-edged musical numbers.

Be prepared to be emotionally devastated.

David Harewood and Edwina Findley, the only trained actors in a compelling cast of non-pros, deliver harrowing performances as a self-styled healer and the desperate mother who seeks his help for her tormented son.

Bloodhounds will lick their lips experiencing the re-launch of Kinji Fukasaku's trendsetting Battle Royale (2000) with 3D effects, which basically make the splatter scenes gorier and stickier.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

A highly original and rather touching account of loss, both physical and emotional.

This picture offers more action, more delicious comeuppances, more daring design and a few genuinely surprising cameos just for good measure. Yet it doesn’t suffer from the usual “give ’em the same thing, but more of it” bloat common in sequels to surprise hits. Its ensemble is more varied than Knives‘, and its critique of the clueless rich more relevant to our age.

Palmason boldly risks audience disenfranchisement by pushing his disturbing story to unexpected lengths dramatically and stylistically, thereby winning a creative wrestling match with a potentially intransigent narrative.

Besides his sure gift for incisive characterizations and acerbically witty dialogue, Johnson also displays a strong visual sense, with the film shot and edited for maximum effect.

Childhood memoirs always are under threat from self-indulgence and sentimentality, but 1993 successfully sidesteps both, establishing Simon as a talent to watch.

Some years from now, Starred Up, a rough, violent and, to American ears, half-indecipherable British prison drama, will be remembered as the film that announced a new star, Jack O’Connell.

Both touching and universally understandable, the theme is how an untimely death destroys the fragile fabric that binds a family together.

Darius Khondji's cinematography evokes to the hilt the gorgeously inviting Paris of so many people's imaginations (while conveniently ignoring the rest), and the film has the concision and snappy pace of Allen's best work.

It proves that Beauvois still masters his uniquely classical brand of filmmaking, coaxing strong performances out of veteran Nathalie Baye and newbie Iris Bry, who makes an impressive screen debut.

Hosoda has a lovely, light touch and leavens the proceedings with dry, well-observed humor.

The strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies.

This biographical drama, grounded in the anguished poetry of its protagonist, is hushed and decorous to a fault. But it does eventually wind its way to a profoundly affecting conclusion.

Lindholm here makes yet another modestly scaled but effective drama that asks more uncomfortable questions than it answers.

Movies like this are why arthouses exist, and why we'll seek them out again as soon as it's safe to breathe near our fellow humans.

At the end of Living, I felt not like I’d seen an old favorite in a new light, but like I might want to go back and watch Ikiru again. There are worse outcomes for a remake than reviving affection for the original, or retelling an old story for a new audience that may not have heard it before. There are better ones, too.

The leisurely narrative is barely able to sustain the film's full-length running time, and some of the obviously staged sequences involving the family of shepherds are annoyingly hokey. Nonetheless, "Weeping Camel" has an undeniable appeal.

The dissected minutiae of this adultery drama unfortunately doesn't add up to a very original or moving whole.

While things get a tad buckled town in mayhem and special effects throughout the film’s busy final reels, Wright spends enough time sketching out his mischievous middle-aged men so that their journey...feels worthwhile and even meaningful for a few of them.

The film is a captivating, sobering look at the world’s endangered aquatic species, but it’s also a frightening revelation of what methane and carbon are doing to the ocean.

Neatly divided into seven discrete chapters plus prologue and epilogue, it's a necessarily repetitive but engrossing and ultimately optimistic glimpse into a troubled situation entering belated turnaround.

Modest in aesthetic terms but more jounalistically serious than many low-budget advocacy docs, the film will be an eye-opener for some, and should add to pressure on executives to stop pretending they're innocent of the crimes contractors commit on their behalf.

Considering that it was filmed in bits and pieces over two decades, it's not surprising that 17 Blocks is disjointed in its storytelling, nor that its technical elements are ragged (subtitles are frequently employed due to poor sound quality). But it nonetheless packs a potent emotional punch.

Demanding attention, imagination and critical viewing from the audience, Chinese Portrait is nevertheless one for posterity.

Though it can at times feel wanting in dramatic heft or clarity, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet can also be revelatory, and its drama flowers in delightfully unflashy ways.

Even when Mountains’ narrative, which often feels more like a series of beautifully conjured vignettes, doesn’t hit its full potential, the way Sorelle thinks of gentrification rewards our close attention.

With its stellar performances, dramatic orchestral score and rich costume and set design, Illusions Perdues is a worthwhile, sweeping narrative of love, lust and literary ambition.

Joshua Z. Weinstein's charming Menashe immerses us in an authentic environment of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and makes it relatable by weaving a sweet story familiar in its general contours, of a single father struggling to hold on to the son he loves.

No true fan of science fiction -- or, for that matter, cinema -- can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.

It's a splendid microcosm of contemporary China's aspirations and shortcomings.

Nitram is an uncommonly tough, taxing film with an aftershock that’s hard to shake.