The Nest lingers long after the final credits. It may not have the same surprising newness that juiced the debut of Martha Marcy, but it casts an ineffable spell nevertheless.

Taken separately, these two medium-length works would be diverting but also rather minor Hong, with their typical dry humor and observations about life and love. But taken as a single, 120-minute work, the small differences in the dialogue and attitudes of parts one and two reveal nothing less than the humanity, inner life and subconscious decision-making processes of the characters, turning the whole into one of Hong’s strongest features to date.

This doc is always thoughtful and tightly edited, and it has an emotional impact that not many docs can equal.

Ultimately, Sabbath Queen isn’t interested in the headline-grabbing macro conflicts that embroil Jews globally, but the internal culture wars within Judaism itself: fascistic fundamentalism versus reformist progressivism; dominant cishet masculinity versus burgeoning feminine and gender nonconforming voices; hallowed bloodlines versus chosen family. It is one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

The film’s lively dynamics owe much to the bristly nature of nearly every relationship and interaction in the film.

Ben Hania lights a connective fuse between documentary and drama.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

It is simply one of the most exciting and intelligent action films in years, probably the best good-cop film we can expect to encounter.

Its dispassionate approach toward the major injustices and minuscule triumphs that make up the life of its protagonist, superbly played by Gabriela Cartol, is always balanced by compassion, perhaps making it more effective than any impassioned rant.

Cheerfully yet poignantly exposing the struggles, anxieties, disorders and obsessions of ordinary people, this is a film as odd as it is charming.

By keeping the camera focused on the faces of patients and judges alike, Depardon — working again with sound recordist and producer Claudine Nougaret — reveals shreds of humanity, and even moments of hilarity, in these closed-door sessions.

The result is a sharp-eyed, open-ended inquiry into marriage and romance.

There's little in the way of genuine depth, complexity or nuance here, Diaz instead seeks to convey the illusion of profundity by having various characters throw around weighty social and philosophical verbiage in thuddingly sophomoric fashion.

What makes this film such a warm and touching portrait is that it reveals a woman who, even at her lowest, never loses her sense of humor.

Dig deeper and Huesera reveals itself to be a wilier film — an astute study of desire and self-deception.

A moving and effective film whose subject may lack the hot-button boxoffice appeal of the director's "An Inconvenient Truth" but is at least a crisis practically everyone agrees actually exists.

This stands as one of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s better but not quite best features in a pretty consistent career, not as scurrilously seedy as him at his worst, or as merciless, but not as ambitious or startlingly insightful as his best.

One senses that Billingham is not always at ease with the narrative demands of filmmaking. But his startling eye for the common made strange is very visible here, and hard not to hope that he’ll make further forays into filmmaking after this very auspicious debut with a work that feels so close and true to his earlier material.

It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

Tantura finally attempts to get the record on that incident straight, but as a movie, it serves an even greater purpose by bringing it to a wider public than ever before.

If audiences can accept a sequel that has veered into something closer to folk horror than its zombie-adjacent roots, they should be able to plug into its peculiar wavelength.

Retains considerable entertainment value on the strength of Herzog's never-dull, very personal narrating style.

By this time, cinematographer Fred Kelemen's mostly stationary camera has revealed about all there is to see in a fine array of textures in such things as the wooden table, the rough floors, the walls of stone, the ropes on the horse and the skin on the boiled potatoes. That does not, however, make up for the almost complete lack of information about the two characters, and so it is easy to become indifferent to their fate, whatever it is.

The Proposal has a life of its own, beautiful and provocative. The biggest complaint one can make is that Magid, whose previous works have involved spy agencies and police surveillance, hasn't made similar features while pursuing those projects.

Using her own experience with the syndrome as a springboard, Brea offers an affecting film.

A gorgeous tone poem that both deepens and personalizes the audio recording, creating a satisfying emotional arc that isn’t as apparent in the collection of 13 fully-orchestrated country-tinged songs.

A fascinating account of its subject's self-torture over his inability to stop one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies.

The arc and uplift of the story might be familiar, but thanks to DaSilva’s magnetism and skillful direction, this is way more than a conventional weeper.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.

The director and screenwriter downplay the conventional melodrama inherent in the situation in favor of emphasizing how practical problems should be addressed with rational responses rather than hysteria, knee-jerk patriotism or selfish expedience.

Instead of a straightforward narrative arc for the small cast of characters, the film -- gorgeously shot and framed by Cemetery of Splendor cinematographer Diego Garcia -- combines a documentary-like look at their everyday lives with a fascinating if not entirely clear-cut exploration of body and gender issues.

Ultimately, what keeps Nowhere Special from being nothing special is the film’s delicacy, its unfussy simplicity, its perceptiveness. The empathy it brings to one man’s crushing decision makes this an affecting portrait of parental devotion.

Other attributes carried over from Liu’s nonfiction work are his restraint and avoidance of sentimentality in a slow-burn, heavily observational drama whose unhurried pacing requires patience. But there’s a haunting quality to the melancholy story that stays with you, and despite what often seems like a bleak outlook, it finds resonant notes of hope.

Upsetting but too curious to wallow in misery (and blessed with a few grace notes), the film pays tribute to a girl who rarely indulges in the self-centeredness that comes with adolescence.

This puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising, very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That becomes apparent almost as soon as the investigation gets underway and the movie starts losing its fizz.

Michelle Williams does her best but she cannot prevent Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, a weak tale about being broke and on the road in rural America, from dwindling into boredom.

There’s never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it’s simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created.

Seyfried builds a powerful force around Ann’s convictions, but there’s too little intimate knowledge of this historically significant woman to convey much beyond her zeal.

While The Sparks Brothers may be a bit too exhaustive for those merely seeking an introduction to the band, longtime fans will be thrilled by the deluxe treatment.

This may be one of Jude’s minor works, but it delivers a quietly devastating emotional punch.

Lifshitz never demonizes those that don’t understand or oppose Sasha’s desire to be who she really is and they remain almost entirely offscreen. Instead, the director chronicles, with immense warmth and generosity, the toll this outside opposition takes on Sasha and her loved ones and how much love, care and attention is needed to compensate for the fact she’s not simply accepted like all her peers.

Bolstered by a career-best performance from Mickey Rourke and outstanding work by Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood.

The Hours makes for a fascinating and ultimately successful stunt in its cross-cutting among the decades.

If director John Hancock's work is sometimes atmospherically colorless, he pulls scenes together that seem to be going nowhere and acquits himself most notably with the performers.

Any way you slice it, and even if you're not entirely in agreement with the various subjects' positions on Medicare for all or the Green New Deal, this film is a winner by a landslide.

Not merely a sitcom of cultural clash. Screenwriter Angus Maclachlan has delicately etched a compelling portrait of a way of life whose decencies and simplicities are often dismissed as being "unsophisticated."

This poetic portrait of simple Japanese life immerses you in the elegance of the ordinary.

The documentary makes a persuasive case as to why this show — grounded very specifically in the lives of a persecuted Jewish shtetl community in 1905 Imperial Russia — continues to connect deeply with audiences across vast divides of religion, race, generation, personal experience and sexuality. Its layers of meaning to anyone who has ever felt ostracized alone have cemented its eternal relevance.

What ensues is a long battle that has all the trappings of a small-town political thriller: corrupt officials, refuted elections, reporters fighting for their rights at the risk of their own livelihoods… It’s a story we’ve seen before, but never in this kind of setting.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is a film with much to offer when it comes to lessons and laughs. It even handles its primary themes about loss, grief and community with humor and grace, an approach that, these days, seems especially hard to find.

A riveting Argentine thriller spiked with witty dialogue and poignant love stories.

This is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music

No question, watching this film is a tough go. Horror films cause less seat-squirming.

An affecting film that manages to find glimmers of beauty in the encroaching bleakness, and coaxing richly dimensional performances which, like Maria's photographs, transcend the conventionally black and white.

Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions.

The sobering message of the film is that independence doesn’t really mean anything in Africa if you’ve got resources that richer countries have an interest in and a general population that remains woefully poor and uneducated.

John Trengove’s first feature takes real chances, delivering a troubling portrait of the collision between communal and personal identity.

Out of all the film’s many achievements, perhaps the most impressive is the ability to keep the tone balanced just on this biting point between tragedy and comedy in scene after scene.

The director has crafted a film of deceptive simplicity, observing the tiny details of a routine existence with such clarity, soulfulness and empathy that they build a cumulative emotional power almost without you noticing.

Rarely does Ben Hania’s film feel exploitative or manipulative. In fact, more than anything, Four Daughters is radical in its honesty and courage.

There is no denying the emotional impact of the story, which is powerfully conveyed in this important, deeply moving documentary.

Carried by impressively fluid, determinedly naturalistic filmmaking, with performances that never hit a false note, 20,000 Species of Bees (20.000 especies de abejas) marks an assured debut, slowly but surely hitting an emotional crescendo during its final minutes

With the steadfast lack of melodrama we’ve come to expect from him, the writer-director packs more incident, life and unassuming complexity into 90 minutes than most filmmakers muster in twice that run time.

The Queen of Versailles will prompt loathing not only among the so-called 99 Percent, but among those in the top 1 percent who would like someone more sane to represent them on camera.

Though the pint-sized protagonist is never far out of sight, the film’s vision is anything but limited, as various encounters in the desert conjure a vivid picture of a world that has remained unchanged for centuries but that is quickly coming undone.

Although the film runs more than two hours, the story is so compelling and the production so beautifully controlled that we are gripped by the characters' quest right up to the shocking end of the story.

Genuinely sweet, beautifully constructed documentary.

Trophy isn't as good at drawing moral conclusions as it is at laying out the difficult issues around hunting, conservationism and the trade in animal parts. But the film will be involving for those on all sides of animal-welfare debates.

Boosted by central characters that remain vastly engaging and a deep supply of wit, Incredibles 2 certainly proves worth the wait, even if it hits the target but not the bull's eye in quite the way the first one did.

If the film's title is an ironic use of Trumpian bluster, it also accurately represents the movie itself, which is about as far as you can get from Michael Moore-style agitprop while still having a red-blooded interest in this country's continued existence: The filmmakers avoid insulting a politician who deserves anything they might wish to sling at him, opting instead to let facts speak for themselves.

Focused much more intently on video journals Gleason made as his illness progressed, the film both documents his rapid physical decline and ponders the many existential issues it raises — especially for a married couple expecting their first child in a few months.

What a relief to escape the series' increasing bondage to high-tech gimmicks in favor of intrigue and suspense featuring richly nuanced characters and women who think the body's sexiest organ is the brain.

The central performances are jewels, most luminously Emma Thompson as the blithe and bonny Beatrice and Branagh as the prickly and proud Benedek. Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington and Beckinsale serve with distinction. [26 Apr 1993]

It's a tough and cerebral but finally illuminating film.

Director Sang-il Lee’s feature is propelled by operatic intensity and visual poetry. It unfolds over three mostly riveting hours, with only occasional jagged lapses in narrative momentum.

Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder about — and wish for — what he might have done next.

Beautifully acted by its ensemble of mostly non-professional actors, The Citizen puts a very human face on a topic that has inflamed much of the Western world.

There are so many witty touches and sharp little observations here that The Strange Little Cat can be forgiven for ultimately making no dramatic statement.

Part of the appeal of Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareisa’s subtly powerful second feature, Drowning Dry (Seses), is that you never know if what you’re watching is taking place in the present, past or future.

If ultimately the highly talky Saraband comes across as a minor entry in the canon, it nonetheless marks a dignified farewell for one of cinema's greatest directors.

Writer-director Gray's handsomely crafted planet-hopping drama is by turns vividly eventful and deliberate in its uneventfulness, and it feels caught, somewhat awkwardly, between stark simplicity and violent leaps into hyperdrive.

The story is scarce to non-existent, but Kim Min-hee in the main role keeps the audience awake, waiting for her next socially uncensored outburst of truth.

A bold film both in its storytelling strategies and its filmmaking logistics.

Schickel's documentary, narrated by Sydney Pollack, breaks no new ground stylistically, but it is a well-organized, informative and inevitably entertaining portrait of the man who revolutionized screen comedy and who arguably became the first mass-market, commercialized media figure.

A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure.

A picture whose tone wanders between arid academic exercise and something close to parody of the more pretentious trends in current auteur cinema.

This challenging but refreshingly candid nonfiction feature is the debut of the talented Swedish-Danish filmmaking couple Frida and Lasse Barkfors, who have not only found a fascinating subject but who also manage to build a case against isolating sex offenders without resorting to such facile shortcuts as voiceovers or heavy editorializing.

Nossa Chape is a testament to how moving forward does not require leaving the past behind.

This tale of a despondent man's attempt to find someone to help him commit suicide never really hits the emotional heights it should; it may be that the film's proponents are confusing simplicity with profundity. [30 Sept 1997]

This very Bronx tale of teenage pregnancy and inner-city strife can seem familiar in terms of content, but never in terms of form.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

The film works best as a poignant character study, observing Star as she settles into her independence and figures out who she wants to be, framed by a vast physical landscape that stretches socioeconomically from privileged wealth to squalid poverty. There's a wonderful intimacy in the way Arnold examines young women in her films.

There’s a modesty about You Hurt My Feelings that makes it seem in some ways as simple and straightforward as its title. But Holofcener is such a gifted writer that it becomes a mosaic of mildly absurd minutiae, mixed in with legitimate feelings.

A delightful experience for jazz buffs and more than an eye-opener for any youngsters who barely know who Armstrong was, it’s worth applauding just for its belief that it can meaningfully touch on private life, public persona, musical legacy and everything else — even if, on each front, it leaves one wanting more.

The film has its resonant moments, notably a wedding and a funeral. But it is by no means the jewel in the crown of a series that most recently has included electrifying docs like At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

Transfixing in its workplace detail and haunting in its harsh commentary on a solitary existence.

Well-made and acted Coen Brothers remake lacks the humor and resonance that might have made it memorable.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.