A fable-like story about a young African girl banished from her village for alleged witchcraft, it blends deadpan humor with light surrealism, vivid visuals and left-field musical choices.

With lucidity and deep feeling, Nancy Buirski's documentary maps an ugly trail of injustice and then widens its lens to pay tribute to the women of color whose refusal to be silent helped drive the evolution of the Civil Rights movement.

After watching Maysaloun Hamoud’s sparkling, taboo-breaking first feature In Between (Bar Bahar), audiences will have to seriously update their ideas about the lifestyle of Palestinian women in Israel.

Writer-directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez shrewdly use their Average Joe protagonist to explore questions of (feigned) political disinterest and civil responsibility under a repressive dictatorship.

A terrifying thriller with a surprisingly warm heart, John Krasinski's A Quiet Place is a monster-movie allegory for parenting in a world gone very, very wrong.

Docs like Jed Rothstein's excellent The China Hustle present us with such frequent occasions for outrage that, in the interest of fairness, it's time for a few top documentarians to assemble a five-minute disclaimer to run in front of each new exposé.

The movie's pounding heart is the remarkable Ejiofor. Imbuing his role with authority, charisma, mighty strength and wrenching human frailty, he's enough to make believers of all of us.

Co-directors David Douglas and Drew Fellman achieve the ideal balance of tender storytelling delivered with a conservationist message. But it’s ultimately the visual experience offered that sets Pandas apart from the titles in the impressive wildlife series from Disneynature.

Minding the Gap starts out as one story, suggesting one set of character arcs, and then flows in unexpected directions and underlines new sets of themes, without ever feeling haphazard or ill-considered.

There are chuckles and even guffaws throughout, though the comedy is streaked with despair, and also great tenderness. It’s the latest evidence of the director’s gift for tackling grave subjects with the lightest of touches; the film flows airily along, then knocks you off-balance with the weight of its insights and implications.

The movie takes its time, but in its unassuming way, draws you close and keeps you there.

Both as a writer and director, Layton delivers the dramatic goods here with the skill of a pro at the top of his game while adding the rueful perspective of time's reassessment of youthful indiscretions; this has to rate among the most accomplished and fully realized big-screen debuts of recent times.

Hereditary takes the core haunting element of a spirit with a malevolent agenda and runs with it in a seemingly endless series of unexpected directions over two breathless hours of escalating terror that never slackens for a minute.

Monsters and Men is a robust ensemble piece in which every performer finds subtle shadings in characters fully embedded in a realistic milieu. It's a smart, urgently relevant movie that marks an impressive upgrade from his acclaimed short films for writer-director Green.

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

Through its droll combo of stillness and churning dysfunction, perfectly embodied by Drakopoulos, Pity deconstructs the artifice of feeling and, most wickedly, movie sentimentality.

Skillfully juxtaposing private revelations with public documents, co-directors Berlinger and Sinofsky have created a mesmerizing portrait of the American justice system and revealed an insight into this country's nature -- throughout, there is the feeling that people take care of one another, and neither laws nor outsiders can quell inherent qualities of decency. [02 May 1994]

Akhavan elicits finely layered performances from her cast. Moretz digs deeper than she has in years for a sensitive lead turn that harmonizes especially well with her co-stars.

Adams displays terrific range and an incandescent screen presence as she effortlessly incarnates Shante over a 10-year period, from puberty to young motherhood.

Though not every moment is fascinating to watch, most moments are, and adult audiences should find its frank presentation of the diversity of intimacy thought-provoking and possibly therapeutic.

A lyrical work that’s as bright and captivating as it is poignant.

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.

Light and likable, with hearts unabashedly all over its sleeves, Roxanne is a winning romantic comedy whose appeal should cross age barriers and backgrounds — giving it an across-the-board promise.

The filmmakers assemble a dense portrait of a man disheartened by his failure to move the needle on economic justice, even as he succeeded in tracing ties among the common problems facing blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and even low-income whites.

Beyond the film’s technical expertise and the political issues that it raises, it works best simply as a tribute to a group of talented and courageous women who missed out on opportunities that might have benefited us all.

Working in an improvisatory vein, in actual locations rather than constructed sets, writer-director Dominic Savage gives this story of a married woman's despair and awakening a powerful, lived-in immediacy. It's also the story of a man's struggle to understand his wife's pain, and the tortured, tender chemistry between leads Arterton and Dominic Cooper is profoundly affecting, at times shattering.

One of the most transporting depictions of the Downtown New York scene (in a field crowded with docs, memoirs and fictions — some by artists who weren't alive at the time), Sara Driver's Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat more than does justice to its acknowledged subject, partly by refusing to divorce him from his context.

Haunting feature that crafts fiction from the inspiration of real-life Kurdish-Iranian poet Sadegh Kamangar. Co-star Monica Bellucci may attract much of the attention Stateside, but the film's ravishing aesthetic and multiple points of political interest will make it fascinating to many cineastes.

A rich and illuminating piece of cultural history.

The resulting film feels highly personal, tender yet unsentimental.

Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski's latest film, is bittersweet and unbearably lovely, a sad ballad of two lovers who can't stand to stay apart but also sometimes can't stand each other either.

The performances of the two leads are riveting.

This is a beautifully crafted film loaded with glancing insights and observations into an understated triangular relationship, one rife with subtle perceptions about class privilege, reverberating family legacies, creative confidence, self-invention, sexual jealousy, justice and revenge.

Bi’s film is ultimately akin to the early image we see of Wildcat’s body being wheeled on a mine cart and pushed gently into the abyss, taking us on a slow and steady rollercoaster ride through memory, melancholy and movie magic.

This small film is a thoughtful addition to his parables about happy and unhappy families (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), studded with memorable characters and believable performances that quietly lead the viewer to reflect on societal values.

While it has visual energy to spare, the movie is more relaxed and less flamboyantly playful than most of Honore’s other films, unfolding with naturalistic grace — precise but unfussy framing, fluid camera movements — and fewer New Wave-y winks and nods.

Though it has far less outright violence than Gomorrah, whose oppressive criminal atmosphere it shares, Matteo Garrone's Dogman is just as intense a viewing experience, one that will have audiences gripping their armrests with its frighteningly real portrayal of a good man tempted by the devil.

It’s an utter delight to see that theoretical academic musings on gender, love, sexuality and politics can be packaged and reflected upon in such a jocular and constantly entertaining way.

Transposing the Athenian comedy to Southern California, Casey Wilder Mott takes his bow as a feature director with a sensuous, silly and superbly cast version, one whose visually vibrancy matches its feel for the language.

This first English-language outing by the ever-adventurous French director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) is a connoisseur’s delight, as it's boisterously acted and detailed down to its last bit of shirt stitching.

Observed with warmth and sensitivity, this is a rewarding coming-of-age drama that features terrific performances from two young newcomers in the central roles.

Bruce Lee's last movie is the only one that gives him the star treatment he deserved. His charismatic presence is remarkable in Enter the Dragon, and it's a shame he didn't have the chance to become the great, unique star he seemed destined to be.

This story about the reunion, following a 35-year abandonment, of a mother and daughter, marvelously played by Spanish actors Susi Sanchez and Barbara Lennie, respectively, is slow but never ponderous, clear in its outlines but never simplistic, and elegantly crafted without being stifling.

In his first narrative feature, documentary maker Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream, Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart) captures the feel of the novel with uncanny precision, notably in the visceral charge and physical heat of tightly wound bodies almost constantly moving in close proximity.

This is a stirring valentine to a neighborhood and its people that, as the film tells it, stared gentrification in the eye and stood their ground, staying true to their cultural identity.

At once an enjoyable genre ride and a feminist art house story, Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts might send some heads rolling but has its own head firmly on its shoulders.

A gender-flipped sibling to Crystal Moselle's Skate Kitchen (set in Los Angeles versus that film's NYC), its narrative of sudden belonging and onrushing perils mirrors that Sundance entry. But in emotional punch and shoulda-seen-this-coming skill, it is more like Hill's Lady Bird, a gem that feels simultaneously informed by its author's adolescence and the product of a serious artist's observational distance.

Of obvious interest to arthouse audiences in Cullen, Wright and Jensen's native Australia, this ambitious and stimulating glimpse into the dark abyss of creativity deserves widespread international exposure at festivals and via receptive theatrical settings.

Corbet's high-caliber melodrama combines food for thought with sense-blitzing spectacle. Between screaming tantrums and booming anthems, it leaves us with a nagging sense that history never quite repeats itself, but sometimes rhymes. Usually to a thumping disco beat.

Stephen Maing's documentary about the NYPD's illegal policing quotas and other discriminatory practices gets the blood boiling.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s hard-won renaissance, as chronicled in Aaron Wolf’s fondly crafted documentary, proves to be a vigorous affirmation of the vitality of Jewish tradition in Los Angeles that will fascinate the faithful and enlighten the curious.

This assuredly crafted exploration of the intricacies of early 20th-century social stratification...soars on the strengths of sympathetic scripting and striking wildlands cinematography.

Curiously contrasted characters and locales play their parts in the Hitchcock strategy, making for an enormously entertaining show.

It’s another breathless chamber piece, expertly crafted to pack dread into every nerve-rattling sound.

Alert not just to shifts in the critical zeitgeist but to accompanying changes in social mores, the fascinating film speaks to the most sophisticated students of fine-art photography without alienating casual buffs.

Though more an atmospheric and sensorial experience than strictly a narrative one, this languorous and handsomely produced (by Call Me by Your Name producer Rodrigo Teixeira) feature is a lovingly textured addition to the coming-of-age genre.

Crucially, like its predecessor, Gloria Bell maintains a warm but rigorously unsentimental tone despite material which could easily lend itself to mawkish sentimentality.

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

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.

Hooper has all the action that fans of this genre could ask for, plus a whole lot more.

Thoroughly successful both as icky art house horror and as an allegory of generational trauma, Scott Cooper’s Antlers continues the director’s hot streak while bearing the unmistakable mark of one of its producers, Guillermo del Toro.

It uses historical artifacts to excellent, devastating effect.

A delicious throwback to the all-star whodunit, this juicy comedy thriller is a treat from start to finish.

Wang shows an assured grasp of tone, a pleasing eye for unforced composition and a persuasive understanding of the immigrant cultural experience, with its sometimes difficult balance of tradition and modernity.

Mikhanovsky and Austen train an affectionate gaze on their characters, both as individuals and as part of distinct groups that intersect and overlap with uplifting results.

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.

Modest in scale but rich in sensitivity, this is an unassuming film, made all the more transfixing by its defining delicacy and understatement.

Audaciously cerebral and unabashedly granular, writer-director Scott Z. Burns' political thriller The Report, a dramatization of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 probe into the CIA's use of torture in the wake of 9/11, is practically pornography for policy wonks.

It's an uncompromising, sophisticated, multi-layered work of art which demands to be met at least halfway.

An extraordinary feeling for nature and the seasons of life pervades Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), an ambitious reflection on our responsibility to others from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.

An English cousin to the earlier Jamaica-set films "The Harder They Come" and "Rockers" that is vastly superior in cinematic terms and just as valuable as a cultural document.

A hilarious, blazingly paced teen comedy.

It provides a powerful depiction of the blame-the-victim culture that has so long dominated the national discussion about rape and which only now thankfully seems to be receding. Although there's clearly a long, long way to go.

More than in any previous Altman movie, we are made to feel the pathos and vulnerability of those impoverished souls he draws so well.

Pure dead gallus (that's Scots for 'wonderful').

Some would say the jury's out on that issue; but near-unanimous love and admiration suggests Hesburgh's stance was a great way to win friends and influence people.

Final Cut will be screened theatrically ... and it demands to be seen there, both by longtime admirers and by young viewers lucky enough to have their first viewing be in a theater. ... This is an overwhelming sensory experience, with deep colors and nuanced sound amplifying the film's hypnotic effect.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an instant film classic, and Warner Bros. deserves the highest credit for making it a movie without compromise.

The lustrous textures, boldly saturated colors and lush sounds of The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao serve to intensify the intimacy of Karim Ainouz's gorgeous melodrama about women whose independence of mind remains undiminished, even as their dreams are shattered by a stifling patriarchal society.

La Belle Epoque is the sort of vastly entertaining mainstream French film that was produced with regularity during the 1970s-'80s and was sometimes remade by Hollywood. Those days are long gone but it could happen with this witty, sexy and original romantic comedy that touches many points of satisfaction.

Bigger, badder, bolder, longer, and featuring nearly more spectacular set pieces than one movie can comfortably handle, this epic action film practically redefines the stakes.

The Apartment is an important and provocative film.

The sequences crackle with vitality as well as setting subtly the characterizations and packing the explosives to be detonated later.

Ladkani's Sea of Shadows is a stirring adventure — inspiring and heartbreaking in equal measure.

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

Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield turns the author's well-loved autobiographical epic into a fast-moving yarn, sometimes hilarious and always entertaining.

The Safdies and the cast go deep enough here to make the film a genuinely human one.

The Robin Hood-like renegade hero of the Antipodean common man, Ned Kelly gets a ripping reinvention in director Justin Kurzel's feverish punk Western, a raw rebel yell of a movie that combines visceral violence with a kind of delirious, scrappy poetry.

A gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become.

Even though the movie barely provides any backstory or other details, the characters’ emotions are always immediately accessible in this vivid depiction of the all-consuming nature of nascent amour, as well as the pain, heartbreak and confusion that come with trying to channel all these pure emotions into something as structured as your daily life.

Even if the film is mostly hitting familiar notes in terms of story and theme, it expresses a concise, focused and expertly managed vision with which there’s little to quibble, and the extraordinary style represents the fruition of a long-imagined dream on the part of many directors and cinematographers. From now on, when the discussion turns to great works of cinematography and camera operating, 1917 will always have to be high on the list.

The Fortune Cookie is Billy Wilder's best picture since The Apartment, his funniest since Some Like It Hot.

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.

Last Night in Soho is an immensely pleasurable film that delights in playing with genre, morphing from time-travel fantasy to dark fairy tale, from mystery to nightmarish horror in a climax that owes as much to ’60s Brit fright fare as to more contemporary mind-benders.

Anchored by two outstanding performances from Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, the film is a triumph of writing as well as unostentatious filmmaking.

Schimberg confidently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (more than once a scene that appears to be real is actually fiction and vice versa), though never to the point that it detracts from the people onscreen.

A spellbinding love letter to Hong Kong and the movies.

Fayyad and his cinematographers and editors wield the cameras and shape the scenes in the documentary so beautifully that The Cave is both intensely real and a carefully wrought work of cinema. A kind of counterpart to Last Men, the new film is perhaps more wrenching and even more ambitious in its visuals.