Inevitably harrowing and sickening in places, but with tender and uplifting moments, Night Will Fall is a somber treatment of a serious topic which earns its place in the broad pantheon of Holocaust-themed cinema. It is just a shame that Singer's worthy memorial feels a little too small for its world-shaking theme and world-famous cast list.

The film’s bucolic mood is constantly threatened by the prevailing reality of violence and injustice in the region, a creeping tension that Syeed carefully calibrates to emphasize the tenuousness of his characters’ relationships.

I Am Another You offers further evidence of this young director’s investigative energy and eye for cinematic poetry without the slightest preciousness.

The Rider is a rare gem, a small, acutely observed portrait of a few lives on what used to be the frontier but is now a desolate backwater, the windswept badlands around Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

Despite its dreary outlook, the film does offer a semblance of hope in the generosity, good humor and tenacious sangfroid of the people it portrays.

The director is such an engaging presence onscreen — wry and humane, balancing sly social commentary with a playfully child-like attitude — that even a minor autumnal work like this is still a heart-warming mood-lifter.

Three hours long and divided into two parts, it starts off as a leisurely, shaggy dog crime story, with what’s probably one of the most laid-back bank robberies in film history. But then it digresses, deepens and complexifies, creating new mysteries out of old ones, and love affairs out of the thin air.

Slowly but deliberately paced, the movie builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself — a real movie shot and projected on celluloid — plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do.

Lakota Nation vs. United States is a visually dynamic documentary, and it’s also one that delves into the power of language and how we use it.

In less assured hands, Cactus Pears might have edged into trite territory, yielding to the familiar beats of trauma-laden queer love stories, but Kanawade’s considered direction and spare storytelling keep the narrative refreshing.

Newcomer Elsie Fisher offers a breakout performance.

Hugely entertaining documentary challenges conventional concepts of legitimate art and the creative process.

Dark, unnerving and thrilling, The Novice is poised to become a genre-breaking success. A film this raw made with such a steady, assured hand only comes along once in a while. We should take notice.

Where many filmmakers would have underlined the bleaker, harsher aspects, Girlhood presents the characters' grim reality without surrendering its lightness of touch, its compassion or its hope.

Women's roles and the eternal fight to expand their rights in Iranian society get a light, hugely entertaining treatment in Jafar Panahi's Offsides.

Though clearly not a proposition for either devout Christians or audiences for whom the multiplex is a temple, this is the kind of take-no-prisoners art house fare that advances and deepens the understanding of a singular director’s oeuvre as a whole.

Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper is unusually somber and conventional by Broomfield's standards, relying more on slow accumulation of detail than caustic commentary or ambush interviews. But it has a quiet emotional force which pays off during the powerful final sequence.

Easy Rider is very likely the clearest and most disturbing presentation of the angry estrangement of American youth to be brought to the screen.

Unfortunately, the narrative endgame is a mess, and should have been rethought in development, but there’s no denying Ezer has made a bold, audacious debut.

Apatow's gleefully raunchy movies are, in an odd and charming way, extremely family-friendly.

Heart-wrenching as well as spirit-raising.

A ferociously entertaining film.

Yes may be purposely over-the-top and unsettling to watch — at two and a half hours, it won’t win over audiences looking for light arthouse fare — but Lapid is trying to show us that it’s hardly an exaggeration of the truth, or at least his own truth about his homeland.

Festival Express should rightfully take its place in rock history as one of the great performance films of all time.

Kim Ki-duk keeps dialogue to a minimum and actions simple in what is virtually a two-character piece. Humor arrives organically, often resulting in hearty laughs.

It’s only when the story heads to pure sci-fi territory later on that April stretches itself a bit thin, though a smart epilogue manages to put things in perspective for both the characters and viewer.

It is one of the few films so visually absorbing, felicitous shot after shot, that its emotional coldness is noticed only at the end, when all the plot twists are unraveled in a solid piece of thinking-man's entertainment for upmarket thriller audiences.