Anchored by a masterful performance by Timothy Spall in a role he was born to play, and gilded by career-best effort from DoP Dick Pope, working for the first time on digital for Leigh to bridge the gap between the painting and cinematography, Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Simultaneously a modern essay on suffering, an open-ended thriller, and a black social comedy, it is most importantly of all a thinly-veiled political parable drenched in bitter irony that takes aim against the corrupt, corrosive regime of Vladimir Putin.

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth.

Wise beyond its years, like the teenage protag Gelsomina, Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) is a wistful but no-tears swan song recounting the disappearance of traditional rural life-style in Italy.

The final half-hour is a joy to watch, as turning points follow in rapid succession.

Coming Home sinks into a conventional tragic romance rut that not even engaging performances by Gong and Chen can save.

Creepy, suspenseful and sustained, this skillfully made lo-fi horror movie plays knowingly with genre tropes and yet never winks at the audience, giving it a refreshing face-value earnestness that makes it all the more gripping.

As in any classic Western, there are blunt pleasures to be had every time the tables are turned on men in black hats, as well as from direct, threat-loaded dialogue, meaningful looks, geometric arrangements of heroes and villains, and tense hunts for prey that play out both in rugged mountain settings and the tight quarters of buildings.

Always commanding attention at the film’s center is Pearce, who, under a taciturn demeanor, gives Eric all the cold-hearted remorselessness of a classic Western or film noir anti-hero who refuses to die before exacting vengeance for an unpardonable crime.

Mesmerizing in its incremental layering of a bizarre, tragic and thoroughly warped character study, Foxcatcher sees director Bennett Miller well surpassing even the fine work he did in his previous two films, Capote and Moneyball.

An exceptional animated feature from Spain, Wrinkles imaginatively and sensitively explore one of the major issues confronting most of the developed world: how to look after senior citizens in a rapidly aging population.

Straining for a quiet poeticism and, to its credit, occasionally achieving it thanks to the beautifully photographed scenic environs, Pilgrim Song fails to involve us in its central character’s introspection.

The actors' raw honesty and the unvarnished authenticity of the Southeast Texas environment lend weight to this slow-burn drama about responsibility, even if its storytelling is unrelentingly downbeat and lacks muscularity.

A fair-to-middling little date movie.

If it wasn’t for the charming top-liners who can make literary dialogue sound sexy in their sleep, the war in Fred Schepisi’s Words and Pictures would have to be called off after the opening skirmish.

Although the humor helps, the Groundhog Day-like repetition gets tedious; it makes you feel more like a hamster than a groundhog — or rather a hamster's wheel, going round and round, over and over again.

Embodying the same wholesomeness that has informed most of his screen work, gross-out comedies included, it feels like a tentative next step in Sandler’s evolving screen persona, one that has gone from good-hearted dolt to bumbling man-child to middle-aged father.

More notable for its small, incisive moments than as a moving depiction of the way that familial relationships are affected by life crises, the film makes only a minor impact.

Elliptical storytelling is both a strength and a weakness in a visually striking mystery thriller.

The film becomes a hodgepodge that will enlighten few viewers.

A feel-good movie about bridging the technological divide between youngsters and oldsters, Cyber-Seniors demonstrates that computer literacy is but a few mouse clicks away.

Although more than a little meandering and self-indulgent, the film is likeable nonetheless thanks to its incisive characterizations and canny capturing of true-life moments.

This moving documentary provides a much-needed account of its little-known subject.

This moving documentary lends a very human face to its powerful environmental message.

Despite the plethora of melodramatic plot elements, the film remains curiously uninvolving due to its compendium of clichés and sluggish pacing.

Engaging characters and the persistent appeal of dinosaurs benefit the doc, whose Byzantine legal content might otherwise be off-putting.

To call Don Peyote a mess would be putting too fine a point on it.