Graced by its refreshingly frank treatment of gay sexuality, its casually expressive use of nudity, and its eloquent depiction of animal husbandry as a contrasting metaphor for the absence of human tenderness, this is a rigorously naturalistic drama that yields stirring performances from the collision between taciturn demeanors and roiling emotional undercurrents.

Even at its most sorrowful, Marjorie Prime is suffused with warmth, the core of it emanating from Smith in two complementary iterations of the same character.

Loneliness, alienation, the ache of nostalgia and the everyday absurdity of life infuse every encounter in the unconventional road trip.

What makes this candid, unpatronizing movie so engaging is that the sexual conflict is never set up as a deal-breaker, rather as an issue the couple has to work through in their own, mostly roundabout way.

Even for those limited to swimming virtually among parrot fish and sea turtles over vast marine ecosystems of astonishing color and complexity, this superbly crafted documentary is likely to wield an unexpected emotional charge.

While the film depicts a world seldom far removed from grim reality, the sly strain of humor keeps it buoyant, nowhere more so than in Kaurismaki’s deadpan dialogue, delivered with affectless aplomb by his marvelous cast.

Emotionally involving material is the key element to a good human-interest documentary, and Lipitz, a Baltimore native with a background in Broadway producing, has tapped into a great story here of adversity, struggle and elevating achievement.

One of Apprentice’s strongest selling points is how, in a very compact yet pleasingly dense way, it takes viewers into both the world of the executioners and the executed criminals’ family members who remain behind, two often almost ignored categories in films touching on capital punishment.

The only frustrating aspect of this cinematic treasure is its brevity.

It’s a credit to the filmmakers and to lead actor Ryan Gosling’s thoughtfully internalized performance as Neil Armstrong that this sober, contemplative picture has emotional involvement, visceral tension, and yes, even suspense, in addition to stunning technical craft.

Franco, who’s absolutely hysterical as the brooding, deluded Wiseau, leads a parade of familiar faces...delivering a winning, Ed Wood-esque blend of comedy and pathos that could very well earn its own cult status.

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

Smartly shaped and vigorously told by prolific documentarian John Scheinfeld (Who Is Harry Nilsson, The U.S. vs. John Lennon), the film bulges with insights offered by everyone from family members and close collaborators to the likes of Cornel West and Bill Clinton.

Just about everything about this film is winning and gratifying.

While the film continues almost throughout to generate great whoops of shocking laughter, it's the notes of genuine sorrow, compassion and contrition that resonate.

The film makes plenty of mileage from trading on the charm of a good bad boy, and Redford’s long experience in playing such roles serves him beautifully here; he knows by now he doesn’t have to push his attractiveness to be ingratiating. His work here is natural, subtle, ingratiating and doesn’t miss a trick.

Lee and Smith shine a damning, sorrowful light on American racism, through the shattered prism of spring 1992 in Los Angeles. With its dazzling wordplay and densely layered profusion of history and biography, Rodney King is an experience as cerebral as it is visceral.

Directed with wit and structural precision — there is not a single moment in the film that feels wasted or doesn’t pay off later on — Glory uses two vastly opposing characters (a communications specialist vs. someone who can barely communicate at all) to depict a society riddled with fraud and cruelty.

[An] evocative and atmospheric feature.

It's a dramatic tale loaded with all manner of dynamics, political and personal, and Spielberg charges out of the gate at a brisk clip, extends his hand and all but enjoins the viewer to grab hold and be swept along for the ride.

Widows is a solid piece of genre fiction made more resonant by how its creators have bored down into its characters and sociological implications in ways specifically designed to examine some of the rotten underpinnings of business as usual.

The elegiac Spettacolo is in some ways a familiar story, revolving around the universal tug of war between time and tradition.

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

With his devastating, finely layered new drama Loveless (Nelyubov), Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev once again demonstrates his remarkable gift for creating perfectly formed dramatic microcosms that illustrate the bred-in-the-bone pathologies of Russian society.

The sheer purity of the imagery is entrancing and puts it among his finest, most uplifting works.

The humor is an ingenious concoction of satire, spoof, burlesque, slapstick, raunchy dialogue and low-comedy sight gags. The jokes are directed at sex, politics, religion and almost everything else. The level of humor is not always consistent, but the filmmakers have thrown almost everything in with a shotgun approach and the routines work more often than not.

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.

The two creators hit it off famously and collaborate with great ease on a journey driven by mutual curiosity and creative application.