A compelling gateway documentary that should absorb both fans and novices alike.

The Fits is a lovely character portrait, abstract and yet highly evocative, given an other-worldly feel by deft use of slow-mo, sinuous tracking sequences and music that ranges from ambient drones to discordant strings and the percussive claps, clicks and stomps of the drill routines.

Fascinating on personal, political and cinematic levels, the film resourcefully plumbs all sorts of resources, including secret tape recordings of Kim himself, but also omits certain aspects of the tale that would merely have added to its intrigue.

The result makes you realize how few realistic and three-dimensional date movies have been made in an era of throbbing hook-up encounters and R-rated horny teen gross-outs.

It's an invigorating chance to experience from afar an ordeal that, unless your name is Eliot Spitzer, you and I will never have to endure.

It’s a quiet drama, full of unspoken hurt and free of histrionics, but it’s as raw and painful as a fresh wound.

Equity is a smart thriller set in the corporate world that disguises its modest budget with an intelligent script and good set of hooks.

Before anyone has even said anything, the economy of Barrett as a storyteller is abundantly clear.

The film’s shrewd sense of humor, its way of underlining the absurdity of life’s foibles, is fully carried by Huppert’s disarming performance, which never panders to easy sentiments but doesn’t shy away from showcasing raw emotion.

It is on the family level that Bopha! realizes its most graceful power. [17 Sept 1993]

A blend of cornpone commentary and tongue-in-cheek exposition, Nuts! is consistently very entertaining.

A short, funny and illuminating interview-based documentary that will leave theater and film mavens both satisfied and hungry for many additional courses.

Once again, Reeves does not disappoint, fully inhabiting Wick by channeling his rage over life’s injustices into an intensely focused performance.

Take a pinch of Top Gun, stir in a generous dollop of The Right Stuff, add a light sprinkling of Mad Men and you have the formula for this uplifting documentary portrait of former Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Where journalism leaves off, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) begins. It takes a unique documentary filmmaker like Gianfranco Rosi to capture the drama through the periscope of his camera focused on the small Sicilian island of Lampedusa.

The artwork is achingly delicate, but there's nothing subtle about Belladonna of Sadness, a blast of psychedelic madness full of rape, tyranny and Satanism.

Some viewers may feel a little uneasy watching her being almost "catfished" by the deception, even if it turns out to be a delightful surprise, and a real emotional money shot when it finally lands.

Beautifully captures the distinctive wit of its subject.

As much as Don't Think Twice focuses on professional envy, though, it remains a love letter to this weirdo art form called improv.

Closer in tone and old-school psychological fright tactics to the original film than either The Conjuring 2 or Annabelle, David F. Sandberg’s incisive approach capably resets the franchise.

A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

German Kral's Our Last Tango balances between a studious fascination with the dance form's history and an embrace of the passions it stokes. Far more engrossing than the usual doc of this sort.

Puts a human face on the issue of income inequality.

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

Although it's hard to avoid the feeling of invading their privacy at times, the viewer becomes thoroughly invested in the fate of the film's subjects.

Themes of courage, patriotism, faith and unwavering adherence to personal beliefs have been a constant through Gibson's directing projects, as has a fascination with bloodshed and gore. Those qualities serve this powerful true story of heroism without violence extremely well, overcoming its occasional cliched battle-movie tropes to provide stirring drama.

In its genial, low-key way, the film, premiering at Sundance, is a chilling account of cyberbullying, perpetrated on a disturbingly wide scale over many years.

The ironies of gentrification will be a chief attraction for this lovely new 4K restoration of the 16mm original. But that theme is just a bonus in a picture whose in-the-trenches look at poverty is humane and, sadly, perpetually timely.