As in “The Wolfpack,” Moselle doesn’t just capture the rebellions of her characters, she expresses their triumphs and joys with intimacy and detail.

From a narrative standpoint, Decker and her three writing collaborators have fashioned a reasonably compelling story. What makes the film transcendent is how she uses the art of cinema to convey it and Howard’s phenomenal performance.

Where Akhavan succeeds is whenever she has the kids doing things teenagers would be doing.

Turtletaub does have a hard time finding a way to conclude Agnes’ story, but he ends Puzzle on such a delightful note of simplicity, that this near-perfect movie nevertheless stuns.

In Euthanizer, director Teemu Nikki has successfully created a cinematic metaphor for contemporary world politics, one that is full of unexpected plot developments and a surprisingly thoughtful take on personal morality.

Yes, you’ll likely leave the theater blown away by Casal and Diggs’ considerable talent, but its Estrada’s vision that will haunt you.

Fisher must be given immense credit for making it all work as her performance is pitch-perfect in every respect. Sometimes, it feels like you’re not even watching an actress perform but an actual person. The way Burnham shot some of the scenes makee it feel like non-fiction rather than fiction.

Too many of the jokes fall flat and as the film moves forward you’re so captivated by the bizarre plot twists that recognizing the humor becomes secondary.

Leave No Trace is a universal, unforgettable experience.

It’s still evidently the work of a very talented filmmaker and is certainly never bad, but it also never lives up to its potential. Barnard has a long career ahead of her, but Dark River seems destined to be remembered, years now, as a minor work in her filmography.

The spy genre is a tricky business, because the tempo and flow of the film must adapt to numerous different scenarios and narrative changes. In Lewin’s movie, however, the ever-changing intricacies of Dawidoff’s book are rendered flat, unappealing and messy.

The film’s inherent problems, however, are two fold. First, the third of the picture is an absolute slog. The Zellner’s may have though this was a creative choice to make the comedic scenes funnier when they finally hit, but it simply doesn’t work. Second, the funny bits simply aren’t as funny as they should be.

This is a remarkable, triumphant, and confident picture by Aster, who gives the film an almost meditative-like sensation, as you feel every space you’re in, every emotion, every moment of grief. Hereditary refuses to employ cheap thrills, creating its cinematic scares with atmosphere, and continuously reinventing itself at every turn.

All four actors are perfectly fine here, but the set-up is predictably conventional.

Fox knows firsthand the events that occur to Dern’s character in her feature narrative debut because they happened to her. And beyond its creative success and failures, her willingness to tell her own story in such graphic detail is a startlingly brave act.

A film desperately in need of an electric charge, Mary Shelley is simply another cinematic corpse on the table.

Full of conviction, First Reformed feels like a lifetime of preoccupations and traumas distilled beautifully, accompanied with a haunting sparseness creating a profound deliverance.

On Chesil Beach makes us consider the lives of the Florence and Edward as outside observers, but rarely takes us inside the complicated mix of desire and fear this pair is trying to untangle.

The film looks heavenly, often bathed in light, as if Qu wants nothing more than to assuage these women of their suffering by suggesting paradise. But the brightness is just a veneer. Beneath the surface, “Angels Wear White” is as bleak as they come.

The elegance of Disobedience, which in the wrong hands could be sensational and one-dimensional, cannot be overstated.

Denis and Binoche have made a film that’s both smart and sexy, imbuing new excitement and wonder into the emotional connections that define us all.

The formal control is remarkable, but sometimes almost stultifying, as though Martel had spent every moment of this intervening decade plotting how to pack each scene more densely, to the point it feels like Zama” could maybe stop a bullet. It will certainly deter the less persistent viewer.

Just as many sports movies before have done, and many more will after, Borg/McEnroe shines a light on the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. It’s just a shame that the movie itself doesn’t have the same ambition

It’s saved from all-out depressiveness by Haigh’s compassion, which cradles the characters within their often desperate situations.

The Death Of Stalin is a grim reminder that we are never too far away from history turning back on progress. It’s not an easy lesson to reconcile, but Iannucci at least has us laughing for a good while before delivering his devastating blow.

While Bening is incredible playing a fading Hollywood starlet in Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, it’s her co-star, Jamie Bell, who might be the film’s real secret weapon.

Bale and Pike are superb. Despite some melodramatic tendencies and strange choices in Cooper’s script they make you have sympathy and compassion for each of their characters.

Despite the darker edges, I, Tonya embraces the surreality of the story and winningly plays it mostly for comedy, with dips into drama, while crucially never mocking the central players.

It’s a film that can swing between absurdist humor and brutal gut-punch sadness in a way that’s rare and, at times, truly profound.

While often hamstrung by genre conventions, particularly in the picture’s first half, Tom of Finland is a passable entry into the LGBT film canon and largely successful in selling the subcultural relevance of the eponymous artist’s beefcake drawings.

It’s Vaughn’s caged-beast charisma (that bounces off the screen long before he is actually caged) and way with a wink or a pithy putdown that keeps us riveted through the substantial sections of the film where heads remain, for the time being, unstomped.

The Villainess confounds its audience on two levels: firstly, how the filmmakers pulled off the elaborate set pieces and secondly, leaving them to wonder what the hell is going on in the plot.

It shows a concern for spatial discrepancies, between characters, between action and intention, between life and death. It’s one of many reasons why The Hurt Locker is one of the most exciting movies you’ll see this year.

Filled with imagery both moving and mordant... 12:08 East Of Bucharest doesn't pretend to have a position on the fallout of the Romanian Revolution. Instead it contends that different questions need to be asked and considered about post-Communist life, about the blame about the current state of the country, and where the future lies for Romania's youth.

Days is the first in a loose trilogy including In the Mood for Love and 2046, but here, amidst all the exquisitely deliberate, drippingly sensual imagery that would become Wong’s trademark, there is still the grit and grain of real life, and it makes this perfectly enigmatic film feel somehow thrilling.

Is it a somewhat middling ’90s dad-core thriller? You bet, but it’s also a totally underrated skeleton key for understanding the careers of its two leads: Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.

The great, unifying success across all ten shorts is Kieślowski’s representation of Poland, which is political, social, and personal all at once. Each movie is its own experiential encounter.

An acutely defined, starkly realized and profoundly unsettling debut if ever there was one.

Crimes of the Future sounds a whole lot more fascinating than it actually is: it’s a more interesting film to read/write about than to watch, which just goes to show how Cronenberg at this early stage was still closer to a kind of literary, idea-based storytelling, and had not yet mastered the filmmaking side of the equation.

It’s a movie that can feel like several you’ve seen before, yet never distorted in quite this style, beat, or fashion. When the messy trajectory seems as though it might be on its way to the point of reflection, dissension re-ignites, and counter-cultural discord combusts through expressive punctuation, once again.

Elegantly constructed, wittily executed, delightfully ruthless, and scary as hell.

They All Laughed is certainly not a perfect film, but its homespun quality, palpable camaraderie, and playfully loose performances make for a movie that’s easy to harbor deep affection for nonetheless.

Ultimately, Ms. 45 is far more interesting and genuinely enjoyable (versus ironically enjoyable, as many of this vintage grindhouse flicks wind up being) than it has any right to be.

It’s pretty banal, but in the anything-but-banal catalogue of Cronenberg films, that gives it its own weird, sincere charm.

Ted Kotcheff’s film is essentially a workplace comedy, but the employees are braindead and wealthy, and the benefits are glory and groupies in equal amounts.

Still Scott’s greatest film and better than James Cameron’s sequel, the director’s sci-fi horror is an exercise in minimalistic terror, manifesting it in the most unknowable, terrifying extraterrestrial creature ever seen on screen.

Saint Jack is probably Bogdanovich’s loosest film, the one that feels most Cassavetian in execution, in which classical plotting, let alone the kind of manic screwballishness that characterizes the director’s comedies, is entirely absent in favor of a low-key, episodic character portrait embedded in a gritty, exotic, and relatively little-filmed locale.

As visceral and invigorating as classics like “Deep Red” or “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” might be, they aren’t a patch on 1977’s Suspiria.

Nashville boasts some of the director’s most memorable and emotionally multifaceted characters —not to mention a first-class soundtrack of country, blues and gospel hits.

The film feels like the midpoint of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, and perhaps one of the reasons it’s been overlooked is that it arrived the same year as two similar masterpieces from those directors, in “Nashville” and “Shampoo,” and if this isn’t quite as flawless as those films (it’s admittedly somewhat sprawling and unfocused), it’s nevertheless worth a watch for many reasons.

California Split keenly and perceptively captures how someone you meet in a chance encounter can become a best friend (at least for a while) in a few short hours.

Undone by a generally detached air, and by lengthy, choking narration (a factor of shooting without sync sound due to the noise of the camera), Stereo (and arguably his next feature too) is most valuable today as a document of Cronenberg the student, the filmmaker-in-gestation, searching for, but not yet finding that perfect balance between kink, thought experiment and actual entertainment.

Sisters never carries any feeling that De Palma is showing off or flexing his cinematic chops because he can, or is above the material. The film is utterly transfixing because it plays its schlock straight, and paired with Hermann’s hair-raising throwback score, the effect is giddy.

Freewheelin’ and almost similar to a long jazz riff that could have been reigned in, Husbands is occasionally fascinating and often tedious.

For all the fun and games, there’s also a depth to it that many Holmes adaptations miss.

Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.

Far from the home-run laughs of “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” Irma La Douce is still a fun if G-rated tour of the seedy Parisian underbelly, but coming in overlong at close to 2 1/2 hours, would have benefited from some tighter editing.

The icicle-sharp, endlessly quotable script is one of the greatest ever written, and the film remains relentlessly entertaining. If it’s not the director’s finest, it’s a testament to how much competition there is for that position.

A lot more minor than major.

A disappointment, certainly, but not one without its pleasures.

Apparently a filler movie taken while Hitch was under contract, this is entirely phoned in and almost completely devoid of any of those inspired flourishes that can make even the least of his pictures worth the watching.

The most impressive accomplishment of In The Radiant City is that it’s unafraid to deal in hard truths about redemption, forgiveness, and shame.

What makes I Love You, Daddy at times frustrating but ultimately enthralling is that the whole picture feels like an exploration — and one where not even C.K. knew where he was going when he started shooting.

Mektoub titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience.

The film has an identity problem. It’s uncertain what it wants to be. This is too damn bad because its first mode, a parody of male self-obsession, is perfectly satisfying; the comedy makes us shift in our seats, but the shifting is pleasurable, complemented by well-timed gags and a mesmerizingly selfish performance from its leading man, Yannis Drakopoulos.

Loveling is often awkwardly paced and unintentionally directionless, which hampers some of the tension of the most important scenes. Which is a shame, because Teles as Irene is phenomenal and some of her finest moments feel squandered.

Diaz’ call-to-arms to artists speaks to the present just as it depicts a terrible period in the Philippines’ past. Season of the Devil is still a grueling, advanced-level watch, but one that delivers beauty and horror in equal measure.

For the most part, Kahn’s latest effort is a tenderly observed portrait of the transformative power of religion, even if it occasionally fails to convince.