The film is easy to admire, but lacks the kinds of scenes necessary to truly make a emotional connection.

The Falling Sky, in some ways, is also a time travel movie, as we get to peek into the past and see ourselves in people for whom time has stood still.

There’s an enigma here. If we believe anyone in The Lost Leonardo, we believe someone who is only here to cover their tracks. Koefoed knows this and plays up the mystery with compelling results.

Both performances at the film’s center are just outstanding.

Deceivingly complex, with an emotional center that peels away like an onion the longer it unfolds, this is a powerful effort from Mungiu in which love and faith are both different kinds of poison.

It’s a film that not only works as a self-reflective biography and community portrait but also as a testament to the living nature of literature, where a work is able to be interpreted and reinterpreted by the generations to come.

Two things make The Sessions stand out. One is the level of acting...The other is that, while we all know sex is more than boobs and bits and butts, it also does include those things, and The Sessions does not hide behind euphemism or gentle cutaways, montages or misty light.

There is some pleasure in spotting the winks and legends and shout-outs, but as with any biopic, of any figure, you can’t just bank on familiarity— you have to give the unfamiliar viewer (and, considering the platform it’s on, there will be many) reasons to care. By the end of Mank, even I wasn’t sure any of this mattered all that much.

This is a documentary that reminds you of the resiliency of the human spirit. The resourcefulness that can take place when you have nowhere else to run.

Annihilation is mesmerizing and its awe-inspiring conclusion will leave your mind blown and splattered against the wall. In its final, surreal biopsychological moments the movie goes to an astonishing interstellar gear.

A film with a universal sensitivity that relates the pangs of first love, the desirous ache of adolescent sexuality and the excitement of not just discovering yourself but finding those kindred spirits with whom you can share your life.

It’s an impressive feat of unfolding this story, though there are a few moments where it loses the narrative thrust and momentum along the way. Still, it’s a remarkable portrait not only of this particular man, but of a culture in a transitioning moment: adapting to new influences and growing older, but continuing, always, to remember.

What Early, who also wrote the screenplay, has his sights on is the hilarious tropes of the movie-of-the-week genre. And he almost completely pulls it off.

The filmmaking is admittedly functional rather than particularly artful, but you somewhat appreciate that Warchus is determined to distract you as little as possible from the story and characters.

This is one of the most thoughtful films about the female experience to debut in recent years, and should be mandatory viewing for anyone eager to engage with confidently-made, skillful art cinema.

This back and forth between assuredness and doubt also makes “Babygirl” a refreshing look at BDSM and questions of consent and desire. Reijn is unafraid to have her characters play out all the wobbles that come with negotiating one another’s boundaries, reinforcing how pleasure comes from good communication. That the Dutch director manages to do so while crafting some of the hottest sex scenes in a major film in years and without dropping the ball in pacing this satire on the era of the politically correct feels almost impossible.

While Kim’s encyclopedic dive may not offer much revelatory information, it nevertheless acts as an insightful and streamlined primer into Paik and his work, allowing fellow artists and critics the time and space to speak about Paik and the radical shift towards video art.

Midnight Traveler is a brutally honest film about the hardship and inhumanity a family endures and their bravery, love, hope, and, above all else, desire to control their own fate.

This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.

Despite some flat moments, Nobody’s Watching is consistently engrossing,

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.

It’s clear that the Panther legacy lives on, and Nelson’s film is a necessary primer for understanding the party — in it’s own words.

There’s no time like the present for a viewing of The White House Effect, and there is no wrong audience, no one immune to the presence of climate change. For those who already know, take it in. For those on the outskirts, you might wonder if it’s needed. It is.

There's a kind of helpless humility to the presentation of these urban impressions, almost a kind of democracy, that allows you to engage as much or as little as you like with them.

An immigration story that manages to draw in themes about manhood, familial identity, and cultural preservation, director Matias Mariani has crafted a picture that speaks to a broader transient experience that transcends both time and place.

Jackman shines, teasing us with suggestions of just how deep his performance runs.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

While Gone Girl is certainly his slightest film to date, it's nonetheless undeniably gripping. Fincher clearly enjoys turning the screws and rounding the wild corners of the plot from the first frame.