If Abrahamson were as gifted with a camera as he was with his cast (he inspires subtlety even from the tiny Tremblay), Room could have been truly worthy of the astonishing performances that provide its foundation.

A monumental hospital soap opera which looks exactly as though Kurosawa had taken a long look at Ben Casey and Dr Kildare, and decided that anything they could do he could do better.

A brimming sense of life, in other words, gradually transforms the small talk into a richly devious portrait of humanity being human.

Japanese superstar-in-the-making Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Drive My Car) latest film is a touching ecological parable full of little feints and narrative red herrings. Just when you think it’s heading in one direction, it slips off elsewhere, like a fawn in the woods.

Thoroughbreds plunges you into an ice-cold bath of amorality, but debuting writer-director Cory Finley has such a command of details—the perfectly soigné clothes and hairdos, the lavish Connecticut living rooms and attentive gardening staffs—that you’ll laugh your way through the shivers.

The death of le Carré feels like the end of an era. The Pigeon Tunnel is its enthralling epitaph.

With a plot that plays like a string of incidental encounters, The Meddler could easily have felt like a glorified sitcom. But its heroine’s grief, her goodness and her complicated relationship with her daughter all feel so lived-in and true that the film stays grounded.

The stakes may seem low, but these high jinks resound with abstract generational import, the various episodes cohering into a moving portrait of a nation that couldn’t account for all it had lost in a war that it won.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

It’s a familiar tale, but one told with gusto, wit and visual flare; of particular note is the dilapidated Germanic fortress where Capricorn and his cronies reside, which looks like it was plucked straight from the warped minds of a Gilliam or a del Toro.

Thanks to its pointed message about violence against women and injustice, this is a thriller with even sharper edges. Somewhere beneath its enthralling depiction of obsessive police work is a cry from the heart against a broken system.

While some episodes are protracted, many are unforgettably funny, wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant.

The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.

This elegant adaptation by Alan Bennett of his own stage success is the best of his contributions to the big screen to date: sturdily performed and persuasively detailed, and with a beady delight in political in-fighting.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

Ingeniously and inventively plotted, taut and unpretentious, the film dashes along at a furious pace, with a strong period feel and nicely understated performances, well served by Mann's straightforward direction.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

The film must come with several warnings. It’s extremely disturbing at points (there’s a horrific backstreet abortion scene), and the silence itself—actually, the nonspeaking, atmospheric sound takes on a life of its own—is hard work, meaning that you have to let whole swathes of story wash over you. But those same obstacles also give this strange story a deeply original, hallucinatory power.

The richly built The Glass Castle—splendidly attentive to the details of the Walls's eclectic childhood home and elevated by Ella Anderson's performance as a young Jeannette—is on the overlong side, but it does right by a tough true story that begs neither contempt nor pity.

In her amazingly assured debut, Clare Denis draws out the implications of the action with great subtlety. She makes the most of the exotic location, and elicits strong performances from all her cast.

If Betty Blue plays into the salacious archetype of the “liberated” foreign film, at least it repays you with real feelings of earthiness.

Peckinpah's superb second film, a nostalgic lament for the West in its declining years, with a couple of great set pieces (the bizarre wedding in the mining camp, the final shootout among the chickens).

Ping-ponging between grisly South of the Border carnage and Angeleno musician Edgar Quintero’s growing success as one of the subgenre’s stars, you start to see how this parasitic relationship works.

You think you're in for another coming-of-age movie about getting into someone's pants until you realize Deep End's real goal is getting under your skin.

When the action eventually switches to an Austrian rehab retreat, Dalle gets to make like the best of the Old Hollywood divas and waste away with devastating reserve - an icon quietly, crushingly crashing to earth.

Grudges, minor insults and found-out flirtations lead to mayhem and murder on a cataclysmic scale.

Like an artist who paints the same composition repeatedly, Shinkai appears to be on a tireless quest for perfection, tweaking earlier versions of his works to reflect his evolving philosophy, trying to make them better by leaving stronger impressions on his audiences.

This enjoyable biopic offers a loving and affectionate portrait of Callas that never airbrushes her foibles.