Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.

Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is a film of great cinematic sleight of hand.

Copti and cinematographer Tim Kuhn shoot each interaction with an up-close, handheld intimacy that not only magnifies the subtle, powerful performances of the cast (many of them first-time actors), but welcomes the viewer into each scene, as though it were a complicated family reunion.

Norm Li’s photography perfectly suits the tone, neither romancing the locations of Lu’s life nor making them look condescendingly squalid. And his aesthetic keeps pace with Brendan Mills’ excellent editing.

What Sam Abbas, as director, cinematographer and editor, does here is to disarmingly present the situation in snippets that give the audience all the details of crossing from Libya to Italy, including elements both harrowing and mundane. In so doing, he engenders empathy and understanding for these displaced people and their struggle, taking a humanist approach rather than an abstract one.

Life has a way of getting complicated when you introduce temptation, and though Union County can be frustratingly simple at times, the stakes are life and death.

Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.

It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.

Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it.

Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.

With The History of Concrete, John Wilson takes the least interesting subject imaginable — the dull gray composite used for sidewalks, overpasses and that great big church in “The Brutalist” — and crafts what’s likely to be the most entertaining documentary of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

Alvarado’s doc is standard in construction but lively in tone, reflecting his subject’s engagement with the sociopolitical challenges faced by Chicanos in the 20th century.

Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.

It’s a cutting, audacious, and at times astonishing movie.

If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.

Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.

With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.

Gugu’s World is such a crowd pleaser that it deserves to be seen widely by audiences. They’ll be in for a real treat.

A lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating.

An assured melange of dramatic re-creation, archival material and interviews, it is a uniquely entertaining venture.

One of the oddest and most illogical murder cases of modern times is recounted in intimate, incredible detail in the classy, disturbing drama A Cry in the Dark [from John Bryson's Book Evil Angels].

It’s been a while since Bardem had a role this straight-up that he could sink his choppers into. He is always a formidable presence, but since Esteban is himself a force — charismatic and manipulative, ruthless but cunningly quiet about it — for a while we just feel like we’re watching Javier Bardem in all his handsome, magnetic and unmistakable aggro Javier glory. The subtle power of his performance, and it’s a terrific one, is that it takes us a while to grasp the kind of mind games Esteban is a master of.

Fatherland is an incisive and ambitious movie that wants to lay bare the torn soul of Germany after World War II. It’s also a portrait of family demons and literary celebrity. The film has been made in a spirit of nearly fetishistic meticulousness; it’s as subtle as a fine wine. Yet Fatherland, as an experience, is so steeped in ideas that in the end it’s more heady than haunting.

At 99 minutes, A Woman’s Life is brisk and concentrated, but it never feels glibly selective with regard to its protagonist, permitting us access to Gabrielle at her most impressive, her most unbearable and her most disarmingly ordinary.

Nagi Notes, however, happily sees the director returning to the form of his 2016 breakout Harmonium, with the precision of its characterization and the balance between heartfelt emotional candor and pensive silence in its finely worked script.

Come for the arch, bitchy humor promised by the title and the director’s general social media brand; stay for the unabashed sweetness of the enterprise; leave with the distinct sense that there’s more to Firstman than his online persona.

It has the disposition of a vintage buddy movie and an underdog tale, one that celebrates human determination and the notion of advancement through science.

The fight sequences (choreographed by Raffaelli) are especially creative, with the combatants using any available object, including a priceless Van Gogh painting, to get the job done.

No trendsetter or breakthrough, this is more than anything else a welcome chance for the fine actor Melissa Leo to finally dominate a film in a terrific and affecting lead role.

Ritchie has never worked on a scale anything approaching this before and, while some of the directorial affectations are distracting, he keeps the action humming.

Cera and his gifted comic co-stars elevate the mediocre source material into a semi-iconic coming-of-age story.

Uplifting and entertaining feel-good, fact-based sports drama.

A restless, rangy and frankly enjoyable genre-juggler that combines melodrama, comedy and more noir-hued darkness than ever before, the picture is held together by the extraordinary force of Almodovar’s cinematic personality.

Well-groomed, upscale, three-hankie entertainment for the “Masterpiece Theater” crowd.

Riotously overstuffed and enormously enjoyable drama.

A frenetic but undeniably funny follow-up that offers twice the number of singing-and-dancing rodents in another seamless blend of CGI and live-action elements.

Despite its handsome look and good thesping workout for Sam Rockwell, the story stretches a bit thin over feature length.

Mostow's smart speculative suspenser imagines a time when people can live through ideal versions of themselves while they sit wired up at home.

Oddball mix that may strike some as overly whimsical but should delight the filmmaker's many fans.

From this polarizing lie, Techine fashions a brilliantly complex, intimate multi-strander, held together but somewhat skewed by the central perf of Emilie Dequenne ("Rosetta"), whose radiant physicality threatens to eclipse even Catherine Deneuve.

Boy gets girl and boy loses girl in convoluted, sometimes cloying but ultimately winning fashion in 500 Days of Summer.

Benefiting from the very different but very appealing comedy styles of Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg even when the script's wit runs thin, this should be catnip to jaded genre fans.

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.

Carried by Kristen Stewart's compellingly dark performance, but also by helmer Chris Weitz's robust visuals.

Telling with a light, surefooted touch a legendary tale from British soccer history, The Damned United reps the latest collaboration in factual fiction between chameleon thesp Michael Sheen, screenwriter Peter Morgan and producer Andy Harries ("Frost/Nixon," "The Queen").

Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet.

There are moments, especially when Welles is alternating between acting as Brutus and directing everyone else, that it’s possible to forget you’re watching an actor and really believe you’re beholding Orson Welles at work.

A big-reveal thriller with surprises that really do surprise -- and are worth waiting for through an audaciously long buildup -- A Perfect Getaway finds writer-director David Twohy in popcorn form with a muscularity not seen since 2000's "Pitch Black."

A rather ordinary account of youthful summer misadventures that goes down easily thanks to a sparky cast, more than 40 pop tunes that anchor the action in the late '80s and characters who get high both on and off their jobs at a tacky amusement park.

With an accountant's eye for precision and a political scientist's grasp of the machinations that move national policy, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight itemizes the errors, misjudgments and follies that have defined the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq.

May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.

Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast.

Calling to mind the work of Anne Rice and Stephen King, atmospheric adaptation of Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist's bestseller is well directed by his countryman Tomas Alfredson ("Four Shades of Brown") and should click with cult and arthouse auds.

The tense drama eventually becomes off-putting when it becomes clear almost every scene hinges on an unpleasant or ugly racial interaction.

A civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry.

An amusing slice of existential whimsy with an Eastern European bent, Cold Souls posits a world in which humans can have their souls extracted and implanted in each others’ bodies.

A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman’s scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multiplane storytelling.

Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, Terminator Salvation boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original, the full-throttle kinetics of "Speed" and an old-fashioned regard for human (and humanoid) heroics.

The documentary's open-endedness offers something for everyone.

Picture represents a powerful, pertinent but not entirely perfect debut for British visual-artist-turned-feature-helmer Steve McQueen, who demonstrates a painterly touch with composition and real cinematic flair, but who stumbles in film's last furlough with trite symbolism.

The picture wobbles a bit before emerging a successful low-key satire of literary fraud and morbid personality cults.

Highlighted by the star's vastly entertaining performance, this funny, broad but ultimately serious-minded drama about an old-timer driven to put things right in his deteriorating neighborhood looks to be a big audience-pleaser.

Winningly unpretentious tale uses a wispy romantic narrative as a vehicle for attractive original tunes.

Sluggish, uneven and lacking in rhythm, it nonetheless has enough pathos and winning humor.

A simpler and more taut, if slightly less interesting version of the oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres the Argentine helmer offered up in "La cienaga" and "The Holy Girl."

Distinguishes itself from such last-fling-before-the-wedding comedies as "The Hangover" with the grittiness of its Texas locales and the smug intelligence of its unapologetically narcissistic protagonist.

TV scribe Kundo Koyama's first bigscreen script peppers the proceedings with rich character detail and near-screwball interludes that shouldn't fit but somehow do.

The Proposal won't catch any bouquets for originality, but in terms of a bended-knee pitch for the affections of women -- including Ryan Reynolds’ boyish charms, a hip granny and even a beyond-adorable puppy -- this romantic comedy pretty much pulls out all the stops.

The bawdy jokes score big points, but it's the rueful acknowledgement of adolescent embarrassment and humiliation that most distinguishes Superbad, another ultra-raunchy and commercial sex comedy from the Judd Apatow laugh factory.

Though almost laughably intricate in its plotting, this thoroughly Gallic adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel reps an entertaining sophomore outing for thesp-turned-director Guillaume Canet.

In the end, though, it's Crowe who must carry the most freight, which he does with another characterization to relish. Still bulky, although not as much so as in "Body of Lies," long-tressed and somewhat grizzled, he finds the gist of the affable eccentricity, natural obsessiveness and mainstream contrarianism that marks many professional journalists.

Sean Penn delivers a compelling, ambitious work that will satisfy most admirers of the book.

In what's essentially a six-hander, the casting is aces. All actors turn in fine, naturalistic perfs, but it would be remiss not to remark on 83-year-old Thanheiser's profoundly moving turn as the grandfather.

The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic.

This very New York tale is old-fashioned in good ways that have to do with solid storytelling, craftsmanship and emotional acuity.

Laden with more than enough profane humor to warrant its R rating, this is nonetheless a formulaic crowd-pleaser.

Wood's powerlessness to break out of the emotive straightjacket hands the picture to his Russian costars on a platter, and they run with it.

While thesping is not the main game here, having a cast of bright young things certainly helps, and Quaid gets in a few nice John Wayne-like moments as the no-nonsense boss.

Lack of depth, complexity or strangeness make this a relatively routine entry for the director.

Undeniably funny, outrageous and boundary-pushing, this further documentation of Sacha Baron Cohen's sheer nerve will draw an abundant share of "Borat" fans.

Fascinating study of free enterprise in free fall. While it may disappoint thrill-seekers, "Girlfriend" should still delight Soderbergh fans and niche auds.

A visually mangy but frequently hilarious low-budgeter.

With a circus parade of mourning Brits and enough appalling circumstances to set proper Englishness back to the Dark Ages, Death at a Funeral pits decorum against sex, drugs and dysfunction.

Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.

Both an inspirational sports movie and an unexpected multi-level urban drama that plays by its own clock.

Frisky and funny enough to please pre-teens, but still witty enough to amuse even those parents who don't recognize Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg and other notables among the unseen vocal talents.

Casual, engaging documentary doesn't attempt a Hinduism 101 lesson, instead going for an impressionistic mix of on-the-fly spectacle and human interest.

Although writer-director Khientse Norbu breaks no ground in unfolding two parallel stories about young men seeking fresh horizons, he creates believable characters -- and has the great benefit of living in a country that provides seldom-seen locations at the top of the world.

In an era when similar genre pics increasingly resemble videogames, musicvideos or glossy commercials, the blunt, brawny simplicity of helmer Jean-Francois Richet's storytelling style seems positively novel.

Sweetly entertaining but bland biopic.

An intricate, fetchingly lensed tale of historical speculation framed as a plausible thriller.

Snappy, affecting documentary.

A general lack of drama, a low-budget documentary feel and an ultraslim storyline are more than compensated for by a sterling script and performances.

Trendy influence of insidiously creepy Japanese horror pics is felt in almost every frame of Boogeyman. The effectively atmospheric and unusually involving thriller tells the story of a distraught young man's protracted duel of wits with the eponymous evildoer.

A noteworthy piece on a difficult subject.