An uncompromising, emotionally draining drama that presents the urbanization of New Zealand's Maori as a cultural disaster, one that is mirrored in the shards of a shattering marriage. This explosive first film by director Lee Tamahori focuses on the transformation of a battered wife, but its story is fueled by the machismo of the disenfranchised Maori male.

Offers an unusually astute glimpse of power at its most alluring and corrosive.

The film brings a more human understanding of a figure so noteworthy he has earned mononym status for the title. Though we only see him in still images and old performance videos in Ailey, he seems much closer.

Glatzer captures the visceral charge of moving wildly in tandem with another person, often in improvised bouts that forge strong bonds between partners, if only for a few minutes.

Written by Rita Kalnejais, based on her own 2012 play, Babyteeth works precisely because it refuses to accommodate expectation.

Filmed with dynamism and propulsive, energetic flair, The Jungle Book allows viewers the vicarious pleasure of sidling up to magnificent (sometimes mangy) beasts as if they were household pets.

With its unflinching portrayal of cynical school officials and their corrupt symbiosis with the sports teams and Greek systems to which they’re beholden, The Hunting Ground is, at its most basic, a damning indictment of entitlement and impunity.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

A remarkable film from Romania.

One of the excellent attributes of Shut Up & Sing is that it lets the cards fall where they may and really doesn't try to spin the Chicks themselves. It's quite possible, then, to watch the film and come to the conclusion that Maines has a big mouth. Spectacularly talented, the young singer is also a spectacular blowhard.

What makes Miss Sharon Jones most captivating is how its subject, in spite of hardship, remains a magnetic stage presence.

Filmmaker Clint Bentley makes a tender, visually poetic feature directorial debut with “Jockey,” a closely observed portrait of a man embarking on the downslope of his career.

As Frank Galvin, the misbegotten inspirational hero of Sidney Lumet's imbecilic courtroom melodrama The Verdict, Paul Newman takes sanctimonious satisfaction in impersonating the sorriest excuse for a crusading attorney since Anne Bancroft misrepresented Margaux Hemingway in "Lipstick." [17 Dec 1982, p.F12]

Vallée, working with a lean, lively script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, neatly avoids excess, letting Woodroof’s terrific yarn stand on its own and getting out of the way of his extraordinary actors, who channel the story without condescension or manipulative cheats.

Better Man, a delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey, chronicles the singer’s tumultuous rise, celebrates his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits, and gives the project of ensconcing Williams in the hearts and minds of the global masses another go.

It’s hard to say what is most difficult to digest about Prophet’s Prey.

A film about war and reconciliation, is deeply Christian, a study in humility and the moral uncertainty at the core of the Christian message.

An absorbing primer in one of the most fascinating chapters in American social history.

What's most fascinating are the movie's larger questions about why some people tell impossible lies -- and why others believe them.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.

What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.

How fitting that Firth should carry A Single Man, a movie of quiet but potent emotional power, perfectly suited to his singular gifts.

This conflict between love and ambition is finely depicted as far as it goes, and the period setting, in a time when birth control problems made the choice of marriage a commitment to unlimited family life, could have reinforced the poignancy of the choice. But because the character has been thinly written, her decision seems selfishly arbitrary. [14 March 1980, p.17]

From the first frames of The Color of Money, you feel, almost physically, the presence of a man singularly obsessed with the romance of movies. In this movie, Martin Scorsese enters a new period in an already extraordinary career. It would be hard to exaggerate the complex pleasure and wonderment that The Color of Money conveys.

Together, under the assured direction of first-time feature filmmaker Oren Moverman, these three actors tell a story that is at once hard-hitting and bizarrely gentle.

Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle. It also examines the hyperbolic industry of instant celebrity and ultimately shows us the complex algebraic equation that is Daniel Johnston's life.

An elegant, heartbreaking fable, equal parts Shakespearean tragedy, neo-Western and mob movie but without the pretension of those genres.

Like “The Revenant,” The Nightingale becomes something of a slog, as Clare’s journey plods toward its maybe-inevitable end.

Extraordinary on many levels...because Mountain Patrol instead becomes what might be the first Chinese conservationist spaghetti western ever made.

A compelling, complex, confounding film.

Like all of her greatest creations, Tomlin brings Elle to life with compassion and candid, sometimes withering knowingness.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

The Road Warrior is ferocious and unpredictable. It's energetic. It's peculiar. It's big and it's dirty. But mostly it's cosmically irrelevant. Hey, but, one thing's for sure, we are driven.

Funny when it wants to be, poignant when it needs to be, and surprisingly effective in harnessing these deeper themes to a character who might otherwise be dismissed as a lightweight laughingstock.

God Loves Uganda clearly lays the blame for it at the feet of the American evangelical movement. The movie doesn’t really argue its case, preferring to stand back, in quiet outrage, as the representatives of that movement are shown with the match in their hands.

The kind of stunning and contentious work of art that will leave a lot of folks speechless.

The film becomes a modest delight.

The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

The result is a vivid portrait, not just of one unforgettable young man but also of a country in transition.

The band's success is never diminished. The fickle music industry can seem so arbitrary: A talented singer with connections might not make the cut, while a middling performer in the right place at the right time rockets to fame. Staff Benda Bilili's unlikely triumph is an epic feat, with or without anyone's help.

Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

Cruise is at the top of his form, and Gooding makes a brilliant opponent.

Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.

A deep core of emotion gives 3  1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets its ballast, but Silver, who also serves as cinematographer, infuses the production with simple, elegant sophistication.

A modestly budgeted but richly rewarding look at a Tennessee housewife's search for a better life.

The through-line of Chi-Raq is a sense of crisis that Lee refuses to reduce to binary causes, but interprets in terms of history, economics and psychology, as well as the personal, political and spiritual.

In the era of climate change, Howard seems to be saying, Mother Nature may be an unpredictable force, but we have our own flesh-and-blood counterpart: this voluminous, combustible, unstoppable Spaniard named Andrés.

Thelma is about the indomitable human urge to keep going and the hard-won wisdom to know when to heed time’s warnings. It’s a movie that rages against the dying of the light — at 30 mph.

Unlike "Heathers," a satiric treatment of teen suicide, Pump Up the Volume is passionately caring. It's a howl from the heart, a relentlessly involving movie that gives a kid every reason to believe that he or she can come of age. It appreciates the pimples and pitfalls of this frightening passage, the transit commonly known as adolescence.

Starving the Beast is still a worthwhile documentary.

Despite the radio reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and some very “Just Say No”-era drug busts, this is a mythic 1980s and a mythic USA, peopled by venal desperados pulled from the mildewed pages of a 1950s Jim Thompson novel.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

Technically, The House I Live In isn't season six of "The Wire." But Eugene Jarecki's investigative documentary probing our nation's futile war on drugs is so similar in tone and intent to HBO's acclaimed series that fans of the defunct television program will want to take a look.

Much of the rollicking and wenching in the countryside of 18th-century England is crafted into the story line, giving ample humor to many scenes even before a line is spoken. [08 Mar 1992, p.Y6]

At times, Apples feels superficially slight, even — pardon me — forgettable. But Nikou, in his feature directorial debut after working as an assistant director on sets with such filmmakers as Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) and Richard Linklater (“Before Midnight”), has pulled off a neat little trick: He’s told a story that, for reasons that are more easily felt than explained, is hard to shake off.

One of the delights of the documentary is hearing Terry tell stories. Watching the movie feels as if you’ve sat down in someone’s living room to hear tales of other legendary jazz musicians, such as Count Basie or Miles Davis.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen delivers an astonishingly restrained and expressive central performance in The Hunt, an engrossing psycho-social drama by Thomas Vinterberg.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

Yet much of the movie's validity stems from time and place recreated with such authenticity that you can sense the wet chill in the morning air and the new wax pungent on the old gym floor. [27 Feb 1987, Weekend, p.n29]

Some sequences...depict gunplay that wouldn’t be out of place in a conventional crime film. But Jia offers a stark presentation (no music, few edits) that discourages vicarious thrills; the violence is startling, not cool.

On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation.

Luckily, The Mustang overcomes its most predictable story beats thanks to de Clermont-Tonnerre’s intimate, unfussy style and a quietly captivating performance by Schoenaerts.

Engrossing and infectiously enthusiastic documentary.

Childishly simple, but extremely funny.

Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again

It’s a lovely tale, even if it’s not quite the Cinderella story you might expect. The documentary also brings up some interesting points about how the Internet — the land of vitriolic trolls — can draw two very different people together to create great art from odds and ends.

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

At its core, this clever, wrenching, profound story underscores the tenacity of faith in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Evil may be good, story-wise. But virtue, at its most tested and tempered, is even better.

First Love isn’t art, by any means, but it’s way more entertaining than it should be. One brief sequence, involving an airborne car, was probably too crazy — not to mention too expensive — to actually film, so Miike renders it as animation.

It's as soothing and pure as the sweetest water from the deepest well.

Like the Dustin Hoffman film Straight Time, Schrader's picture sustains a certain interest despite its faults. You stick with both movies because of the promise of something authentic and tragically revealing, even though the promise is never fulfilled. These films don't really work, but they're the sort of films that don't work in interesting ways. [24 Mar 1978, p.D1]

Gray directs this handsome and evocative film with emotional restraint, making its archetypal title character a living individual whose moral journey is never simple.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Never mind that Best Intentions, which was filmed both as a six-part TV miniseries and a three-hour movie, is occasionally uneven and sometimes confusing. It remains a rare August pleasure, a film for grown-up audiences that challenges and enriches.

Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

Coupled with the fact that the plant and animal life (hoopoes, zorilles and ground squirrels, among other beasties) really look African, and that the film's original score is by the great contemporary Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour, Kirikou and the Sorceress's surprising honesty about the banality of evil makes the movie -- even with all its magic -- feel truly authentic.

Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.

Enlightening, inspiring and expertly crafted documentary.

It has, simultaneously, the exhilarating feel of a departure and the finality of a full stop.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.

Fascinating facts and testimony.

It's all done without special effects, soaring strings or manufactured sentiment. Now, that's entertainment.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

Exploding on the screen in a riot of movement, music and color.

The real value of poetry - of the contest itself - is not revealed until the closing credits, when we see the impressive list of colleges that the movie's four subjects have gone on to.

You're invited to fish for the comedy within the movie, within Harry's world, which happens to be falling apart around the hapless schlemiel's ears.

The Big Easy, starring Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid, is the sexiest, most companionable movie of the summer. Set in New Orleans, it's an amiable, loping, goof of a movie, with charm to burn and not a thought in its head.

Code Black is a powerful and quietly damning film. While training his lens narrowly on the heroic workers in a single emergency department, McGarry has made a broad indictment of a system that is badly in need of surgery.

A handsome production that delicately skewers literary-world pretensions and Great Man mythmaking. But primarily, The Wife offers viewers a chance to observe one of the finest — and most criminally underpraised — actresses of her generation working at the very top of her shrewd, subtle, superbly self-controlled game.

A riveting, moving and beautifully animated film.

There’s no doubt that Audiard has invested a story of grief, dispossession and desire with immediate, almost tactile, urgency. Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.

This sweet, affectionate (and unapologetically slight) comedy is an all-too-rare homage to harmless, hilarious incompetence, at a time when there is plenty of the more hurtful kind to go around. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of “Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s 1994 tribute to the auteur of such misbegotten fruits of moviemaking as “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” it is nonetheless a much-needed distraction.

Thoughtful, searching and wonderfully moving in its wistful final moments, Lo and Behold may not be Herzog’s most artistically ambitious film, but it’s an intriguing, even important one nonetheless.

For such a low-budget movie, Nightmare on Elm Street is extraordinarily polished. The script is consistently witty, the camera work (by cinematographer Jacques Haitkin) crisp and expressive.

Ultimately undermined by the fact that the two rock bands Timoner chose to focus on -- the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols -- simply don't matter as much as she thinks they do.