What gradually comes into focus is a terrifying, appalling, infuriating cycle of exploitation and corruption.

Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an entirely idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, salacious gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor.

Their individual voices may not be literally captured in On the Record. But in this anguishing and essential film, they are heard — and the implications of being silenced for so long come through loud and shamefully clear.

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither.

To quote In the Heights itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer.

The archival footage is exciting enough, but editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, who co-wrote the script with producer Shane Boris, make judicious use of split-screen, circular stencils and other visual effects, varying the rhythm just enough to make this world seem even more magical.

I love the unsettling details.

Oslo, August 31st builds to an unforgettable climax, a bravura sequence that starts at a party, crawls through a variety of nightclubs and raves, and ends on a note of utterly surprising lyricism.

As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, the film is a literal revelation. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut.

For fans of horror at its most sinister, The Witch is not to be missed. It casts a spell that lingers long after its most disquieting mists have cleared.

Thanks to the assured hold Johnson exerts over this ingeniously structured game of cat-and-cat, we'll go anyplace he has in mind.

The power of the film is cumulative, as the filmmaker spins a mesmerizing morality tale from the dross of daily life. In his skillful hands, the ordinary turns out to be anything but.

"Kubo" is both extraordinarily original and extraordinarily complex.

Cameron and company have made a sequel that is gripping and vital. The 2 1/2 hours fly by with this brave company, our imaginations sucked into the screen as if by a black hole. [18 July 1986, p.N31]

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

Momma's Man takes that germ of an idea and lets it flower, in a way that is both odd and oddly compelling.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy You Were Never Really Here depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche.

Based on Gerry Conlon's own account of his arrest and subsequent incarceration, the film takes forever to do what "60 Minutes" does with the same meat in a single segment.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

Ballast, though, is less than completely satisfying in a dramatic sense. Events that seem to be important are dropped and left unresolved. Conflicts from the past are mentioned but never explained, as if key scenes were missing. Given that disinterest in conventional narrative techniques, the abrupt ending may be appropriate, but it feels wrong and arbitrary.

This all makes for a deeply entertaining experience that engages our hearts as well as our funny bones. And it's gratifying to see Cruz finally get her due.

In this vibrant, lyrical, graphic, sobering and finally soaring testament to aesthetic and political expression, Noujaim consistently provides light where once there was heat.

It proves how smarts and style can elevate even the pulpiest material into something shrewd, socially attuned and bracingly observant. Rarely has a movie been so illuminated by a single character simply breaking into a smile, and rarely has a smile been so unequivocally earned.

Love After Love meanders through richly observed and sometimes startlingly funny scenes, never attempting to force the drama. The richly drawn characters stumble toward healing in ways that are refreshingly honest.

What makes Synonyms so compelling is how it explores the theme of identity through a lens of searing self-reflection.

Boys State is a portrait of the country in microcosm: divided, but not yet irredeemably lost.

David Mamet's Homicide is a brilliant muddle: compelling, exhilarating and, at the same time, profoundly dubious. Certainly there is greatness in it. And just as certainly the moral ice it skates on is precariously thin. It leads us into a forest of dark contradictions, then leaves us stranded, dazzled but bewildered, elated but perplexed.

Museum Hours is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film’s lively cast of supporting characters.