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.

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

One wonders what someone who has never heard of the guy...would make of the film, which is defiantly, even, at times, obnoxiously, obtuse. Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of like the Russell we see in the film.

Gorgeously photographed, and with a minimalist score by Fred Frith, Leaning Into the Wind offers viewers a welcome chance to consider the work of an artist who defies the recent commodification cult to embrace the ephemeral and the nominally “worthless.”

Amid all this dazzling artifice, the film's most authentic source of power comes from its star.

That's the movie: It's taking us inside the burqa to the woman.

My Beautiful Laundrette is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.

Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.

That's the problem with The Sure Thing. All the good lines are given to Cusack -- he's always "on," narrating his own life in the revved-up spiel of a sports announcer. For Cusack's Gib, life is performance -- his long quill of a nose even seems to look for his audience's ticklish spots. But why would he bother with Alison? Screenwriters Steven L. Bloom and Jonathan Roberts have sketched her as an annoying scold, leaving Zuniga little to do but bray disapproval at everything. [4 Mar 1985, p.B3]

Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.

A thoroughly engrossing documentary.

Vikander never goes for the easy emotion, though, choosing instead to play against what conventional melodrama would dictate her reaction should be. This understatedness is always the right choice, and it makes for a far more effective — and affecting — film.

The lines are drawn early on in "Beats," which is surprisingly tense and combative given the overwhelmingly positive and playful music in the band's catalogue. But that makes what could have been a sappy, fanboy loveletter a compelling look at the group's inner workings.

The fact that Guy-Blaché isn’t a household name — even after making nearly 1,000 films — is due pure and simply to sexism, and literally being written out of history, either through animus or laziness. Thank goodness “Be Natural” is here to set a brilliant, distinguished, invaluable record straight.

Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade. Symbolism aside, Sid & Nancy is an indelible drama of undying love and meaningless decline.

Oldroyd’s brilliance (and Pugh’s) is to probe this age-old archetype — the Gothic antiheroine, the adulteress — and find pathos and cruelty. It’s also to uncover the complex web of hierarchies — of race and class, as well as gender — that ensnare and empower her.

A deft, tense, pure thriller, the movie has great star turns and is brilliantly directed, but it began as an extremely well-crated screenplay by Russell Gewirtz. It's professionally entertaining.

Shayda could have been a horror story. Instead, it’s a survivor’s tale, and it’s suffused with gratitude and love.

Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” this is a movie rooted in the scruffy but golden days of the 1970s, populated by strivers and schemers and would-be stars whose breakthrough is as much a function of willpower as raw talent.

It manages the trick of being both an unironic sci-fi action-adventure flick and a zippy parody of one. It’s exciting, funny, self-aware, beautiful to watch and even, for a flickering instant or two, almost touching.