Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.

Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.

A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.

Amid its celebrations of black power, ambitious Afros and fly female trombonists, the film serves as a rousing testament to the singular blessings of music education, since there's nothing inherent or automatic about kids learning how to groove.

Majewski's film is a dazzling master class in visual composition.

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

Plays like a gothic prequel to David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," one in which human flesh is viewed as both horrific and erotic terrain.

The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.

Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

Miller’s ace in the hole is the hulking, regal Harper, whose round face vacillates between childlike mirth and lung-stomping sadness. His casual charisma not only commands our attention and affection, it sidelines every social or thematic concern to this singular, tentatively aspiring life.

Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.

Brazilian filmmaker Júlia Murat's first narrative feature is a mesmerizing, slow-build marvel.

The only time a subject directly addresses Takesue, it's with a doozy of a query: "Why are you taking my story to USA, New York?" The answer is as complex as the film itself, and as simple as deciding to not look away.

With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

Attenberg shares with the Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth" a weakness for overgrown innocence and deadpan perversity.

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.

The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.

It's a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity.

Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.

The backbeat anarchy is fun while it lasts, but without a persuasive purpose, it's all just noise in the end.

What Lost Bohemia lacks in aesthetic presentation - first-time filmmaker Astor seems to have gathered footage without much forethought - is made up for by an intimacy familiar from home movies, revealing eccentric neighbors at their most frank and endearing.

This impassioned documentary could have the same real-world impact as Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," and help to free a wrongly convicted man. The filmmaking could be better, but it's hard to argue with that kind of potential.

What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.

Armed with archival footage and wrenching interviews, filmmaker Chad Freidrichs revisits one of our nation's darkest hours - and emerges with a scrupulous, revelatory consideration of the varied factors that turned a worthy plan into a horrific, state-sanctioned nightmare for a generation of working-class African-Americans.