It never feels as if we're watching a brand-name cash-grab, but instead as if we're participating in an endlessly imaginative afternoon of play.

Jendreyko elegantly sketches in the details of his subject's life and the historical events surrounding her coming-of-age-out of which emerges a fascinating subtext about the malleable powers of language.

The filmmaking is patient and participatory, getting down in the dirt with the workers (in one case the lens is even soaked by a spray of sludge) and allowing several touchingly distinct personalities to emerge.

Toward the end of the film, a few hard-hitting cuts between young and old brings the title's meaning home: These children have an inescapable life of drudgery before them, and there's little likelihood it will change anytime soon.

Even at a mere 75 minutes, Silent Souls is thrillingly dense and allusive, and the elegiac finale maintains the overall air of mystery while beautifully bringing all the disparate threads together.

A lesser movie might hammer home the idea that the cult squashes Martha's sense of self. This distinctive and haunting effort implies something much scarier: that there is no self to start with.

This is an exquisite portrait of a family navigating the wreckage imparted to them by one of their own.

It would be a Christmas miracle save for one lump of coal: an ear-shattering Justin Bieber song over the end credits. Gotta sell something to the kids at Yuletide.

Fassbender and his multifaceted allure helps counteract any thematic or conceptual shakiness, as was the case in McQueen's highly uneven debut, "Hunger." One thing's for sure: McQueen has found his De Niro, and he better keep him close.

Leigh does a stellar job of showing how these events seep into the unaware girl's everyday existence - almost all of the film's sequences are photographed in precisely composed, inherently surreal single shots.

This lifelong Tintin fan was more than pleased, even while having to acknowledge that the movie lacks the subtle state-of-the-world commentary that Hergé often smuggled into his creation.

Despite his repentance, you sense that this lost soul will be confessing his sins for all eternity.

When the action eventually switches to an Austrian rehab retreat, Dalle gets to make like the best of the Old Hollywood divas and waste away with devastating reserve - an icon quietly, crushingly crashing to earth.

The mostly dialogue-free middle section is a scare-film master class - and when a becalmed smile does finally cross his lips, it's in the most giddily mordant of circumstances. As Arthur embraces the darkness, so does the darkness embrace us.

First-time director Josh Trank, working from a taut script by Max "Son of John" Landis, indulges in some wild, witty spectacle, but he's equally adept with the tale's grimmer elements, especially when the introverted Andrew unleashes his inner Magneto and uses the city of Seattle as his tear-it-apart emotional playground.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

Losier has made a quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.

Even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject - Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into "the Steve and Paulie Show" - effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

Puzzling and provocative, Alps has a lingering power and an effect that is thrillingly difficult to define.

What most distinguishes the redo is the often remarkable use of 3-D: Miike turns the format's inherent limitations, especially the tendency toward visual murkiness, to his advantage, fully immersing us in a world suffused with moral and ethical rot.

Sensitive parents shouldn't fret; this is the kind of grim fairy tale, equal parts midnight-movie macabre and family-round-the-hearth compassionate, that scars in all the right ways.

Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.