The documentary provides a birdsong of perseverance in the face of irrational violence, immense historic anger, and grim, seemingly insurmountable realities.

Julia Murat shows a fine grasp of form, letting her technique reflect the elements and moods of her story.

A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.

More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.

In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.

Once Corpo Celeste began to recede a little in my rearview mirror, my initial impatience softened a little.

A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.

Pawlikowski has crafted a film that throbs with substantial personal weight and bristles with a violent, haunting interior life.

Kirby Dick's spartan use of graphics and statistics conveys arguments with little grandstanding.

Nathan Adloff's Nate & Margaret is an endearing, hopeful, and quietly radical film.

The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.

As great and intimate as Live at Massey Hall 1971 may be, it's not as transportive as this filming of a Neil Young performance at the venue 30 years later.

The film remains buoyed by the same open heart that makes Tyler Perry's best work so endearing.

A modestly charming bit of whimsy that hopes to speak to anyone who experienced a sense of emotional injustice during their formative years.

One can see the difference between the two traumatized main female characters right in their faces.

The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.

Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.

Lauren Greenfield's film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a more evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family.

Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.

It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.

The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.

It works--quite successfully, in places--as a warming tonic against this emotional nippiness of the cinema of Canadian coldness.

Even with the heaviness of some of its subject matter, the documentary remains limpid and unsentimental until the very end, in keeping with its subject.

Succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement, but it's worth celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the efforts of writer/star Zoe Kazan.

An honest and breezily melancholic film, thoroughly clear-sighted in its intentions and ideas and bravely committed to the emotional rigors of its central relationship.

Most of what transpires between the two girls feels as internal as something you only keep to yourself.

A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.

It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.

The seamless juxtaposition of faith and pain, innocence and guilt, allows the film to transcend Spike Lee's occasional bombastic moments and become a strong examination of internal suffering.

It plays out like a series wet-dream scenarios, performed by a cast of vintage action figures battered and broken from overuse, bleached and slightly molted from sitting in the sun too long.

Ron Fricke's film is a brightly hued bauble, fit for rapturous contemplation.

Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.

Lawless may be full of half-hearted overtures toward depth and emotional complexity, but the film's prestige sheen is mostly a sham; the real focus here is the irrepressible lure of bad behavior.

Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.

It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.

Illustrates the problem of class mobility with a dark, troubling premise that holds a harsh light up to our own assumptions and expectations.

More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.

Jirí Barta's film is a disturbing through-the-looking-glass reflection of traditional fairy tales.

This nearly pitch-black comedy is better than its tiresome use of '90s pop references, no matter how much they illuminate what the gals bonded over back in the day.

Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.

If the film covers well-tread territory (a morally bankrupt player trying to prolong his own influence), it does so with pinpoint control of mood and theme.

What keeps the documentary from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved.

Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.

There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.

The images and interviews Robert H. Lieberman and his crew have managed to capture are eye-opening enough to justify the dangerous effort.

The story places a premium on delivering its disreputable sex-and-violence goods with a minimum of fuss or pretension.

This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.

Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.

Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.

The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age.

In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.

The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.

Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.

By favoring the repetition of gestures over plot or graphics, Don Hertzfeldt argues that animation is, at its essence, a kinetic rather than simply visual form of expression.

The stillness and silence with which we look upon Jake Williams ranges from curious to unnerving to fascinating.

Throughout, it becomes clear that both the film and its subject are defined by the necessity of multitasking.

The film is at its best when it lingers on intimacy and the characters' incompetency to manage it.

In a cinema landscape where the representation of the black female experience is most visibly explored through the modes of outlandish comedy, unironic melodrama, or not at all, Ava DuVernay's take is a decidedly refreshing one.

It's the rare film to sell sex as something truly tender and life-affirming, and Helen Hunt, in particular, is lovely and poignant.

The hilarity of the film creeps up slowly and from every angle, not through the facile immediacy of short-lived laughter.

Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.

Citadel is stripped down and no-nonsense, fixating on Tommy's emotional and psychological struggles with an intensity that's harrowing.

The earthiest of Japanese New Wave directors, Shohei Imamura goes fascinatingly meta in this 1967 hybrid of investigative tract and ruminative experiment.

Jay Bulger's seemingly erratic documentary formally channels Ginger Baker's almost defiant refusal to lead a life that adheres to a linear narrative.

Whereas the later "Saw" films were hampered by bloated backstory, various ostentatious agendas, and self-satisfied sadism, The Collection feels utterly unburdened by anything but its lean, fleet-footed plot.

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.

The overall experience is entirely immersive, thanks not only to the filmmakers' handheld camera, but also to the illusory nature of the staging.

The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.

Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker.

Its most redeeming quality is that it isn't so quick to neuter its queer characters into a package-friendly "gay couple" aesthetic a la Modern Family.

Most compelling in Christian Petzold's latest is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia.

By taking a disturbing and sometimes conflicted look at the prejudices that led to the West Memphis Three's imprisonment, it asks murky questions about how people could get something so wrong for so long.

The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.

Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.

Glides from a mildly off-putting opening across several scenes that waver between sitcom superficiality and sudden, unexpected gusts of feeling, ultimately ending on a note of perfectly judged emotional ambivalence.

Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.

The film is at its finest as a catalogue of Yossi's unspoken ache, less so when it begins to flirt with the clichés of the love story.

Walter Hill thoughtfully regards the pummeling power of weaponry at work.

It flouts convention in a number of ways in service of its genre-mash-up agenda while still contributing something original to the tradition of the zombie film.

Deceptively modest on nearly all accounts, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die employs seemingly minor directorial contrivances to ruminate on a unique quarrel.

It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.

Alejandro Landes's Porfirio is an ugly movie to watch, but it's not without purpose.

Melissa McCarthy is riveting in simply-penned moments of remorse and confession, adding tearful depth to her ace timing and formidable physical comedy.

A singular biopic and a snapshot of a society renewed, No unaffectedly celebrates faith in democracy, and, surprisingly, truth in advertising.

Raimi's script is riotously deadpan, his compositions undeniably breathtaking and inventive. [6 March 2002]

Teasing out a subversive portrait of a complex and rather subdued monster, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files unfolds with the same meticulousness exemplified by the eponymous serial killer.

There are more than a few striking images and intriguing ideas to be extracted from Tristana. [10 Oct. 2012]

More difficult to convey are the web of moral and political issues that surround the hunger crisis, and A Place at the Table proves its worth most by how it treats this wider set of problems.

Though overstuffed, his film eschews pop-doc conventions by opting for in-depth analysis over superficiality.

With Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter manages to avoid nearly every pratfall of such period pieces, focusing on extreme alienation rather than enlightenment, and wringing a powerful and jaundiced coming-of-age story from the decade's less trod corners.

Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.

George Washington this isn't, but there's enough heft here that the comparison can be tastefully made.

Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.

What Craig Scott Rosebraugh's film lacks in originality, it makes up for in comprehensiveness.

One of the effects of Harmony Korine's feverish, hypnotic style is that the whole thing feels like a fantasy—or rather a nightmare perversion of the American dream.

Renate Costa's doc gradually simplifies into an elaborate seesaw between general, journalistic scoopery and unabashedly personal confrontation.

Makinov's film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains' unspoken fury at their elders.

Tobias Lindholm's hostage-negotiation drama that wields its verité style for maximum tension.

The film draws out Danny Boyle's less dazzling commercial side, not to mention his penchant for whirling excess.

The film has many elements of a thriller, but ultimately Antonio Campos's interest lies much more in profiling, yet never over-determining, his moody protagonist.

Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal's film is a tasteful, well-orchestrated drama that never reaches beyond its humble means.

The setup and geography are consistent with the original, though the film never makes the mistake of trying to rebottle the lightning that electrified Sam Raimi's movie.

Perhaps the most valuable insight that the film provides about its subject is that he acts even as he directs.

While the film is deeply romantic and nostalgic, possessing a genuine reverence for youth and rebellion, it's also something of a tragedy.

A welcome contrast to the first film's snuff-y atmosphere and general mean-spiritedness, featuring more humor, fewer hateful characters, and occasional twinges of relatable human emotion.

The psychological path of these characters is finely marked with signposts, but as Prince Avalanche reaches its destination, you almost wish it would have gotten a little more lost in the woods.

Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.

Amy Seimetz's intoxicating slice of genre revisionism earns its "neo" prefix, envisioning a brightly sinister world where desperation is the new normal.

It often seems more intent on spelling out its awareness of the politics involved than in lingering on the aching human engaged in the libidinal transactions.

The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.

Passion is a serpentine, gorgeously orchestrated gathering of all of De Palma's pet themes and conceits, a symphony of giddy terror where people perpetually hide behind masks, both literal and figurative.

The film's structure as a character study helps to subtly underscore the flawed justifications of a privileged kid's thought patterns and unchallenged value system.

It's always a pleasure to encounter genre ambition contained in such a sinewy-shot, emotionally resonant, and gorgeously photographed package.

Noah Baumbach's film feels like too perfect a portrait of quarter-life malady, down to the rushed redemptive endnotes and Greta Gerwig's idealized heroine.

Without being didactic, the documentary demonstrates how an ordinary concerned citizen can take a stand when politicians neglect to make decisions for the good of the people and instead serve the interests of big business.

Layered conflicts mount as this lean film treks on, and they're not limited to gender politics.

The film is densely plotted, occasionally bordering on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.

The research and elucidating synthesis on display effectively illuminate the pernicious aura of a lifestyle pursued by the yearning, lost souls of the time.

This complex emotional texture no doubt owes a lot to Bello's stunning performance, which works by screwing with the familiar conventions of reaction shots; she goes cold when we expect her to freak out and explodes when we expect her to be silent.

Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.

Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

Jig doesn't twist itself into the self-important, exploitative think piece on youth ambition that Spellbound was, but it does convincingly suggest that its subjects are in it for more than sport.

While it may not pack the rollicking drama of his first feature, Street Fight, Marshall Curry's timely If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front likewise chronicles the personal tale behind political headlines.

Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).

Complacent with road-movie tropes, director Ralf Huettner and screenwriter Florian David Fitz's Vincent Wants to Sea is likeable insofar as it's familiar.

Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.

Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.

While I still protest Bay's too-hasty cutting (many shots are good enough to warrant a few extra seconds), his set pieces, and his sets, are magnificently entertaining.

What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?

Love is both a many-splendored and painful thing according to Love Etc., a multi-subject documentary about the various states of amour that, while never succumbing to glibness, also fails to rise above superficial geniality.

Terri, a generously spirited dramedy in the high-school-misfit genre (indie division), finds director Azazel Jacobs taking a calling-card approach to his second feature.

Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.

Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.

It presents itself in a sleek suit and tie, carrying itself from the moment it enters the room with a steadfast gait that suggests there's no dotted line it can't get us to agree to sign.

Nicholas Pereda shows nothing short of immense promise here, especially in his enigmatic framing and collaborative effort with his regular DP, Alejandro Colonado.

As its titular tyrants, Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell all revel in their over-the-top noxiousness, though the latter is mysteriously given short shrift even though his performance is far and way the most novel and gonzo.

Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.

Pooh's moral triumph isn't all that weighty, but it's almost existentially profound to see the silly old bear forgo honey a little while longer because of someone else's needs.

The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.

Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."

Tommy Lee Jones provides wisecracking levity as Rogers's commanding officer, Hayley Atwell supplies the aforementioned buxom chest and accompanying tough-girl grit as Rogers's British love interest, and Johnson directs with flair, his set pieces defined by both muscularity and clarity.

A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.

An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.

The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.

At its best, Magic Trip evokes the freewheeling, idealistic, psychedelic vibe of an era's origins; at worst, it's a film in which people narrate their own druggie home movies.

Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.

Director Leon Ford displays a wonderful empathy in his examination of Griff and Melody's lonely environments, allowing their fringe perspectives to flower organically from the mise-en-scène.

Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.

One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.

Even the use of the 3D format -- and the 4D "Aroma-Scope," which allows the viewer to enjoy various odors in sync with the film -- adds to its good-natured earnestness.

A portrait of gender-and job-transcending ennui, Special Treatment paints a vulgar picture of two apparently interwoven professions: prostitutes and shrinks.

Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.

Handsomely mounted and shot with an eye for nocturnal Parisian mystery by Guillaume Schiffman, Gainsbourg somewhat mercifully peters out after the grande scandale of the provocateur's reggae version of "La Marseillaise," which earned him the wrath of French patriots.

Zaldana is such a sultry and surprisingly heartfelt executioner that she often finds a way to make this by-the-numbers genre retread feel, if not fresh, then at least sporadically electric.

An understated--and at times, clinical to a fault--Oedipal drama of long-simmering resentment and familial love's ambiguities, I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive risks bringing chilly subjectivity to sensational raw material.

If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.

If The Weird World of Blowfly is any different from other documentaries about eccentric characters from music-world obscurity, it's in the contentious topics Clarence touches on in his cantankerous speech.

Although far from the worst offender in Disney's canon, The Lion King is nevertheless host to many of the less savory qualities common to the studio's output.

"Why are there so few black surfers?" That's the question posed by Ted Wood's incisive, if ultimately repetitive, documentary White Wash, and to answer the question the film digs deep into US political and social history.

When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.

Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.

A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.

Wholly uninterested in puffing up his subjects into an iconic rock outfit on a par with their idols Led Zeppelin and the Who, Crowe instead merely tells their story free from the constraints of rise-fall-rise clichés.

If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.

Killer Elite is pleasurable enough, but with a steadier hand, it could've been one for the books.

It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.

The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.

Flip-flopping traditional genre dynamics in a manner more cute than uproarious, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil charts the Three's Company-style shenanigans that ensue when two West Virginia bumpkins cross paths with a group of camping college kids.

This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.

The movie is far more successful in its execution of the young-man-meets-mortality element, warranting its existence by bringing some well-considered verisimilitude to what feels like rare movie territory.

A modest genre entry, Dream House also benefits from the fact that any movie with good enough sense to cast Elias Koteas is automatically better as a result, even if he is utterly wasted here.

As thorough as the filmmakers are in providing a political context for Fishbone, they're often reduced to tunnel vision in an attempt to lift the unheralded band to its rightful place in music history.

If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.

This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.

If the Footloose remake had its own signature dance, it'd be called the Push-Pull, as this hip-to-be-sorta-square movie, much like the small-town teens within it, has a mind for propelling itself toward a progressive future while continually being yanked back by cherished hallmarks of the past.

A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.

Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.

The Son of No One is driven by mood and atmosphere to the extent that the stakes-free story and interest-free characters seem almost incidental, and such is surely the movie's saving grace -- a perverse style that overshadows a severe lack of substance.

Watching Dennis Farina dominate every scene is a joy, and thankfully the actor makes the most of this opportunity.

Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.

As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.

The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.

With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.

Using a whirlwind of archival footage, maps, and split screens, Edmon Roch conveys Juan Pujol Garcia's reign as Europe's premiere spy in a constantly fluid fashion, aesthetically mimicking his crafty and cagey nature.

Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.

Half-formed expressions of disappointment, hope, struggle, confusion, and boyish playfulness on faces otherwise marked by youth's inexperience, and a self-consciousness brought on by the curiosity of being filmed, constitute the most memorable moments of Lads & Jockeys, a documentary on 14-year-old aspiring jockeys in France.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.

The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.

The wonder and terror of Meryl Streep's performance in The Iron Lady is her formidable ability to nail the disheartening talents of not just Margaret Thatcher, but so many conservative politicians like her, who have a tremendous knack for changing minds and beckoning cheers while underlining their own rigid ignorance.

The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.

At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.

A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.

Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.

It's likely, then, that the film was directed by Susanne Rostock the same way Belfonte's new memoir, My Song, was written with Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson: to articulate, polish, and edit what the vociferous and at times alarmingly honest Belfonte wants to tell us without injuring his credibility outside of the left any further.

Manages to be an entertaining and faithful expansion on the original material while being inconsequential to it.

The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.

As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.

What sets Undefeated apart from the usual underdog sports story is how the filmmakers emphasize the importance of mentorship as something separate from on-the-field interactions between coach and player.

Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.

It'd be unwise to dismiss Safe House as merely a clone of Tony Scott's manically inclined vision.

Unlike most war documentaries, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat.

The goings-on can rarely be called truly compelling, even if they're almost always generally pleasant.

A strange and intoxicating indie constructed as a series of vignettes that capture two children grappling with the overlap of trauma and nostalgia.

Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.

Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.

The Assault raises many more questions than it answers, and its overall objective is puzzling and remains shrouded in political agenda.