About Elly (Netflix)
"It's tempting to suggest that if you have any interest in Iranian film in general,
Best of Enemies (Netflix)
"Vidal and Buckley hated each other long before ABC brought them into this figurative boxing ring, but the clips collected by Neville and Gordon reveal something feral about these two extravagantly articulate, upper-crusty men; they eye one another like suspicious forest animals, each smelling something foul in the other. What they say in these debates isn't nearly as interesting as how they say it." —Stephanie Zacharek
Buzzard (Amazon Prime)
"Often very funny, the film is not a comedy; as his anxiety mounts, Marty becomes increasingly violent, fleeing to Detroit, where he sleeps in seedy motels before descending into near psychosis,
Danny Collins (Amazon Prime)
"Danny Collins is a redemption movie in the skeptical key of Jerry Maguire. Our decadent hero decides to fix himself in the first act. The rest of the film is him realizing how hard it'll be to keep living right — and that maybe he doesn't have the moral clout to manage it. Danny
Ex Machina (Amazon Prime)
"Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: It's a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It's also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes double as threats, and vice versa. Ex Machina is the directorial debut of sci-fi screenwriter Alex Garland. It's the film version of an iPhone: small, expensive-looking, and a touch overhyped — plus an addictive sales pitch for whatever Garland makes next." —Amy Nicholson
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Netflix)
"World cinema may have no better builder of delightful scenes than Roy Andersson, the deadpan Swedish existentialist. Each shot in an Andersson film is
Phoenix (Netflix)
"A rapturous noir thriller from German director Christian Petzold, Phoenix is ardent, urgent and smoldering, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect. The script is by Petzold and Harun Farocki, adapted from French crime writer Hubert Monteilhet's 1963 novel Return From the Ashes (also the source material for a 1965 film starring Maximilian Schell and Samantha Eggar). It's also, incidentally, a riff on Vertigo: The extraordinary Nina Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a woman who has survived Auschwitz but whose face has been disfigured." —Stephanie Zacharek
Slow West (Amazon Prime)
"Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut. 'A railroad to the moon,' the schnook imagines, before offering up this lament: 'First thing we'll do when we get there
Tangerine (Netflix)
"There's probably only one humanist film that opens with the words, 'Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!' accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted
Welcome to Me (Netflix)
"So, the movie's messy. But it's also funny, pungent, and sympathetic to the struggles of the borderline, the bipolar, or whatever inexact term is used today for functioning people sometimes at odds with their own minds. It goes all-in on one of the most reliable comedy premises: the free-spending millionaire ruled by whims." —Alan Scherstuhl
While We’re Young (Amazon Prime)
"That bewilderment is the guiding force of Noah Baumbach's fearless half-a-comedy While We're Young, an unsparing consideration of what makes the young different from the not-so-young. Ben Stiller plays a onetime documentary filmmaker who's hit his forties and stalled out on the masterpiece he's been painstakingly crafting for years. He gets a jolt when he meets young aspiring filmmaker Jamie (Adam Driver) and his artisanal-ice-cream-maker wife, Darby (Amanda Seyfried), both about twenty years his junior." —Stephanie Zacharek
The Wolfpack (Netflix)
"Crystal Moselle's documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna, conspiracy theorist, and