Mark Jenkins

In Barbarians, writer/director Radu Jude's ruminating, ruefully funny Romanians debate history, propaganda and truth while mounting a re-enactment of a mass murder.

Shot on vintage, lo-fi video cameras, this talky, didactic film finds a bickering couple beginning to question themselves once they start to question a tale told by an older black man.

The slaying of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago cop has been widely reported but Richard Rowley's documentary lays out the CPD's cover-up, and its ultimate collapse, in stark detail.

Director Denys Arcand continues a series about the discontents of Montreal intellectuals with The Fall Of The American Empire. While it elides some complications, its range of references feels fresh.

Joanna Hogg's tale of a London film student who falls for a manipulative older man is at war with itself: Hogg's "confessional memoir draws you in, while her clinical style pushes you away."

A couple leaves L.A. to start a farm from scratch, without knowing what they're in for, in this crowd-pleasing documentary that proves "amiable and ultimately moving."

The legendary Chinese director Zhang Yimou presents a sweeping quasi-historical tale that allows him to return to the visual and narrative themes for which he is known.

Writer/director Bi Gan's second feature is a mood piece about a man who returns to his hometown to search for a lost love. The net effect is that of a "stately waltz of movement and illumination."

There's plenty of 'Downton Abbey' DNA in this tale of prim Norma (Elizabeth McGovern) who shepherds young Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) to NYC; there's also a leaden script and thin characters.

Writer-director Jia Zhangke returns to many of his classic themes, actors and locations — this time with a new, slightly absurdist touch to reflect China's profound transformation.

A French dance troupe drinks sangria spiked with LSD and descends into carnal violence in a film that turns into "just another Noé freakout, familiar in tone and stylistic tics."

The latest from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo explores his usual theme of existential regret. The film's complex structure leads its characters to simple, if revealing, insights.

No flashbacks, no dream sequences. Just a raw, harsh tale about the practical concerns of minute-by-minute survival in a frozen wasteland.

A mix of dramatization and recorded interviews with Jews who managed to hide in plain sight in Berlin despite the Nazi dragnet, this hybrid film fights against itself.

In this stirring documentary, the secret archive maintained by members of the Warsaw Ghetto comes to vivid life through historical footage and reenactments.

A Manhattan drug courier has a very bad night in this scrappy but underwritten slacker comedy that plays like an extended sketch.

Pawel Pawlikowski follows up 2013's Ida with this tale of Polish musicians living under Stalin; it's "an ode to joylessness that feels historically credible but narratively arbitrary."

Long on CGI but short on any real inspiration, this adaptation of a fantasy series about giant cities that roam a post-apocalyptic landscape quickly runs out of gas.

Tom Schilling plays a German painter clearly modeled on Gerhard Richter in this melodrama about the lingering costs of war and the ways they inform both art and artist.

Peter Farrelly's tale of a black musician chauffeured through the Deep South of the 1960s by a white driver is "a well-meaning but glib and shallow ode to interracial healing."