Matt Brennan

Daughters culminates with an emotional father-daughter dance inside a Washington, D.C., jail. But its real potency, as both a portrait of families riven by incarceration and a call to action on prisoners’ rights, lies in what comes before and after.

López’s film smuggles queer ideas and images into spaces traditionally populated by straight people and shaped by straight tastes. Which is, to be clear, no more the “right” way of updating the genre for the 21st century than any other. It’s just nice, for a change, to come in through the front door.

Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.

It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.

Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.

The film is a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.

The film's understanding of the brittleness that begets the "traditions" of frat culture is altogether shallow.

Jeff Feuerzeig isn't skeptical enough of Laura Albert's explanations and rationalizations.

It recombines elements of the emigrant saga and the coming-of-age story into a searching, fresh-faced portrait.

Director Ira Sachs transforms the smallest blip on life's radar, a childhood friendship, into a momentous occasion.