Set in London, 1962, amid the specter of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this coming-of-age drama from writer-director Sally Potter (Orlando) otherwise begins wistfully enough, with friends Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) indulging in teenage-girl behavior, cavorting about town together, rebelling against their mothers, smoking cigarettes, and laughing about kissing boys.

Rachel (Julia Garner), a 15-year-old Mormon girl living in 1990s rural Utah, believes she’s been immaculately impregnated after listening to rock music on a cassette tape for the first time.

Pablo Larrain’s fantastic new film No depicts a very specific part of the regime of Augusto Pinochet, but does so in a spectacularly self-reflexive way, making it a delightful entry into a genre that needs a bit of shaking up.

Abbas Kiarostami’s most successful film in America is probably 2010’s Certified Copy, a sublime work that takes his signature traits to such ecstatic purisms that virtually anything following it would seem like something of a disappointment. That film is Like Someone in Love, and indeed it is somewhat disappointing.

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects is a frenetic propulsion of changing dynamics and plot twists, in the vein of some of the classiest Hollywood classics, without deigning to undercooked pastiche.

Singular in its scope as a Nazi/Holocaust narrative, Lore approaches a complicated subject in an uncompromising way, building upon Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” thesis to show ordinary characters in a complex world.

Shot in sumptuous black and white, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ new film, Tabu, is a delight to the visceral senses and to the mind.

Gus Van Sant’s new film, aptly titled Promised Land, is almost paradoxically traditional in that it hearkens back to the classic American films of directors such as Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, but maintains a contemporary feeling throughout.

If there’s one constant element to Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked romps, it’s that he doesn’t write about victims. Sure his characters often start at a Grindhouse-worthy low, but Tarantino is all about second acts—brought about by any means necessary.