Critic consensus:Featuring gut-wrenching performances from Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu, 4 Months is a gripping portrayal of life in Communist Romania.

Numbered reviews:1. Observes with ruthless, artful precision. While plunging a knife through your soul.
2. Proceeding with a blunt and sometimes brutal relentlessness, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days impresses and engrosses as a work of stark, spare naturalism.
3. A film of brutal, breathtaking intelligence, a work of pellucid, shimmering art without a scintilla of compromise, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is surely one of the very best films of the year. And you can pick the year.
4. His film unfolds with a graceful realism, as if he just happened to catch life unfolding for these two desperate women. His film never hits a false note...
5. Virtuosic, assured, and possessed of undeniable aesthetic force, it's also hard not to turn away from.
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a feminist film of the toughest and most rewarding kind. Without flinching, it looks at the limits of female friendship and college romance; it depicts the horrors of illegal abortion from every angle.
7. It's a testament to the brilliance of Mungiu's writing and the actors' performances that the conversations feel more natural than anything captured on a reality show.
8. Just as Romanians got used to eating bones with little meat on them, they must also have gotten used to movies with very little dramatic meat.
9. The mesmerizing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days represents another outstanding offering from Romania, a country in the throes of a cinematic renaissance.
10. A brilliant and discomfiting film.


Critic consensus:Essential for soul fans and entertaining for novices, Muscle Shoals offers a compelling, warts-and-all glimpse at one of the most fascinating stories in modern American music.

Numbered reviews:1. Only the genre's most studious followers will be able to watch Muscle Shoals without being regularly astonished: Even if it sometimes gets lost in its byways, Greg "Freddy" Camalier's documentary tells an extraordinary story.
2. One of the year's most entertaining and enriching nonfiction films...Moving and joyful.
3. The film mixes an impressive array of interviews with plentiful archival footage.
4. The film possesses considerable persuasive power despite its modest substance and simple construction, making it very much like the timeless songs it showcases.
5. This is a work that's a must-see for even the most casual of music fans, while still so chock full of moments of grace and beauty that even the most jaded of us that have seen umpteen other variations on this story can still properly fall in love with it.
6. Has funky magic in it. Ooh, baby, does it ever.
7. Deals with the intriguing mystery of why so much funky music came from this one town.
8. The documentary is a little slapdash, but then so is the very idea of what Muscle Shoals means. Is it the town itself? Or the celebrated rhythm section that started at one studio and then formed its own?
9. A marvelous doc about the creation of the fabled Muscle Shoals Sound -- as powerful today as it was 50 years ago.
10. Even fans who don't know Muscle Shoals by name know its music by heart. Now they can also see how much soul went into it.


Critic consensus:Kazakh sheep herders get their cinematic due in this lovely, unsentimental debut from director Sergei Dvortsevoy.

Numbered reviews:
1. A folk tale disguised as a documentary, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan appears something like actual reality, half-planned and half-found.
2. A visually stunning coming-of-age drama set in the vast barrenness of southern Kazakhstan's Hunger Steppe.
3. Despite its rich, picturesque scenery and a few briefly amusing and tender moments, Tulpan feels uneven, meandering, unimaginative and somewhat bland both as a drama and as a comedy.
4. The details of the exotic trappings on display may be relatively new but the rites-of-passage story is as old as civilisation itself in Tulpan, a timeless and endearing coming-of-age tale for the Story of the Weeping Camel crowd.
5. It dares to be sentimental. Underneath the fly-swatted surface is a gentle coming-of-age.
6. Skip the latest Hollywood trifle and see this instead.
7. Story of a young man's efforts to reconcile his imagined paradise with the harsh landscape he hopes will sustain him offers a romantic vision of nomad life on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
8. Poignantly captures a society at the hinge of change, where the beauty of the rugged environment and the pride of fulfilling traditions compete with the pull of the city.
9. It captures the life-and-death demands of a seemingly alien landscape within the context of a generational paradigm shift in Central Asia.
10. Perceptive and humorous, this gentle drama is uplifting and resonant.