Great social-realist cinema has to do a lot more than just throw in the kitchen sink. Following her 2010 docudrama breakout The Arbor, Clio Barnard’s first fiction feature is just about as good as it gets.

The following interview appeared in METRO: The Golden Hour: London filmmaker Jason Gray offers sneak peak of most intense film yet We wait ages in the hot afternoon sun for an empty-looking streetcar. When we climb in, he jets straight to the back and sits down, bracing his arm against the top of the seat to steady his camera, his eyes narrowing as he zeros in for the shot.

The Counselor is a dark, disturbing and stylish thriller that portrays the fatal consequences of greed within a world without grace when dealing with devils who know no boundaries. “Free will” is the gift that keeps on giving, a divinely created thing that separates man from animal, saint from sinner, and determines grace or damnation.

Finding out who you really are isn’t easy — even when you wear a name tag all day long. If anything, the external label can almost make the existential ache even worse because it writes off personal identity as a piece of plastic, something that can be digested in a half-blink.

For David Cronenberg, man is a forlorn hero always too eager to improve himself. That's what makes Cronenberg such a poet of horror--whenever he's behind the camera, this crazed quest for perfection usually ends in catastrophe.

Robert Redford fights valiantly our sinking feeling that he will not survive the gash to his sailboat in the lean, engrossing drama "All Is Lost." Weathered and riveting, he gives a physically demanding performance enhanced by a deeply laconic approach. The sophomore voyage of director J.C. Chandor, "All Is Lost" is a film of few words.

I think you have to be British — or at least a member of the Commonwealth — to get your knickers in a twist over Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana. I have never seen the level of vitriol unleashed on such a relatively innocuous biopic before — and it’s almost entirely from Brit and Australian critics.

For all of us who’ve been waiting way too long for a smart, funny, snappy romantic comedy for grown-ups — here it is. Nicole Holofcener’s “Enough Said” is a joy, marred only by the poignancy of seeing the late James Gandolfini in one of his final screen appearances, trying on a persona that fits him uncannily well.

A good example of the maxim that opposites attract, Zachary Heinzerling’s accomplished and entertaining documentary, Cutie And The Boxer, presents the complicated 40-year marriage of New York-based Japanese artists Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko.

Sex, lies, betrayal and murder set among the gods of the Beat Generation. That's Kill Your Darlings, a dark beauty of a film that gets inside your head and stays there. Daniel Radcliffe, erasing all memories of Harry Potter, delivers his best screen performance to date as the young poet Allen Ginsberg, a Columbia freshman in 1944.