David Ehrlich

The relatively gentle, meditative, and straightforward Hotel by the River is like everything and nothing that Hong has made before; to say that it’s “just another Hong” movie is an accurate way of emphasizing what makes it special.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

Bothersome as it can be that we barely get to know the people in Corbijn’s doc, the experience of watching it dovetails with that of going to a live show and being surrounded by thousands of strangers who share your same love: Everyone is on their own trip, but they’re all traveling together.

The film is gripping from start to finish, even when so much of its menace rings hollow.

The genius of Legge’s design, and why his debut works as more than just a cute little curio despite its thinness, is that it mines a sneaky emotionality from the bedrock of the film-within-a-film structure.

This isn’t just the definitive story of a perma-stoned frog who just likes to do what “feels good man,” it’s also an expansive forensic look at the life cycle of an idea, a warp-speed analysis of internet sociology, and a harrowingly modern fable about innocence lost. If the film can’t find a way to be all of those things at once, it’s still horrific and fascinating and maybe even a little bit hopeful to see how this strange world of ours has knotted them together.

This quiet, difficult little movie — so stubbornly opaque that its torpedo of a last shot almost makes it feel as though Franco has been trolling us the whole time — is the rare film that has the courage to stomach the reality of life after death.

This light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages to draw a comprehensive map of what the Cold War relic has come to represent — and what freedom means to the people of a nation that’s been defined by its pursuit.

Wind River may not blow you away, but this bitter, visceral, and almost parodically intense thriller knows what it takes to survive.

Subway is a rush of youthful energy so raw and well-realized that it steamrolls any of the director’s attempts to cohere it into an actual story.

A Private War resolves as such an effective memoir because even in its most clichéd moments — of which there are many — it resists easy psychoanalysis.

Betts’ adaptation never loses its sense of humor, and the multiplex flair it brings to such a sensitive subject — its wry, politically inclusive approach to illustrating how burying America’s heartache without a headstone only guarantees that the pain will continue — allows for a verdict that feels damning and hopeful in equal measure.

It often feels like Heineman is (understandably) too overwhelmed by the stories he’s capturing to help shape them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But no other film has so convincingly, or so urgently, illustrated the role that media will play in our fight for the future.

Girls State gradually moves away from the reality show-like competition baked into its premise in favor of something more interesting and less resolvable.

Quinn has clearly done the work to establish meaningful relationships with many of his subjects, and you can see the pain and concern in their eyes. Still, Eating Animals feels every bit as scattershot as it sounds, the film’s moral argument cornering you from all sides rather than attacking head-on.

Shaggy and unformed as Pahokee often seems, the film — like its subjects, and the town where they live — is more than the sum of its parts.

Wootliff cuts away everything other than the raw nerves that are left exposed, creating a film more elemental than narrative.

The results are delightful and exasperating in almost perfectly equal measure until a last-minute hail Mary ends the movie on such a high that even its hoarier stretches seem like they were worth the walk in hindsight.

“Homecoming” works by allowing itself to become an actual genre film, the first of its ilk to recognize that superhero movies might be more interesting if they were also something else.

A light but meaty piece of magical-realism that threads the needle between Cronenbergian body horror and Miyazaki-like fantasy to create a modern parable that evokes any number of identifiable emergencies — deforestation, the AIDS epidemic, the global migration crisis and its attendant xenophobia, etc. — in the service of a story that refuses to be reduced into a clear metaphor for any one of them.

Agnes may start as a slaphappy pastiche of a particular horror sub-genre, but — like Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” before it — the film’s veil of irony proves sneakily disarming.

A familiar but arrestingly visceral crime story with a coming-of-age twist, Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas has an unusual relationship with its own predictability.

Christmas in Miller’s Point is just happy to be an immaculately conceived vibe.

One Man Dies a Million Times” might be slow cinema writ large — its story told through erosion, and with all the velocity of a famine — but the half-imagined past that it remembers is coming for us at the speed of real life.

If Greengrass’ broadly entertaining (if gallingly relevant) film is a bit too soft and spread thin to hit with the emotional force that it could, so much of its simple power is owed to the grounded nature of the director’s approach, which allows these desperate characters to feel as if they’re trying to escape the very genre that threatens to define them forever.

Life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he’s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he ever could have paid to his parents’ legacy.

Every winking iris shot and cheesy cross-dissolve adds to the timeless spirit of a film that knows beauty may be short-lived, but good schlock never dies.

Reaping the benefits of a generation that compulsively records the evidence of their crimes, Fyre exploits a motherlode of private footage that festival mastermind Billy McFarland commissioned throughout the process. It’s less of a snarky recap than a clinical post-mortem.

This is a persistently quiet film; always human and alive, but also told with the solemnity of someone who knows they’re sending a ripple through a body of water that’s been still for thousands of years.

Even at its most absurd, the movie is chilled by an ominous and ever-present feeling that the world has become smaller than we ever thought possible, and that real nightmares are waiting for us on the other side of every window.

Mars Express may have benefited from the luxury of being able to slow down (this story could have easily sustained a 13 or 26-episode anime season), but Périn makes the most of its propulsiveness, as this eye-popping movie launches toward a future where tech might be liberated from the people who created it.

It drifts by with all the force of a mild summer breeze, and — as is typical of Sachs’ jewel-like work — it leaves you feeling like you could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters. For better or worse, this one also leaves you feeling like Sachs could have spent another 90 minutes with these characters, too.

Clear enough about what happened to be ambiguous about what it means, the film makes only one clean argument: Truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but it’s often a hell of a lot sadder.

Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

12 Hour Shift doesn’t allow for quite the same kind of bravura showcase that Bettis gave us in “May” — Grant’s film, while plenty deranged in its own right, is nevertheless grounded in reality — but it still depends on the actor’s genius for being loathsome and lovable at the same time.

While the filmmaker’s craft has never been shakier than it is in this stilted and wildly uneven tale about the twisted strings that tie some couples together, it’s also never been clearer that said filmmaker is Adrian Lyne. Not only does this delirious movie find him swan-diving back into the same fetid lap pool of envy, lust, and psychosexual control where he used to swim laps every morning, it finds that he’s basically got an entire lane to himself.

Quick, vibrant, pulsing with all sorts of crossover appeal until a slightly moribund energy takes hold toward the end, Trier’s film is never more fun than when Julie is second-guessing herself and/or trying to keep time from slipping through her fingers.

It’s a brave thing, to tell a story by omission, but Pawlikowski almost pulls it off.

A clever, high-concept dark comedy that uses the moral clarity of “The Twilight Zone” to see through the veil of modern cynicism, Happily jackknifes into the murky waters between #RelationshipGoals and #BodySnatcherVibes as it skewers the assumption that something must be very wrong with anyone who’s too happy for too long.

Lester treats the whole thing with breezy exuberance, with colourful cinematography by legendary Carpenter, Zemeckis, and Spielberg collaborator Dean Cundey, and best of all, a killer late-disco soundtrack sweeps all your cares away.

From its title on down, Sauvage / Wild is a film that’s torn between different translations of the same basic principle — one soft and the other hard. There’s no judgement of him whatsoever, to the point where it sometimes feels like the character is more of a construct than he is a fully dimension person of flesh and blood.

While it might be legally accurate to say that Love and Monsters isn’t based on pre-existing material, it couldn’t be more obvious that it was conceived by someone who saw “Zombieland” on TV one night and thought to themselves: “I could do it better. And with bugs.” Lucky for us, they were right — or at least right enough that it’s a blast to watch them try.

Complicated enough to lose a casual viewer but never so convoluted that André and co. are sublimated into the system around them (which would have been fatal for a film so attuned to the relationship between personal interest and collective perception), Bonitzer’s plot spins forward at the speed of an auctioneer’s mouth until raw suspense becomes appropriately inextricable from meaningless gibberish.

The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.

Charmatz’s nimble direction allows the action to flitter between the imagined past and the “actual” present without missing a beat, and that deftness proves key to the Pete Docter-like anthropomorphism that renders the Dark and his colleagues as working stiffs with a job to do.

A tense prison drama that’s penned into the trappings of a classic Western, The Mustang is a small movie about a subtle transformation, but its closing moments — however contrived they might be — are as touching as they are unexpected.

Listless at times and lacking the killer instinct required to follow through on the emotional toll that the fighting took on its survivors, the documentary is far more insightful about the buildup to bloodshed than it is about the mess that was left behind in its wake.

Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either.

Tran’s debut feature delivers a ton of charm for a kung fu throwback, and kicks a lot of ass for a broad comedy about some old guys relearning how to honor each other and fight for themselves.

You’ve seen this story a thousand times before, but Joris-Peyrafitte’s expressive direction and Margot Robbie’s sheer force of will are enough to endow the movie’s best moments with the same hope-and-a-prayer immediacy that its heroes take with them as they speed towards the southern border.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates may not be the first Apatow-era comedy about twentysomethings coming to grips with the fact that they won’t live forever (and it’s certainly not the deepest, as it lingers in your memory for about as long as a Snapchat), but it might just be one of the funniest.

The film’s hyper-naturalism is its raison d’etre, and Being 17 is at its best when it leans into that approach.

While Peter Pan & Wendy is clipped and uneven in a way that prevents it from reaching the same heights as the director’s previous Disney project, this spirited fairy tale is still able to take flight for one simple reason: It maintains the courage of its own convictions.

If Zombi Child gets snared in a web of symbols and ideas that it never fully manages to weaponize in its favor...it still provides a bold and compelling bridge between the living and the dead.

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

Here is a rare new entry in that smallest of sub-genres: Movies that don’t punish teens for f--king their brains out (surprise surprise: it’s French).

If Almereyda fails to pierce the inventor’s skin and expose his circuity, his gauzy film nevertheless has fun exploring the idea that we’re all wired differently.

This is a strong movie about a man in need of a new start, made by someone who could benefit from one of his own.

This is a movie about where strength comes from, who takes it from us, and how we get it back. It’s familiar territory, but First Match is such a powerful coming-of-age story because Monique makes us feel like she’s the first person to ever set foot there.

If this weren’t a Cartoon Saloon movie, it would probably fall apart long before Meg LeFauve’s screenplay arrives at its touching finale, which trusts kids to confront some of the more difficult truths that childhood forces you to intuit. But good news: My Father’s Dragon is a Cartoon Saloon movie, and the open-hearted sincerity of the studio’s work breathes singular life into even the least engaging scenes of its most anonymous feature.

Charli xcx’s casting adds a metatextual richness to the movie and vice-versa, as the friction between her pop star persona and Bethany’s somnambulant everywoman deepens the sense of a woman divided between the superreal and the literal, the spectacular and the mundane.

The Little Things is pulpy and ridiculous and requires some major suspension of belief, but — if you didn’t know any better — you might even say it’s beautiful.

It’s only a little while before this starts to feel like just another documentary, but even a short-lived miracle goes a long way. It’s still enough to make you believe in the impossible.

What ultimately helps Citizen Koch rise above the dozens of other movies like it is a focus not just on recent developments in American politics, but also on the bedrock of what has made this country such an enduringly great, astoundingly troubled experiment: one person, one vote.

Logan isn’t always a satisfying movie, but there’s a very satisfying answer to those questions waiting for viewers at the end of it. Satisfying not only because Mangold resolves things with some brilliantly expressive imagery, or because he endows this story with a no-shits-left-to-give honesty that defies its origins and justifies its spectacular violence and salty vocabulary, but because it proves how iconic Jackman has made this character over the last 17 years.