David Fear

(The verb in the title is not superfluous. If this movie resembles anything, it’s "Citizen Kane" — structure-wise, if not remotely aesthetically.)

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

This muted mobster story reminds us that the ties that bind can also gag you, garrote you and slowly deaden your soul.

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.

We Live in Time is an actor’s movie, by necessity if not always by design. You know where the destination ends before the movie’s even begun. Pugh and Garfield make the endgame worth the journey, no matter where you place it.

Long after the dance-movie thrills are in the rearview and before the images turn themselves upside down — before the movie becomes a literal danse macabre — you find yourself impressed by the fact that he’s not out to recreate a bad acid trip. He’s trying to create his own bad trip sans the drugs. And the fucked up thing about it is: You end up wanting to go along for the ride.

While the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

Had The Christophers just been a cross-generational punch-up, the sort of flinty showdown designed to throw off pleasurable sparks, you’d still walk away content. It remains a conduit for two of the best performances you’ll see all year. But Soderbergh and his two stars want to concentrate on the embers, what fans them and what keeps them burning.

As a dig at generational dissatisfaction and/or a lament about the migrant’s blues, the film is good enough. As a portrait of a diva on the verge of a meltdown that could take out a metropolis, it’s a next-level nightmare.

A prison drama less interested in crime and punishment than in catharsis and the creative power of theater, director Greg Kwedar’s chronicle of how the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program affects its participants wants you to focus on the humanity on display over everything else.

It's a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.

You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

The Promised Land is, if nothing else, a nod to both its nation’s and the movies’ past. The feudal warring over unclaimed Jutland territory may be strictly Danish, but the excitement, romance, and awe-inspiring visual spectacle of this melodrama is vintage Hollywood.

The whole thing is a blast, which doesn’t mean you don’t sense that the stakes are high or that the tension between this threesome isn’t threatening to smother a great creative collaboration in the crib.

Names get checked, baby-faced future celebrities like Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi make cameos, and various cross-pollinations between below–14th Street mavericks are clarified.

It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.

Come for the most impressive, lustrous car that a gajillion-dollar budget can buy. The reason to stay, however, is the driver.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

If Marcello Mastroianni’s character from "La Dolce Vita" hadn’t stepped off the sweet-life treadmill, this is exactly who he would have become.

So call Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a documentary, or a docufiction, or an ecstatic-truth improvisation — just don’t let it miss last call.

The movie isn’t just a paean to a pioneer spirit. It’s equally a testament to the actor playing her.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

It’s these life-or-death stakes that Happening puts front and center, as it forces viewers to not just confront the stigma associated with abortion — a word, by the way, that’s never uttered in the film — but to immerse themselves in the same dread and paranoia that Anne feels.

It’s both a sly piece of ethnography and a social satire that reads like a cosmic joke…right up until its climax makes the chuckle catch in your throat.

If any film could convince people that ACID is the patron saint of tomorrow's Godards, it's this one.