Jeannette Catsoulis

This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.

Refusing to pander to restless derrières, they’ve given this big, bounding, beautifully cinematic swashbuckler almost three hours to breathe. Yet their pacing is so frisky — and Celia Lafitedupont’s editing so elegant — your derrière is unlikely to complain.

Dark Horse is a canny package that uses the classic structure of the sports-underdog story to deliver a glowing ode to community pride and the merits of collective action over individual gain.

The film’s guileless, heartfelt style veers perilously close to corniness at times, but the superb cast dares you to mock.

Willets Point may not be the slickest of movies, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in heart.

Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.

The battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.

As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.

While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.

The wonder of Black's performance here is its empathy and balance: inasmuch as he can disappear into any role, he dissolves into this one with no hint of mocking remove. It's a beautiful thing to see.

Verhoeven brings more vitality to his work than many filmmakers half his age, and his screenplay (with David Birke) is a tasteless hoot, gleefully cramming the frame with blood, fornication and flagellations galore.

A novel teenage comedy with an astute understanding of adolescent sexual confusion and the nebulous nature of desire, Zerophilia suggests an elastic view of gender that's alternately gleeful and terrifying.

Ms. Dyrholm, photographed frequently in brutally unforgiving close-up, fully captures the faded charisma of the woman whose life reads like a Who’s Who of the New York midcentury art scene.

The plot matters only inasmuch as it allows the returning director, Chad Stahelski, to stage his spectacular fight sequences in various stunning Roman locations, where they unfold with an almost erotic brutality.

Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.

Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.

Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with Belfast he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.

The filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.

Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.

Ultimately his story draws more energy from class than from criminality: awash in sludgy browns and rotting greens - the colors of poverty and decomposition - this unpredictable oddity is a little bonkers but a lot original.

A movie of stark contrasts and zigzagging motives, Beauty in Trouble moves from the golden serenity of a Tuscan villa to the powdery chaos of a Czech garage without sacrificing thematic confidence or nuanced performances.

Sally, a welcome but unadventurous documentary about the astronaut Sally Ride (who died in 2012), wraps a risk-taking personality inside a risk-averse package.

More curious and combative than the movie around her, Kennedy is as much anthropologist as chef, her deep love for her adopted country palpable.

Even while embracing the breathless beats of the crime thriller, Graceland holds tight to its concern for exploited children.

I’m beginning to think that the Philippous don’t just want to shatter our nerves: They want to break our hearts.

Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, Hoard is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor.

Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man.

Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.

[An] elegantly unsettling documentary.

Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.

A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun.

If Baig’s writing is at times thin and excessively pointed — like a classroom discussion about what it means to live an authentic life — her grasp of mood is spot on.

Belaboring the cartoon connection, the director leaves the family struggles that enrich Mr. Suskind’s 2014 book of the same title stubbornly veiled.

A tale of two siblings -- one basking in memories, the other fleeing them -- Prodigal Sons grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.

The film presents an often sharp commentary on dueling beliefs and idiocies that unfolds in lush pastel hues and distinctively retro drawings.

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.

Tiny advances in seduction — like a direct gaze, or the eventual removal of that wig — assume the power of full-on sexual collisions, and Ms. Yaron, with her restlessly darting eyes, easily conveys Meira’s sensual deprivation.

The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.

Vividly depicting the indignities of the flesh, Porfirio offers a harshly sensual portrait of a man imprisoned by paralysis and the callousness of the state.

Sad and sweet, and with a rare lyricism, The Cakemaker believes in a love that neither nationality, sexual orientation nor religious belief can deter.

Light on plot yet heavy on chemistry, Paris 05:59 is at times a little precious. But the two leads are so believably besotted that their occasional immaturity doesn’t rankle.

A strange, spiky movie that refuses to beg for our affection, Little Sister, the fifth feature from Zach Clark, molds the classic homecoming drama into a quirky reconciliation between faith and family.

While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.

What follows is something rarely seen in American movies: a sincerely humane examination of what it means to experience a crisis of faith. Tender, bittersweet and often gently comedic, Corinne's 20-year journey toward (and around, and away from) her God has a loose, searching rhythm that's engrossingly unpredictable.

The trick to enjoying The Town, Ben Affleck's follow-up to his impressive 2007 directing debut, "Gone, Baby, Gone," is to expect nothing but pulpy entertainment.

Ardent and primal, Daughter of Mine addresses complicated ideas with head-clearing simplicity.

The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.

Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.

Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.

Merging the sustainability worries of guitar enthusiasts and environmentalists with the hard-cash concerns of logging corporations and Native American land developers, Maxine Trump’s thoughtful documentary wrests clarity from complexity.

Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.

The setup is commonplace, but the scenery is delicious, the dialogue refreshingly tart and the keen supporting cast frisky or affecting, as the occasion demands.

Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.

Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, Dream Scenario is often funny and frequently surreal.

Neither bitter nor maudlin, The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.

The template is familiar, but Quarantine delivers the heebie-jeebies with solid acting and perfectly calibrated shocks.

Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), Kill is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious.

Raw and resolute, this unsettling fable feels driven by an anger that remains largely unexpressed.

Bathed in a shadowy beauty and slippery psychological atmosphere, “Beast” soars on Ms. Buckley’s increasingly animalistic performance.

The narrative eventually loses steam, but the movie’s politics remain as low-key as its acting and as basic as its special effects. Lapsis isn’t a polemic, it’s a caricature, and all the more likable for having its claws sheathed in velvet.

Not one for climactic endings or predictable histrionics, the director, David Barker (who wrote the script with Ms. Meierhans and Mr. Godere), sticks to the stylistic template of his debut feature, "Afraid of Everything," which was filmed in 1999. Preferring the tease over the tell, his films coax us into looking beneath the surface. What we find is mostly up to us.

The irritations and tedium of high school life are staged with refreshing simplicity, while the performers interact with an age-appropriate naturalness the American teenage movie rarely achieves.

All This Panic can feel glancing, its more painful revelations sliding in unheralded and slipping away just as quietly. What’s left is a dreamy diary of a time that passes so quickly yet impacts so profoundly.

Its straggling, true-crime narrative, leaping hither and yon like a dog chasing butterflies, is not what holds the film together; the real glue is the emergence of a parallel between location and suspect, between literal dumping ground and figurative. This is so effective that there was no need for the directors to conduct a handheld, "Blair Witch"-y foray into the nighttime woods -- their film is creepy enough in broad daylight.

The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices...are gentle and persuasive, using the horrific details of the rape and its aftermath as ballast to stabilize a heart-wrenching history of systemic injustice.

Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.

Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal.

Whichever side of the aisle you inhabit, you will leave The Iron Lady feeling disgusted; you will also feel cheated - of information, insight or even an identifiable point of view.

Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.

Painfully stark yet utterly magnetic, You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo presents excerpts from the 2003 interrogation of the 16-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen accused of killing an American soldier during a firefight in an Afghan village.

With a little more shading and originality, 13 Minutes might have pushed beyond its familiar Nazi tropes to shape something more immediate and infinitely more potent: an ominous portrait of radicalization.

A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.

Educates without lecturing and engages without effort.

As we join throngs of excited citizens at a public vote-counting, their uninhibited zeal for the process only highlights the jaded cynicism that threatens to overwhelm our own.

Unfolding in somber tones and among hard surfaces, Arbitrage has the slickness of new bank notes and the confidence of expensive tailoring.

In “Chapter 3,” the violence has been supercharged, and so has the virtuosity. At a certain point, though, the carnage becomes deadening, its consequences no more than soulless tableaus of damage that encourage disengagement.

Part tribute, part musical mystery, ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris shines an overdue spotlight on a great who got away.

Though rife with implausibilities, Transpecos is fortified by strong acting and a location whose desolate beauty is a gift to Jeffrey Waldron’s serene camera.

What we need is for the writer and director, David Pomes, to wallow less in aimless dialogue and lowlife sordidness. What we need is a point.

Starring flying debris and surging walls of water, The Impossible takes the template of the old-timey disaster movie, strips it to the bone and pumps what's left up to 11.

And by exploring the lighter side of communal action - the camaraderie and cruising that turned weekly meetings into what one member calls "a combination of serious politics and joyful living" - he uncouples the gravity of the cause from the perceived humorlessness of advocacy. Foot soldiers for the dying, the members of Act Up never forgot how to live.

Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.

Often chaotic but never disorienting, the movie’s spirited set pieces — like a wriggling ribbon of undead clinging doggedly to the last compartment — owe much to Lee Hyung-deok’s wonderfully agile cinematography.

A heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China.

Richly photographed by Rob Hardy (who gave Red Riding: 1974 its almost surreal bleakness), this meticulously researched story (Marston spent a month interviewing families trapped in these vendettas) reveals a culture dominated by male pride and patriarchal selfishness.

A warm, entertaining compendium of counterculture voices and literary landmarks.

A twisty, small-town thriller that blooms in the shadows and shies from the light, “Sweet Virginia” marshals a relentlessly threatening mood from dangerous secrets and unpleasant surprises.

Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.

A tantalizing glimpse of a determinedly outsider talent.

Such an uncommon artist warrants a less conventional survey than this one.

Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.

The result is a movie that evolves naturally from the filmmaker's compassion for her subject; as much as possible, she remains off camera, and her immense act of charity is never permitted to become the film's focus. Instead this remarkable documentary offers a brief but satisfying look at a defiantly self-sufficient life.

Stretched to 80 minutes, the story (by the director Leah Meyerhoff) almost breaks; that it holds together without compromising its simplicity or emotional authenticity only proves that, contrary to the maxim, you don’t need a gun if you’ve got the right girl.

Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.

Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, Tales of the Rat Fink will convince you that Mr. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth.

The effect is by turns comical, maddening and endearing as Escobar reaches for more ambitious ideas about the political appeal of the authoritarian hero; but “Leonor” is finally too mired in its film-within-the-film frolics for more serious themes to gain traction.

The template of CODA — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.