Joshua Rothkopf

Dank with the effluvia of a proudly unhygienic, sex-obsessed German teen, this frenetic adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s notorious 2008 best-seller is a standing dare to anyone who thinks the movies have gotten too tame.

Nature smiles upon Alamar, just as it did on the simple, unfussy charms of "The Black Stallion" some 30 years ago.

Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.

This is meat-and-potatoes genre work, certainly superior to a Hollywood product like "Edge of Darkness," but not by much.

Where he ends up going—a place of real anxiety and envy—speaks to the filmmaker’s nervy ambitions. If this is Baumbach’s commercial breakthrough, he will have made it several steps up that staircase with nothing lost.

Her whole life has been about beating the odds — it’s inspiring stuff.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

Blessed with an improbable-but-true story that functions on many ironic levels, this clever documentary ultimately conveys more about the complex American character - shifting between intimacy and criminality - than a whole shelf of fiction films.

The movie does an uncommonly sensitive job probing the psychologies of blocked men, less so the urges of a widow who needs more than comforting words.

Would that Grandma had given rascally Sam Elliott more time to express his magnificent unease as Elle’s old flame, still wounded by her own choices. Single-handedly, he saves the film from its cutesy instincts.

Destroyed yet defiant, Robbie walks the emotional tightrope of the most fabulously, tragically American film of the year.

You will see the man toiling and revising - killing off half-good ideas, struggling for clarity - and it's a routine well worth demystifying.

Too much of the doc takes our taste for granted; Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins and others won’t persuade you that Death could have been huge, nor does a clichéd last-act reunion show. But the film’s alternating inquiry — into family love, slow compromise and, yes, death — resonates strongly.

The movie works beautifully by bringing forward the delicate subject of guilt via passivity.

Still, you can’t help but be swept up by the sincerity here — that and the sight of a hard man softening to a sympathetic nuzzle. (This is some excellent equine acting.) The Mustang is leagues beneath the recent "The Rider" or "Lean on Pete," both superior in terms of articulating silent human-animal relationships that fulfill larger psychological needs.

A trip to America bears its share of exasperated hotel-room humor, but watch both actors lean into characters seeking redemption; their clash is invigorating, with a mature payoff that has two minds meeting and getting further along. It’s a tonic to all the Oscar-season showboating: Call it Best Duo.

To watch Bigelow’s expertly calibrated chaos during the riots’ escalation – nothing short of block-by-block guerilla warfare – is to witness something depressingly familiar to anyone who has seen the videos of today’s police brutality, of violently botched arrests and furious community responses, and worried that it would never get better.

This one’s a crucible of sweaty pre-natal panic, weird knocks at the door, mind games and ultimately, a roaring, miniature apocalypse set inside a single claustrophobic living room. If that already sounds like your home, it's time to go and give it a try.

Resident turned filmmaker Ryan McGarry sometimes displays shrewd instincts for hardheaded vérité — there’s compelling stuff here, even if you shear away his occasional stabs at issues of bureaucratic overcrowding and corporate cost-cutting at the expense of intimacy.

The world's worst film gets an affectionate making-of dramatization that's half as weird as the real thing.

Herzog’s latest, ostensibly about the internet, is divided into 10 sections, each taking on a blend of awe and uneasiness at a radically changed world that’s increasingly lived online.

Watching the new film is like getting upsettingly full on insubstantial tapas: You would never say no to just one more, but there’s better.

Blue Caprice is probably what more post-9/11 cinema should have been: desperate for explanations, inchoate and wrapped in unspoken loneliness. Even though we can stomach it better a decade later, we’re still not healed.

The director has made disappointing films before — a more generous word might be transitional — but never one so slight.

Assayas evokes the atmosphere so vividly, you begin to breathe in his tale, rather than watch it.

Barely over an hour, the sketch feels lovely, unhurried and a bit insignificant. That may be your definition of cinema, but if you've hired a babysitter, this isn't the film for your date night.

So while his live-action scenes leave much to be desired, Khrzhanovsky fills the margins of A Room and a Half with glorious doodles: yawning cats penning love letters to former flings; spectral violins floating high above the city; spiky silhouettes pouring out of a truck to bring violence to the ghetto.