Marc Savlov

Why Don’t You Play in Hell? isn’t for everyone, but neither was Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring." Genius is genius, no matter how many audience members may riot.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.

Citizenfour is obviously in Snowden’s corner, but as an example of pure cinema vérité, this is the finest – and most disturbing – political documentary since Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side."

Hasbro’s long-lasting occult board game gets its own starring role in a film that makes those other recent Hasbro plaything adaptations – namely "Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" – look like triumphs of subtly engineered cinematic magic.

The creature’s big reveal is masterfully handled and a final revelation is exceptionally memorable, but the characters, unsurprisingly, remain interchangeable with those of any number of other teens-in-peril pics.

The Blue Room is mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and, at the very end, viscerally devastating. They don’t make them like this much anymore, but they should.

A third-act revelation will knock viewers silly and cause them to reevaluate everything that’s come before, but even without that jaw-dropping information, Moss’ film is a righteous piece of empathetic, of-the-moment documentary filmmaking.

Fuller’s film is inarguably a stone-cold classic of the genre, but Fury, for all its cacophonous chaos and half-crazed characters, never quite reaches the shellshocked heights required to make it a bona fide pillar of cinematic combat.

The Indonesian-born brother/sister filmmaking duo of Ken and Livi Zheng scores high points for creating a new take on the undocumented-immigrant badass story (hola, Machete), and for their obvious martial arts skills, but this first feature from the pair is ultimately hobbled by a paucity of credible acting.

It’s a worthy effort, and Webb’s story is important. Nevertheless, Kill the Messenger feels extremely dated: In these cynical times, it’s too little, too late, which is too bad.

Another addition to Universal’s Pictures Classic Monsters arsenal of crap (remember Van Helsing?), director Shore, in his feature debut, displays a fine sense of pacing but little else.

While it’s possible that Annabelle might give a few audience members goosebumps, anyone who’s ever seen "Rosemary’s Baby" –or pretty much any film James Wan’s had a hand in since helming 2007’s "Dead Silence", the "Saw" franchise excepted – will figure out what’s going on within the first 30 minutes.

What’s great about this “documentary” – Cave gets a script credit alongside the directors, which kind of invalidates the whole notion of hands-off documentary filmmaking – is that it delves deeply into Cave’s notoriously fussy creative process without ever becoming stodgy or dull.

Fantasies and phantasms aside, Fincher proves himself yet again to be a better cinematic psychologist of (in-)human nature than almost any other director alive. It’s another squirmily excellent date movie from hell, courtesy of contemporary cinema’s most overt nihilist.

With The Guest, Wingard and Barrett have once more upped the ante for the indie horror flick pack.

The Boxtrolls feels rough-and-tumble and not as much fun by half.

With A Walk Among the Tombstones, the names have been changed but the story’s all too familiar. Speaking of which, "Taken 3" is on its way.

There are many questions raised and answered in this film, but one that isn’t is why on Earth it’s garnered an R rating. Love Is Strange is anything but. It’s a seriocomic romance of the most genteel sort, full of heartfelt “I love yous,” brief (and definitely unerotic) snuggling, and a wealth of tremendously fine acting from all involved.

James Gandolfini’s wintery silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing this otherwise frustratingly vague slice of low-end Crooklyn crime life, but just barely.

Innocence certainly has all the right genre conventions to toy with, but the haphazard script by Brougher and Tristine Skyler is a bloody mess.

Crammed to bursting with the director’s trademark magical realism. Occasionally marred by budgetary constraints, this is nevertheless a welcome return for an artist who truly deserves the sobriquet: El Maestro.

As a documentary on the origins and backstory of the unfilmed film, Jodorowsky’s Dune is unsurpassable. More than that, however, it also allows audiences a rare glimpse inside the furiously creative mind of Jodorowsky, who still, at 84, is a wonderfully mad genius of the moving image.

What makes Under the Skin such a mind-blower has everything to do with Johansson’s chillingly unempathetic turn as the, well, whatever she is, coupled with cinematographer Daniel Landin’s disorienting, hallucinogenic visuals.

Oculus never quite resolves into the image of horror it clearly wishes to be. Kudos, though, to cinematographer Michael Fimognari and score composers, the Newton Brothers – all of whom provide a fertile audiovisual background for Flanagan’s film.

Not an easy film to love and politically incorrect to the hilt, it nevertheless leaves its mark on you – and it’s rarely, if ever, dull.

At over two hours, The Winter Soldier could have easily been trimmed by a good 20 minutes, but if it’s spectacular imagery and duplicitous goings-on that you crave, the film will not disappoint.

The filmmaker brings neither condescension nor moral outrage here. A father confessor to his benighted characters, von Trier may revel in the muck, but Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 is anything but a dirty movie.

With its brief running time and revelatory story, this neat, fascinating documentary ought to be required viewing for art history students everywhere.