Peter Debruge

Exceptionally strong performances from the entire cast draw you into the movie's deliberately provocative world, a "Lord of the Flies"–like realm where parents are noticeably absent.

It’s also made fresh by the myriad literary and cinematic references Wu weaves into Aster’s correspondence with “Paul.” With its slightly nerdy, play-on-wordy title, The Half of It alludes to the ancient Greek belief that two-faced humans were separated by the gods, devoting their lives to finding their lost soulmates (if you like the idea, read Plato’s “Symposium,” or check out “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”).

Less stuffy literary biopic than ever-relevant female-empowerment saga, Colette ranks as one of the great roles for which Keira Knightley will be remembered.

The movie’s mostly just meant to be fun, and that it is, skewing young while giving lifelong fans (including those who grew up on the Turtles) plenty to geek out about.

Hidden Figures is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts — though ongoing racial tensions and gender double-standards suggest that perhaps we haven’t come such a long way, baby.

Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there.

Slow as molasses but every bit as rich.

Animation proves the ideal medium for Miss Hokusai’s relatively tame story, allowing audiences to admire the family’s artwork within a world that they were partially responsible for creating.

Who wouldn’t want a picturesque trip to the French capital that delivers more laughs than a nitrous oxide leak near the hyena compound? In fact, I’d go as far as to promise that Lost in Paris offers the three most delightful sight gags you’ll see on screen all year.

With his snowy white hair and moustache to match, Hanks conveys a man confident in his abilities, yet humble in his actions, which could also be said of Eastwood as a director.

[Csupo's] take on Bridge to Terabithia doesn't pander or misrepresent, but instead illustrates the power of open-mindedness in both its forms: creativity and acceptance.

Circus of Books is an affectionate look at one of the most unusual mom and pop businesses in America, directed by the person who knew Mom and Pop best.

As the work of one young man bursting with inspiration, the film is a giddy thing to absorb, allowing complete strangers to witness someone performing open-heart surgery on himself.

Despite his movie-star reputation and looks, Mortensen remains a remarkably humble screen presence, a trait that’s perfect for a part that demands considerable empathy from whoever’s playing it.

The Stranger confirms that Wright has arrived, even if his treatment sometimes feels more oblique and self-consciously arty than the material demands.

It’s easy to form an opinion about the subject of a great many docs, but unsettling to realize how little we know about how they were treated.

Although Collet-Serra brings creative solutions to each of the action sequences, the project is actually most effective when audiences are honed in on the core characters.

The movie may not be “Bridesmaids”-level brilliant, but it’s got more than a couple hall-of-fame-worthy comedy set-pieces.

Director Jon M. Chu (“Step Up 2: The Streets”) has crafted a broadly appealing charmer in which practically anyone can identify with Wu’s character as she’s whisked into this elite milieu.

Schemes like this have a way of spiraling out of the characters’ control, but Moland and Aakeson maintain a firm grasp on the pacing, progressively building both carnage and suspense as the situation escalates toward a Mexican standoff of which even Sam Peckinpah would be proud.

Is this a fantasy? A fable? A new kind of horror movie? Actually, Dream Scenario is all of the above and then some, for it also shares a certain postmodern DNA with two of Cage’s most boundary-pushing movies, “Adaptation” and “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

It is not a documentary so much as a fan-friendly tribute, designed to celebrate Williams’ legacy without getting too personal or technical in the process.

After establishing its fresh and relatable origin story, the movie gets bogged down with a relatively generic villain’s power-hungry schemes. Still, there’s enough that’s new and different about Big Hero 6 to get excited about, especially for those still too young for Marvel’s more intense live-action fare.

It can sound like a cliché to say that any given movie is what the world needs now, but “Will & Harper” earns that distinction.

It’s uncanny how much Dolan’s style and overall solipsism have evolved in five years’ time, resulting in a funny, heartbreaking and, above all, original work — right down to its unusual 1:1 aspect ratio — that feels derivative of no one, not even himself.

In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed.

It’s not one of those filmmaking-as-therapy grudge sessions, but a wrenchingly fair-minded look at complicated family dynamics.

Though it takes some work to engage with the characters at first, the journey makes a powerful impact.

Though named after a party girl's pet Chihuahua, Starlet could just as easily describe the two exceptional first-timers making their debuts in this brittle, beautifully understated San Fernando Valley character study.

Zulawski maintains such expert control of the film’s look and tone that there can be no question that each choice has been deliberate, whatever the significance.

The movie hardly ever turns its gaze out the windows, but the scenery never gets old, since Bhat has a head for creative close-quarters combat.

While mirthless in the extreme, Cesar Acevedo’s deliberately paced and distant-feeling debut works its way under audiences’ skin, weaving a haunting allegory through painterly compositions.

What’s refreshing about the debuting director’s approach is that it feels relatively egoless. His style is playful and energetic, often intercutting between multiple threads within a given song or scene, but it doesn’t feel as if Miranda is calling attention to himself so much as trying to open up the show.

There’s at least one more key aspect of Little Woods that sets it apart: Whereas DaCosta’s dialogue strains to find poetry amid such scrappy conditions, she intuitively reveals a deeper dimension to both of her heroines by taking an extra beat at the beginning or end of scenes to observe their faces when no one else is watching.

[A] sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut.

A simple premise can serve as a portal to profound social critique, for those willing to take the plunge.

While it’s not saying much, Thor: Ragnarok is easily the best of the three Thor movies — or maybe I just think so because its screenwriters and I finally seem to agree on one thing: The Thor movies are preposterous.

Wild Indian doesn’t quite add up, but it heralds an important new voice — not just because of his Native American heritage (although that plays a central role in this project’s concerns), but even more on account of the complexity he’s willing to acknowledge in his characters.

When a movie taps a nerve with the public, it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to become a phenomenon, which might explain why Matsoukas puts greater attention on the look, feel and musical signature of the project than she does the plot, which feels thin and familiar.

A vital expose of American law enforcement carried out with almost reckless zeal.

An insightful, engaging and all-around affirmational auto-portrait from an Afro-Latina New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable, Beba never questions its own right to exist.

The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.

It’s an old-fashioned literary fable, spiked with shots of grimacing men with sunburned faces blasting one another with shotguns that wouldn’t be out of place in a Sergio Leone movie.

A striking discovery, Dayo Okeniyi will be unfamiliar to most in the lead role. He played a small part as District 11 tribute Thresh in “The Hunger Games,” and appears opposite Jennifer Lopez in “Shades of Blue,” but Emperor is effectively his breakout, which makes him feel as much a revelation to audiences as Green’s story will be.

Regrettably, Kiki seems far less interested in entertainment than activism.

The movie’s payoff is every bit as delicious as its build-up.

Clearly, Wheatley is bored with the paint-by-numbers approach of his horror contemporaries, but has swung so far in the opposite direction here, the result feels almost amateurishly avant garde at times, guilty of the sort of indulgences one barely tolerates in student films.

It's a brisk and lively getaway with genuine personality.

The Proposition leaves you shell-shocked.

The Fall Guy is funny, it’s sexy, and it features the boy toy version of “Barbie” MVP Ryan Gosling — which is to say, this time around, he embodies the ultimate action figure.

Instead of feeling bloated, Wicked has found its ideal form, where every frame comes crammed with the kind of detail that could easily have been distracting, had a lesser talent than Cynthia Erivo been asked to carry it.

Both deeply personal and remarkably objective, The Biggest Little Farm offers a firsthand account of the ups and downs of married duo John and Molly Chester’s trial-and-error attempt to start a biodiverse agricultural operation on land that had long since been stripped of nutrients.

These criminals may be out of their league, but Gavras orchestrates it all with a surfeit of style and an irreverent sense of humor that spares no one, no matter their background.

The film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.

With the aid of Johnsen’s doc to overcome the obstacles China has put in his path, Ai’s voice carries louder than ever before.

Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.

Air reveals how an exceptional Black athlete leveraged his talent and the power of being pursued by a bunch of white men in suits, to change the game. Not just basketball, but the whole field of celebrity endorsements.

For years, “gay movies” were practically a genre unto themselves, neatly conforming to one of three categories: stories about coming out, stories about unrequited love, and stories about the impact of AIDS. “Sorry Angel” succeeds in ticking all three boxes without falling into any one.

In full anamorphic 65mm splendor, the resulting landscapes are lovely, as is the face of relative newcomer Agyness Deyn in the role of hardy Scottish heroine Chris Guthrie, although the underlying feelings are all but lost, rendered in a difficult-to-fathom Scottish dialect and withheld by Davies’ overly genteel directorial approach.

Think of how M. Night Shyamalan redefined the ghost story (The Sixth Sense), the superhero creation myth (Unbreakable), and the alien-invasion epic (Signs)--and you may get a sense of the genius behind this fascinating new horror film.

Argentine powerhouse Pablo Trapero (“Carancho,” “White Elephant”) takes a case so upsetting many refused to believe it was possible and retells it in ghastly detail from the p.o.v. of the perpetrators in The Clan, a muscular, Hollywood-style account of the Puccio fiasco.

By forcing Puss to contemplate his priorities, the sequel more than justifies its own existence, while paving the way for how his path meets the big green guy’s.

Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, Raiders! captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations.

It’s this strange alchemy — the way that a terse script can leave so much unsaid, combined with such a talented ensemble’s ability to suggest all the details left either in silence or in darkness — that makes “Sweet Virginia” such a haunting character study.

Ask yourself: Just how curious are you to understand the source of Shia LaBeouf’s insecurities and rage? If this is a subject of high importance to you, then you’re in luck, because Honey Boy offers a sincere window into the actor’s soul: a vulnerable, honest (or at least honest-seeming) act of therapy through screenwriting

While Julieta represents a welcome return to the female-centric storytelling that has earned Almodovar his greatest acclaim, it is far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.

Suspense is not the film’s strong suit, and while the trek in between needn’t be dull, Greengrass has made it curiously unengaging.

Good Boy reflects the powerful connection between people and their pets as few films have, ultimately devastating us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.

For Lara, dancing matters more than dating, more than anything, and as such, Dhont’s relatively modest film manages to encompass the themes of both “Billy Elliot” and “Tomboy,” and deserves the recognition of both.

Levy’s funny-sad contemporary drama acknowledges the supportive dynamic that Marc plays in Thomas and Sophie’s lives, even as it centers the gay best friend for a change — not so different from the one he played in “Happiest Season.” All three characters feel well rounded and real, especially in their imperfections.

In the end, it’s inspiring to see a director of Coppola’s stature back at work, and better this than some impersonal job for hire.

The outcome is widely known, but the backstory proves boisterously entertaining — and incredibly well-suited to the current climate, as King was both fighting for her gender and exploring her sexuality in 1973, when the widely publicized face-off happened.

It's like "Lock, Stock" as filtered through the mind of David Mamet, with Craig as the suave middleman holding it all together.

Delivers platinum performances, especially Sharon Warren as Ray's tough-lovin' mother, Kerry Washington as his lily-tempered wife, and Regina King as his spitfire mistress.

If one intention of Sun Children is to remind that all kids are created equal, deserving of education and encouragement, Majidi’s young ensemble makes the case loud and clear.

Pope gives a career-igniting performance.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a movie obsessed more with the act of telling a story than the story itself, which explains why, when the movie's finally over, less than half the audience will have understood the finer points of the mystery.

These movies are comedies first and crime-film homages second, but it’s their tertiary value as social commentary that makes the franchise so indispensable: Behind the laughs are teachable moments.

It’s hard to say whether the period this picture exhumes was any more innocent than what the world now faces, but that’s certainly the way Stone plays it, acting like an urbane orchidologist, cross-breeding contemporary art-house touches with the old-school refinement of a vintage Masterpiece Theatre production. Sometimes the best escape from the craziness of today is to lose oneself in history.

The result is nothing short of an urban war movie, as charismatic characters decide to do something about the outrage people have been expressing toward law enforcement in the real world.

Disguised as a drunken cartwheel through expat paradise, Mark Jarrett’s striking feature juggles questions of mortality along its rowdy cross-country path.

Yang may be the MVP in this ensemble, though the cast is terrific across the board.

Bros is confident enough being about queer characters that it doesn’t have to make them all likable.

Ultimately more symbolic than satisfying, the project leaves one grateful that two stars of this caliber would take on such a story, while wishing their efforts had left us with a more resonant artifact.

Taken together, the parables serve primarily to entertain — an effect that has as much to do with Garrone’s command of the cinematic language as it does the content itself.

As always, Eastwood respects our intelligence. And yet, Juror No. 2 registers as something of an anomaly in his oeuvre: It ranks among his quietest films, forgoing spectacle in favor of self-reflection.

Ross doesn’t run from the resulting sentimentality the way so many other directors do; nor does he undercut it with irony or sarcasm as has become the regrettable tendency in independent cinema.

This is a modest film, well-acted but rather clumsily assembled, that almost certainly would have benefited from an in-person SXSW, where it’s possible to bask in the shared laughter of an enthusiastic first screening.

With Boyhood, Linklater has created an uncanny time capsule, inviting auds to relive their own upbringing through a series of artificial memories pressed like flowers between the pages of a family photo album.

We may never know how Spacey would have been, but Plummer is easily the best thing about a film that is technically accomplished, yet a bit too mechanical in the way it sets up and executes the high-stakes kidnapping at its center.

Jusu meticulously calibrates the interactions between her characters, revealing a nuanced understanding of race and class relations.