Peter Debruge

I don’t want to oversell Slut in a Good Way here. It’s a tiny movie, and the bleary black-and-white cinematography looks only a notch better than “Clerks,” and yet, like Antoine Desrosières’ “Sextape” (easily the funniest film I’ve ever seen in Cannes, but still without U.S. distribution), Lorain’s film challenges traditional gender roles in such a way that’s surface-level entertaining but also deep enough to inspire a college term paper or two.

For Guadagnino, it’s not the characters’ fates that matter so much as their dynamics, which Kajganich and the director manipulate with the sort of take-no-prisoners attitude typically reserved for theater, pushing the entire ensemble to their full potential.

This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.

Though set in present-day Montreal, this tender romance unfolds like an episode from another century, paying the sort of careful attention to social boundaries you’d expect to find in a classic forbidden-love novel.

The result is an eye-opening social portrait in the tradition of "Paris Is Burning," the landmark 1990 documentary that introduced drag balls and ''vogueing'' to the mainstream, but it lacks the earlier film's structure and focus.

In the end, The Sea Beast is a movie about challenging conventional wisdom and figuring things out for yourself, and that’s a philosophy that worked on both sides of the camera.

Smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work.

Director Maggie Betts has a rousing old-school crowd-pleaser on her hands with this truth-based (albeit strategically embellished) drama featuring the most entertaining performance yet from Jamie Foxx, who makes a day in court feel like going to church.

Precisely the sort of intelligent, human-scale adult drama audiences insist no one makes anymore.

While you watch, be sure to scour the background for in-jokes, including cameos by Gromit and other DreamWorks characters, and rest assured that Flushed Away gets even funnier on second viewing.

The movie wouldn’t have worked half as well had Dunham not discovered Ramsey, a “Game of Thrones” veteran soon to be seen in HBO’s “The Last of Us.” The young actor has a face one might find in a medieval Madonna portrait and a rowdy contemporary sensibility that makes her instantly relatable.

It’s here in the movie’s more fantastical details that Yonebayashi’s imagination runs free — and Studio Ponoc’s potential shines brightest. The world they’ve created may not be logical, but it is intuitive, as Mary adapts to whatever hallucinatory wonder or obstacle the filmmakers can throw at her

An exercise intended exclusively for fans of the genre, another crude, hard-R bloodbath from the studio that brought you "High Tension" and "Saw."

To its credit, this future classic is honest about adolescent desire, self-questioning sexual identity issues and all kinds of other behavior that sends worried moms and dads into meltdown mode.

This easily exportable, minority-driven drama has the potential to launch the careers of its young directors and cast.

For readers of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, extravagant French adaptation “The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady” packs its share of surprises: killing off important characters, sparing others and reimagining allegiances that have stood for nearly two centuries.

Director Kitty Green’s high-concept documentary Casting JonBenét breaks fresh ground, probing the public, rather than family members or suspects (often the same thing).

Delightfully insightful ... Whatever comes next (and the movie makes a beautiful kind of peace with not knowing), Green has given his subjects an incredible gift: the kind of immortality only cinema can provide.

Though undeniably charming, Buñuel can be a difficult character to like here, but that’s the point: The movie dares to imagine the exact moment when Buñuel the callow prankster became Buñuel, engaged anthropologist of the human condition, whose later Mexico City masterpiece “Los Olvidados” was clearly informed by what he witnessed in Las Hurdes.

Not just one of the great racing movies of all time, but a virtuoso feat of filmmaking in its own right, elevated by two of the year’s most compelling performances.

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.