William Bibbiani

A glorified pitch reel, submitting for our approval a few nifty movie ideas and wrapping it all up in a tidy bow. All action, no filler.

Despite one wonky misstep, it captures some real magic.

Everything’s Going to Be Great understands the hopeless can-do spirit of not quite getting there but coming close enough that you’ll never, ever give up.

It’s filtering Vera Drew’s autobiographical story through the lens of contemporary popular culture, transforming her own life into myth while transforming corporatized IP into punk rock anarchy.

The Sisters Brothers is almost as aimless as its title characters, but it's worth the journey. John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix shine as wild west hitmen who are just smart enough to know they should be smarter, whose quest leads them in unexpected, funny, and surprisingly emotional directions.

For a debut documentary filmmaker the former 'Xena: Warrior Princess' star makes tough choices and makes them boldly, and her film is more complicated and engrossing for it.

This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get. But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine 1970s porn star, as virile as he is virulent.

What’s clear is that as a stylist, Perkins is at the top of his game. Maybe even the top of anyone’s game. As a storyteller, he’s either a bold innovator or just slapping dream logic onto old-fashioned pulp.

It’s a film that engages with the dour without becoming bitter, and a film that allows for redemption but only through the hardest possible work. It’s a film that’s built on a lie but sees only the underlying truth. What an astounding religious drama, and what a beautifully realistic morality play.

Inu-Oh may get messy with its plotting, but that never dulls its impact. It’s a siren scream of a musical: angry and beautiful, rapturously animated and highly infectious.

Gracey may film Better Man through a thick veneer of showbiz glitz but — thanks in large part to the fact that, again, the star is a CGI chimpanzee — the film’s heaviest scenes sneak up on you and pack a wallop.

I, Tonya is a fairly conventional biopic of the scandalized sports star, but one buoyed by Margot Robbie's performance.

Curry Barker’s supernatural nightmare Obsession is a better version of Wonder Woman 1984.

Watching Grace and Rocky talking science, doing science and exploring the parallels between their cultures evokes the very best parts of Star Trek.

The film can’t decide if it wants to be truly bizarre, which is when it’s funniest, or simple and sweet, when it’s the most dramatically effective. These aren’t the worst problems for a movie to have.

The filmmakers haven’t redefined the zombie genre, but they’ve refocused their own culturally significant riff into a lush, fascinating epic that has way more to say about being human than it does about (re-)killing the dead.

Gerald’s Game is a set of tightly wound gears that cranks out dread. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood are as superb as they have ever been.

The Disaster Artist is a hilarious and heart-wrenching ode to outsider art, with a baffling story that would be impossible to believe if it weren’t apparently true. James Franco directs the film with sensitivity and painstaking detail, and gives a fantastic performance as one of the worst filmmakers - and one of the most unusual human beings - ever.

An audacious film that completely obliterates the expectations of the musical biopic genre.

It’s an undeniably informative and vital documentary, which clearly illustrates a disturbing political farce that has been allowed to thrive for far too long. Which is to say, at all. Where Citizen K falls short is its depiction of Khodorkovsky, whose early indiscretions are breezed over as quickly as possible in order to get to his redemption.

A film like Rebel Ridge reminds us that you can lose yourself in exciting, engaging, stimulating entertainment while still keeping your brain completely on.

It’s just shameless promotion for a book about relationship advice, released on a streaming service that also sells happens to sell the book. It even features lines like, 'This story hit so hard I Amazoned a copy of ‘Relationship Goals’ right away.

Benson and Moorhead direct and shoot their film smartly, but their performances are what ground it and give it shape. It’s Benson’s moping alienation and Moorhead’s desperate need to believe in something — no matter how nonsensical, even if he knows he’s making it up himself — that resonate.

Road to Revenge is everything you could want from a rough-and-tumble, tough-as-nails action movie. 'Sisu' was even more of it, but only by a matter of degrees.

Schnabel creates a natural, immersive motion picture that conveys the experience of being, living with, and painting like Vincent Van Gogh.

The first half is a drowsy day at the office, full of complex paperwork minutiae that, too much of the time, doesn’t even pan out by the end of the movie. The second half is more horrifying to think about but less scrupulously presented and, as such, harder to believe.

Pearl isn’t just great; it retroactively makes its predecessor great, too. It’s a handsome and sad horror drama, with scenes and shots and performances that will make you wonder if you’re supposed to laugh, cry or shriek. Until you realize that the best part of this film is that you are absolutely supposed to do all three. And you probably will.

Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable.