There is an edginess to Babygirl, an uncomfortableness that is part and parcel of the subject matter. But it’s somehow accessible. Maybe that’s a plus, maybe that’s a minus; perhaps it depends on your taste for this sort of thing. But there’s undeniable power in Kidman’s performance, one of the most interesting and, along the way, best of the year.

Is Whose Streets? the only story we should see and hear about what went on in Ferguson and after? No. It’s by its nature incomplete, one side of the tale. What makes it important is that it is the side that too often goes ignored. But here, at least, no more.

A compulsively watchable look at Rivers.

As a portrait of modern warfare, politics and propaganda, Coriolanus is intriguing, even if the gritty action sequences don't quite measure up to the realism of "The Hurt Locker."

It’s not a warts-and-all treatment because, at least in this telling, there are no warts. It’s more about securing Berra among a new generation of fans as one of the greatest players who ever lived. And on that front, it more than succeeds.

There’s a great journalism movie hidden in Bad Education. Forgive the biased viewpoint. Luckily, there’s also a really compelling, breezy comic crime drama — with a terrific performance by Hugh Jackman — sitting there in plain sight.

The film is slow at times, despite bursts of action, and Chandor could have let it breathe a little more. The seriousness grows stuffy every now and then, but these are small quibbles. A Most Violent Year is an outstanding movie about business and marriage, not necessarily in that order.

You can read Emma's affair and its eventual effect on Edoardo as an inverted oedipal thing, or perhaps as a metaphor for decadence, the embodiment of a family that subconsciously realizes it's in decline and must fight to warm its blood.

David Fincher's meticulous direction pays off in spades. From the way he expresses the book's construction — not quite he-said/she-said, but a version of that — to the way the film looks (cold and uncaring, like its characters) to his work with actors (go Tyler Perry!), Gone Girl delivers.

Simien's film is one of those rare works that teach by appearing not to — you laugh at some of the antics, cringe at others, but the film is so entertaining you may forget you're learning something.

Negga is fantastic. Her eyes alone convey passion, the feeling that she has had enough. Words aren’t needed. Good thing, because neither she nor Richard use them too much. They’re living their lives, harming no one, and being harmed for it. It makes the story one of the best examples of making a universal situation personal.

An epic-length, fascinating film about faith and its opposite number, doubt.

In an age in which celebrity gossip and page views trump all, hearing two masters talk intelligently about movies and how they’re made is, if nothing else, a welcome treat.

It shouldn’t work, honestly. There’s too much going on in too many directions at the same time. But Villeneuve brings it all together somehow. We’re more than five hours in between the two films (this one is 2 hours and 46 minutes), and while the lack of a sequel wouldn’t be as infuriating as it was last time around, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’m ready for more.

Think of Drive as the cinematic equivalent of riding in a car that projects a fashionably stylish image. Sure, the gas mileage may be terrible and the engine unreliable, but it's such a smooth, good-looking ride that you'll put up with the annoyances.

David O. Russell's film makes use of some terrific performances - Christian Bale is brilliant, as is Melissa Leo, even by their lofty standards.

[Jodorowsky's] a hoot, and so is Jodorowsky's Dune. But it's something more, too, a look at twisted genius and missed opportunities, a sad but intriguing combination.

There is so much beauty in Monster, and so much sadness.

With a filmography stuffed with masterpieces, the Coen brothers’ greatest trick is balancing the ironic commentary on cinema and storytelling with the dramatic impact of compelling human stories well told. And it’s a trick they pull off again and again.

Yelchin and Poots are especially good.

The film feels overlong and a bit repetitious, but it’s obviously a complex subject that deserves a thought-out treatment.

This is a film that finds horror not in the extreme, but in the mundane. That alone makes it a worthwhile entry in a genre that it both inhabits and rises above.

The world Bell creates in In a World ... is so agreeable and inviting you’ll enjoy the visit.

It is not hyperbole to say Oyelowo is a revelation. The British actor brings phenomenal humanity, grace and torment to a historical figure who once seemed to loom too large a legend to make flesh on screen.

This truly is what a summer movie looks like — and yes, feels like.

Green shows us nothing lurid, nothing explicit. Instead she lets the toxicity build, bit by bit, until it’s seeped in everywhere. That’s powerful, and that’s worse, too.

Eschewing a tidy wrap-up, Reeves doesn't leave us feeling manipulated, as so often happens in films like this. Instead, we want to know where the story goes from here, and that's no small accomplishment.

Denis (“Beau Travail,” “35 Shots of Rum”) is a very particular filmmaker, forcing you to adjust to her rhythms. Never is that more apparent than the last scene, which goes on for a quarter of the film or more, right through the end credits and beyond.

The look of the film is jaw-dropping at times, beautiful to behold. If the story... can't quite keep pace with the look of the film (and, alas, it can't) it will take you awhile to notice.

Succeeds in portraying a life so solitary that, even when he knows what's going on, that's a deal Owen is willing to make.

Fences is a feast of brilliant acting, in a story that’s sometimes as difficult as it is powerful.

Even more than an expose of bad reporting and social hysteria, The Witness is an intimate exercise in grief and healing

It may be slow by Hollywood standards, but it's accessible at every moment, and we come away feeling that human character is more complex, and perhaps darker, than any studio is willing to test an audience with.

Malik Bendjelloul really knows how to spin a yarn.

If it’s not great — think of a sort of JV “Commitments” and you’ll have the idea — it is surely winning.

Once again, Sofia Coppola captures how it feels to be a woman unrealistically idolized by a romantic partner — instead of simply respected.

The Innocents, writer and director Eskil Vogt’s horror film about children with supernatural powers, is definitely difficult to watch, a brutal bit of business. But the thrills aren’t cheap — they’re hard earned, if you can call them thrills at all.

It's all or nothing with Black Swan. Either you embrace its headlong descent into madness brought on by the pressures of artistic perfection, compounded by smothering anxiety, or you reject it. It's that simple.

This is a film as powerful as it is painful.

I can say without hesitation that if you’re looking for something ambitious and difficult and super weird — and satisfying, in the end, though think of that in loose terms — I recommend the rather amazing experience.

Indignation sneaks up on you, and that may be its greatest difference from the blockbuster mentality. Its explosions are quieter, but just as destructive.

You may or may not be surprised by developments here, but it doesn’t really matter. What does is the honesty of the characters and the absolute delight it is to spend time with them.

All of this is interesting, in varying degrees. But watching and listening to Fox talk is magnetic.

This is one film I think you should remain seated for as the dark comedy and psychological thriller will leave you feeling better about yourself in the end.

When it reaches its boiling point, Les Misérables absolutely roils.

Kajillionaire is hyperbolic and surreal, but also, with July’s unique touch, sweet.

Top Gun: Maverick is a movie-star movie with great action pieces best seen on the biggest screen available. It’s a modern take on old-fashioned fun.

In many ways BlackBerry is the standard-fare cautionary tale of tech start-ups. Insert your Icarus metaphors here. But there is a kind of sweetness to the film that makes it more compelling than the typical rise, crash and burn movie.

In a world where film arguably celebrates youth more often than middle-aged people in Hollywood, it's refreshing to see the opposite artfully done with one step on the dance floor at a time.

The Last Man on the Moon is one of those movies we didn't realize we needed, but turns out to be just the thing for our fractured, cynical times.

It’s Allen’s best film in years, an authentic-feeling deconstruction of a life. It isn’t always easy to watch. It isn’t exactly fun (although parts are funny). Blanchett’s performance sometimes overpowers the story. But it’s an essential work in Allen’s later canon.

It Comes at Night is soaked in uncertainty. It makes us uncomfortable because we want answers and can’t have them. And if there’s anyone who knows how to make an audience uncomfortable, it’s writer and director Trey Edward Shults.

Please Give is an almost perfectly rendered slice of life, buoyant with wonderful performances.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is not a great piece of cinema, exactly, but it delivers on what it promises, time and again.

Roadrunner, however, lays out a convincing case that Bourdain was in pain for much of his life, desperate for answers. But even he may not have known the questions.

The Dark Divide will win over nature lovers with stunning visuals and an overarching message about the importance of conserving our unpredictable planet and relishing the beauty of exploring it.

As with First Reformed, Schrader crashes right through the boundaries separating the literal from the surreal. It is a strange journey, increasingly so, but an immensely satisfying one.

Johns makes it all bearable. Inviting, even. His performance has such a gentle humanity, especially in the darkest scenes, that you can’t turn away. You don’t just root against the system. You root for him, and that’s an important distinction.

The Dark Knight Rises brings the Batman story to a close in enormous, satisfying fashion, not just on the huge scale it builds for itself, but on a human level as well.

The Lost City of Z is a throwback, an epic film about a grand adventure.

For fans, counting up how many superheroes can emerge from the clown car of one three-hour movie is half the fun. For casual moviegoers — say, those who might skip minor installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — it accounts for half the exhaustion, a bit of world-building fatigue to go along with the sensory overload of a fantasy realm that seems stuck in perpetual apocalypse.

A fantastically entertaining movie.

Blue Ruin is a movie about revenge, but it reaches far past the bottom-shelf titillations of fantasy to tell a richer, character-driven story with a protagonist who's less avenging angel than ghost.

It's great when a movie messes with your head. And Ex Machina, screenwriter Alex Garland's directorial debut, does just that, pretty much from start to finish. The writer of "28 Days Later" and "Sunshine" purports to examine A.I., or artificial intelligence. What he's really after is something at once more exotic and more relatable — and infinitely less predictable: human nature.

The Tribe is that rare breed of film so masterful in execution it requires watching once, yet so devastating you may never be able to stomach seeing it again.

More than anything, The Sisters Brothers is an exploration of how far you can take an anti-Western before it snaps out of the genre’s orbit entirely.

What it lacks in thematic innovation it more than makes up for with enough memorable characters and visual splendor to make Zootopia a perennial Disney favorite.

A Love Song is, no doubt, a small movie (it only lasts 81 minutes), a miniature study of a life. But it is an oddly compelling one. And Dickey and Studi masterfully make the difficult look easy.

Although not everyone in the cast is as comfortable with the dialogue as Acker, for whom it seems natural, there is a clear love for the material here in every performance, in every shot. It’s not stuffy or remote. It’s fun.

For all its heart and beauty, The Breadwinner sputters a bit to a close. Its themes are undeniable — one walks away feeling angry and empowered. But with the story’s soft focus, one soon forgets why.

Ultimately it's Wasikowska's performance that captivates. It's oddly compelling — she doesn't say much, and what she does say is usually off-putting. But there is a fierceness in her eyes as she walks, a determination that almost dares you to look away.

Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's see-it-to-believe-it feature debut as a director, goes from agreeably strange to weird to surreal, but its brilliance lies in how it never stops feeling real, genuine, lived-in.

War is much on the minds of people right now, and 1917 is a good reminder, flaws and all, of what that really entails. The contradiction, of course, is that it is not one long slog through gorgeous sunsets, but a million little moments that make up the effort. That’s kind of the movie Mendes made, and yet it’s not. You want to feel a movie like this, but too often you simply appreciate it.

As a cinematic diatribe set in a stark moral universe, Goldstone comes in loud and clear.

It’s only Fargeat’s second feature after 2017’s “Revenge.” That was a good movie. “The Substance” is a substantial leap forward and a film people will rightfully be talking about for a while.

I liked the movie — it’s certainly well made, and a lot of fun — but I mostly found myself laughing at it, not with it.

[Denis] definitely never holds back from shocking the audience with multiple sudden deaths, haunting rape scenes and various graphic moments. But with such little character development, why invest in these stories?

Even at its most disgusting, and it does get disgusting, the film is engrossing. It’s not that you can’t look away. It’s that you want to look and look again. That’s the lure of the vampire. And it’s the lure of “Nosferatu,” Eggers’ best film (at least so far).

It’s not particularly revelatory for fans, covering such a long expanse of time that it’s perhaps necessarily a little shallow in places. It is, however, a sometimes fascinating look at a career that had highs and lows even fans may not know about, as well as the tricky dynamics of creating music with your family.

Director Terence Davies dispenses of any gaudy romantic trappings and makes something much more beautiful in A Quiet Passion, a delicate and measured drama that plumbs the depths of the poet’s strange heart and the agony of her intelligence.

So what drives these men? “Because it’s there” merely scratches the surface. Meru may not answer the question completely — likely nothing can — but it is a thrilling, harrowing attempt.

Moreno felt as if she didn’t have much worth as she struggled, she says. One of the most satisfying things about the film is that through decades of struggle she clearly has found that worth. It’s in her confidence, the confidence of someone who has come out the other end of a long struggle with the knowledge than nothing is going to get her down. You can’t get the best of her. It’s inspiring.

Clemency isn’t exactly a good time at the movies, but it’s definitely an enlightening one.

Yes, it’s graphic. But that’s the point. The discrimination and racism that fueled Emmett Till's murder and sparked the civil rights movement are still omnipresent.

It isn’t the kind of movie where you nitpick the details. It’s the kind of movie where you float along from one scene to the next, buoyed by catchy hits like “Golden” and “Soda Pop.” They don’t just serve the story, but drive it.

“Nope” is good — quite good in places. But it’s not great. In fact it’s not clear that Peele means for it to be, odd as that sounds.

Like the original, Finding Dory makes us understand the fears, joys, struggles and triumphs of family.

Jiro Ono is a magician.

Cliff Curtis is staggeringly good as Gen.

It’s an assured debut from a rising star that nails tone and pace. It would be a solid summer thriller were it not grossly undermined by its astonishingly regressive treatment of its leading lady.

It’s heartbreaking at times, but it’s also uplifting — the three subjects are fierce advocates and activists, and Cohen’s empathetic storytelling makes it a personal journey. It’s also often entertaining, because the three are so expressive and engaging.

Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay Victoria is that while you go in knowing about the gimmick, it doesn’t take long for Schipper to make you forget it almost entirely.

It boasts a terrific performance by Katherine Waterston and an even better one by Elisabeth Moss. It's not exactly a grand old night out at the movies, but it's still well worth the time (90 minutes) and effort.

Paddington is a mostly smart update loaded with charm, and it preserves enough of the fuzzy feelings for purists to walk away with a smile.

Despite the specificity of the setting and the performances, there is a universality to the story.

Mendelsohn manages to make us simultaneously feel sorry for him and hope, against what seem like steep odds, that he somehow succeeds.

It’s a powerfully sensual movie, gorgeously lensed colors and textures conveying its characters emotional states while thoughtfully exploring the range of human sexuality through Adenike’s experience.

Floridly explicit, gleefully disgusting and yet somehow kind of sweet, the film is a showcase for Carla Juri.