Helping Elvis & Nixon remain in conjectural mode is the fact that neither actor – Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon – looks particularly like the character he is playing. Yet both actors make their roles believable through apt choices in body language and vocalization.

Director Jim Sheridan, who has collaborated with writer Terry George on In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son clearly understands the weariness that inevitably consumes not only long, seemingly irresolvable conflicts but stories about them.

In its often distressing, sometimes nauseating depiction of a woman caught in weaponized co-dependence, Alice, Darling is rarely an easy watch. Yet it is always captivating, and that all comes back to Kendrick in what may well be her most powerful performance to date.

Jackson does it all in this movie: writes, directs, stars, produces, and designs the makeup.

Although Ferrara's Body Snatchers might not be the preferred among the three versions, it is nevertheless a clever reading of the story. The decision to start the pod plot within the military is a great one, and there's a disconcerting lack of privacy for the Anwar character.

Writer/director Lonergan succeeds at capturing eloquently the disappointments of growing up and growing old. But he isn't always successful at reining in the schmaltz.

The movie's quirk isn't forced; it sincerely ponders the nature of love and of human need, opening with a quote by Jacques Lacan and ending with a shrug.

Chronicle may go over the top with its climax, but for such a giddy film, it's remarkably down to earth.

An interpersonal drama shot like a 1980s British television supernatural tale, The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story in the same way that Lenny Abrahamson’s class-riddled gothic fable The Little Stranger is, or Henrik Ibsen’s Gengangere (better known by the mistranslated title Ghosts).

First, to dispel the two talking points attending The Impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona's dramatization of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: No, it's not racist, and no, you don't have to be a parent to feel the film in your bones.

These dragons are rendered so expressively, and they have become so dear. We may not deserve them, but that doesn’t stop the heart from wanting.

The film is an intelligent study of the will to live. It's so strong that even a suicidal man rises to the occasion.

The sights are ingenious, impressively rendered in 3-D, and the sounds – including cheeky voice work by Mr. T, Neil Patrick Harris, and Benjamin Bratt – are a blast.

Just look at the cast and try to resist the testosterone pull of this movie.

If anything, A Few Good Men errs by throwing almost too many elements, themes and moral debates into the mix thus, by default, they sometimes seem shallowly developed and overly simple. Then again, that perhaps allows them to connect with more universal experiences.

DeLillo’s style, a mismatch of tonal understatement and the absurdity of an event, is basically the de rigueur of contemporary comedy, and Baumbach harnesses that style to great effect for much of his adaptation.

Absolutely, 100% kickass. Now would someone please get busy on the "Tank Girl" do-over, please?

It all adds up for a tender and loving family portrait of growing up and letting go.

Pete’s Dragon has the power to breathe fire into the most tepid of souls.

The dead have more fun than the living, again, in Tim Burton’s new stop-motion animated feature, a gift to gothlings everywhere and as exquisitely crafted as one of Federico’s post-mortem still lifes on "Six Feet Under," and just as melodramatically melancholic.

Fillion’s performance as the constable Dogberry in this section is the film’s comic highlight. Wounded by an insult, his ass-backward indignation achieves a droll momentum that will have you chuckling. All’s well that ends well, indeed.

Above all, it's a satisfying, almost restful work, as welcome in this less-than-thrilling cinematic summer as a cool soak on a hot summer's day.

It’s Fukumoto’s wonderfully weathered countenance that makes Ochiai’s film such an elegiac delight. On it, you can see the entire history of samurai cinema, or at least that essential part of it that died often, and beautifully so.

At its best, Captive State blends imaginative science fiction with the caliber of detail-oriented espionage you might find in an Alan J. Pakula film.

The cast is uniformly excellent in their roles, and Eyre's persistent use of long, trailing shots reinforces the story's elegiac tone.

Ponyo is another conceptually and thrilingly original masterstroke from an animator who long ago left Walt Disney in the dust.

With her audience's full attention assured, first-time director Kasi Lemmons then proceeds to unravel a spellbinding, powerfully seductive tale that blends Southern Gothic magical realism and disturbing family drama with the flair of a born storytelling genius.

The United States of Insanity is as much a portrait of a long-ignored, mocked, and lambasted band, and the subculture that surrounds it, as it is a trip into a deeply disturbing and Kafkaesque assault on civil liberties.

The Vessel speaks eloquently. It’s a testament to the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Bennett’s true genius is not merely in his words – although few have ever achieved his flair for simplicity and wit. It’s in his compassion.

Ill-suited to casual viewing. But its challenges are worthwhile, and the gifted Gleize is one to watch.

Good, clean fun, with none of the icky aftertaste so common to “family friendly” ware, Drumline proves irresistible in more ways than one.

Fathers and families and the impossibility of ever fully understanding either are at the heart of My Architect, and like Nathaniel Kahn, we come away from the film with a renewed appreciation of both.

That is what this film documents: racism, homophobia, misogyny, and exploitation of the working class. God bless Texas.

An inner-city tragedy that plays its story simply, sorrowfully, and beautifully.

The film is set in post-WWII Scotland, but its tone and its telling are so stark, so Medieval, that it seems anachronistic when one of its characters picks up a telephone or plays a bebop jazz record.

Don't let the big (but not that big) budget fool you: It's Troma, baby, just how you like it.

It's too bad the language prevents this independent film from being rated PG-13 because this is the kind of movie that might be capable of realistically reflecting teens' lives to other teens.

The seated dance between Johnson and Penn is witty, earnest, honest, and overflowing with kindness, making Daddio a remarkable story of two strangers opening up to each other.

Overall, No Hard Feelings is a breezy, welcome return to the sex comedy, even if it’s a bit more tempered than it would have you think. It’s a breath of fresh air that hopefully signals a change for the better, bolder, and filthier in mainstream cinema.

Remarkable, melancholy, and ultimately hopeful documentary.

Haunts the memory long after you've left the theatre.

Solet may not have explicitly made a horror movie, but it’s truly terrifying nonetheless because it stares point-blank at the lunacy that allows a seemingly normal farmer to blame every outsider for his ills. If you've ever wondered where a Cliven Bundy comes from, or an Andrew Joseph Stack III (the maniac that flew his plane into an Austin office building in 2010 because he was mad about his tax bill), this is a trip down every twisted nerve and malevolent neuron.

Ford's Indy, who doesn't quite hang up his fedora at film's end, is still the only cinematic smartass-cum-bullwhipping scholar of antiquities I'd want by my side when push comes to shove comes to Nazis ("I hate these guys"), Russkies, or, for that matter, Al Quaeda. Go get 'em, Indy, and cue the John Williams while you''e at it.

The young Dillon effortlessly portrays the thuggish Richie, and Kramer is believable as the misunderstood kid turned miscreant. Add a pulsating soundtrack featuring the Ramones, Van Halen, and Cheap Trick, and you have a vibrant depiction of confused teen life.

Splitsville succeeds because it never seems fragmented. As a director, Covino dances between the sensual and the silly while constantly exploring the core thesis of the messiness of relationships.

Yet while this vibrant and energetic version of Miike is certainly a blast, it can feel underwhelming when you know this was the same man who made the visceral and disturbed "Visitor Q" and the bone-chilling "Audition."

Associated with the modernist architectural movement centered in Southern California during the mid-20th century, Shulman’s still photographs are essential to any study of the style’s vast popularization and commercialism.

Funny, scabrous, disturbing, tragic, and improbably life-affirming, The General travels its own idiosyncratic path with more real style and substance than the past half-decade of Hollywood gangster movies combined.

Although there are shades of "All About Eve" here, the resonances lean more toward the fluid identities of the actresses in Ingmar Bergman’s work or even Assayas’ own "Irma Vep."

La Promesse is a penetrating coming-of-age story, one that argues that adulthood begins with the emergence of moral convictions.

Certainly one of the most lovingly crafted, end-of-the-world, cinematic feasts ever made, a spectacle of destruction and survival not even C.B DeMille could have envisioned.

This is Martin Scorsese, and in the end, it's his town, and his show.

The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee.

Tilting surprisingly dark – I suspect the film is at least in part about how we process trauma – but also somewhat impenetrable on first watch, it was another startlement when I realized I was crying. I can’t wait to go back.

Damon, particularly, stands revealed as a comic ace.

In the end, it's a love story after all, but a peculiarly Gallocentric one -- cheap, nasty, but salvageable nonetheless.

The most remarkable aspect of Lemon Tree, however, and the one that's most likely to land this film on many year-end Best Foreign Film lists, is Abbass' devastating and marvelously restrained performance.

The filmmakers go to obvious pains to add a bit of nutritive value to their sweet, frothy confection.

The language barrier borders the Babel-esque; it’s a surprise fount of humor, too, as when a translator is terrified to pass along an Italian tailor’s request to the French-speaking chief seamstress, knowing she’ll be furious at the added work.

Searingly potent and suggestively supple, Carax's images are rich with emotion and ideas.

Starving the Beast does an admirable job of making even the most arcane of arguments and abstruse alliances plain and clear.

The fifth Scream is an ultimate reflection of the beloved first film, and perhaps its only misstep is that the directing duo didn’t relish in their finale, soaking in some of the beautiful homages they visually set up. Even so, Scream is a blast, a solid setup for more to come.

Radical may hit all the requisite narrative arcs, but it does so with a level of nuance and examination that other films of this type either gloss over or ignore entirely.

The Salt of the Earth travels to the heart of darkness, but thankfully comes out on the other side and leaves you with a hopefulness that no matter what kind of madness and repression happen in the world, there is still hope for humanity.

It's a mix of nonviolent black liberation, mysticism, 1970s psychobabble, and a dedication to Black Santa, all based on God talking to him through a duck (Moses’ delusional mental health issues are dealt with, as is Morris’ way, with both humor and sensitivity).

What Greene both shows and helps enable may be the first steps toward a new understanding in a shattered community.

If there are two signatures to Indonesian horror, they would be an overwhelming sense of relentless dread, and poisonous centipedes. The Queen of Black Magic has plenty of both, and an enthralling supernatural siege story binding everything together so tight you'll barely be able to breathe.

This is a wonderful, disarming film, sort of like Ghost, but with all the Hollywood drained from it, leaving nothing on screen but the truth of the matter. Which is the way it should be, of course.

Innocence is possessed of a highly literate, almost classical story.

It's a riveting, nail-biting, two-buckets-of-popcorn return to form for Howard.

Carnahan and co-conspirators Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams are clearly having a blast orchestrating this symphony of Grand Guignol.

Noa may not be Caesar's heir as leader of the apes, but he definitely walks in his footsteps as a worthy protagonist in the latest iteration of this ever-intriguing sci-fi classic.

Yet it's really as a director of actors that he's a revelation. Abbott never lets the audience walk away because they have already spent so much time – if not liking him, at least understanding him. We're right there with his wife, Lydia (Newcomb, extraordinary in what could have been a cipher of a role), when her world starts to fall apart. Dumb and evil may be different, Dick Long says, but it doesn't make the damage hurt any less.

Although a few bits (the film is done in blackout sketch style) fall flat and a good ten minutes could be shaved off the running time with no visible damage, it's an impressive and irascible debut that rings true even when you're laughing too hard to hear it.

Just like the best of the 1980s actioneers, Nobody has just the right mix of brains, brawn, and gut-busting laughs.

As for the Austin-based Green, the director’s characteristically understated style is well-suited to this material. Joe recalls, in many ways, the filmmaker’s earliest features – "George Washington," "All the Real Girls," and "Undertow" – not to mention his heavily wooded last feature, "Prince Avalanche," films that capture a poetic sense of bewildered young people in the rural South.

For those who loved movies like "The Last Winter" or "Wendigo," Depraved is more of the same in the best possible way.

The details of what went down are fascinating, but the ultimate focus of Best of Enemies is television and this demonstration that it can be both eminently viewable and illuminating.

Even when the direction is heavy-handed, the Sanfords are just too compelling to ignore.

If you are unfamiliar with Dupieux’s cinema of meta shenanigans, Keep an Eye Out serves as a solid starting point. For those already indoctrinated, it’s another welcome dispatch from cinema’s premier purveyor of perplexing paradoxes.

For many films, all of this would be represented as little more than an onscreen epilogue. In the hands of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, here adapting the story of the real Buscetta, it’s the jumping-off point for a story of betrayal, modernity, and one man’s struggles with a lifetime of trauma.

Sharp-witted delight.

It is the product of a machine perfectly evolved for the sole purpose of annihilating boredom, a machine whose primary weakness is the utter indifference of those uninitiated or unimpressed by this point. For the rest of us, it’s a hearty helping of fine.

It's a simple set-up, it gets straight to the action, there's just enough personal drama to give the audience a good reason to root for the humans, and it's all just top-notch gory fun.

The worlds of the natural and the artificial are compared and contrasted in this non-narrative visual orgy.

Tangerine’s greatest accomplishment, however, lies with director Baker, who filmed the movie using an iPhone 5S. It’s an amazing achievement – the fluidity of the camerawork is exhilarating at times, the intimacy of the close-ups sometimes unsettling.

Knockout ensemble performances like these don't come around all that often, though, and when they do they ought to be savored.

Inspired lunacy.

While St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn is not the standard performative music documentary, it opens a window to her soul that many are never able to give away so freely in front of the camera.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

Actor-screenwriter Favreau and director Liman demonstrate with Swingers that they're definitely "money."

Dry, ironic humor is also one of the primary ingredients of The Other Side of Hope, and one of Kaurismäki’s signature elements.

The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride.

Wrath of Man may soon occupy the same rarified air as Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, another film anchored by an aging action star that promised revenge and delivered something more.

Neither slave nor mammy, junkie nor maid, these dawn-of-the-twentieth century African-American women are an unstereotypical breed unto themselves.

This is not a conventional love story but a philosophical one.