In short, the actors deserve a big round of applause -– especially Affleck, for finally wiping the smug look off of his face (OK, 80% smug-free); Garner, for her dead sexy mix of attitude and adrenaline; and the grunting, googly-eyed Farrell, for … well, for being "fookin’" nuts, I guess.

So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

This is Michael Bay for the John Wick generation: bombastic filmmaking at its finest with complex, multi-level action sequences that give the stunts room to breathe.

Despite a third-act tendency to gather a few spare genre clichés as it rolls along (Guns! Drugs! Angry siblings!), Robinson's film is a cut above the rest.

It’s a shrewd last move in a movie that’s uncommonly smart about when to buck convention and when to conform to the warm feels we all want.

Take Shelter is a deeply unsettling movie. Writer/director Jeff Nichols (an Austin resident and director of the award-winning 2007 feature "Shotgun Stories") doles out information as strategically as a government official.

If the film had allowed them to fall in love in real time, instead of to the drumbeat of history, their relationship would seem immeasurably more nuanced.

There are moments where Fremont can lean a bit too far in the direction of Miranda July-esque eccentricity – admittedly, not always its strongest gear – but Wali Zada is always there to anchor these scenes in a genuine, desperate need for interpersonal connection.

It's a consistently entertaining story.

A genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a young(ish) scullery maid.

Like his previous feature, "Eagle vs Shark," Taika Waititi's Boy tells a mere wisp of a story, yet both films are filled with compelling characters, situational color, knowing observations about youthful behavior, and quirky bits of oddball and fantastical humor.

In a similar fashion, the film’s music score is both high-strung and ominous – at times ringing like the aftermath of a shotgun blast and at others slow and dark like a body being dragged across a floor.

Propper’s greatest success is that she doesn’t overdramatize tragedy and trauma. Awful things do occur, but in an organic way, so that the inevitable reaction is a sense of stunned shock. That’s why there’s no sense of judgement: Instead, there is just Propper’s overwhelming sense of empathy for what it is to be young right now.

It's thanks to Akhtar's standout performance that The War Within is as electrifying as it is.

Rises above the usual underdog sports cliches to become something quite affecting and distinctive.

Thunder Road has received oodles of festival awards, including the Grand Jury Award at SXSW. The film is a singular work. Even though it doesn’t always live up to the promise of its opening sequence, Thunder Road is an exhilarating ride.

Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct.

Succeeds as a moody, evocative, and pleasing film, one that underscores its indie roots in sentiment as well as style

It's a giddy blend of horror and comedy.

Dunye's film is smart, sexy (the interracial lesbian lovemaking scene prompted an infamous little ruckus over at the NEA a while back), funny, historically aware, and stunningly contemporary.

With its strong cast, crisp writing and exploration of the messiness of rash decisions, The Threesome embodies the essence of the romantic comedy while never falling into stereotypes or cliché. It’s fun, thoughtful, and heck of a ride.

To its credit, the film never feels like a patchwork, but rather a cohesive whole. Or to be more specific: a haunting and meditative yet often hilarious cohesive whole.

The movie's tone concurrently embraces melodramatics and wry humor, a twisted suburban Oedipal knot seen through a sardonic, yet deeply involved, eye.

The Lover is one of those great films that shouldn't be missed.

The Lost World (unlike Spielberg's original film) leaps head first into the action, rushing, it seems, to get the film's real stars -- the dinosaurs -- to the screen as quickly as possible, and it does so with considerable verve.

You simply want the story to go on and on. Let's hope that Holofcener's movies do: Her peregrinations through the lives of contemporary women know few screen equals.

I Saw the TV Glow presents a potent rumination on identity, repression, and self-acceptance.

The result is a lyrical contrast of two contiguous cultures, worlds apart in their definitions of family and love but brought together by mutual awe and basic human need.

Lucky is not simply not a rape-revenge film. It's a brutal, brilliant rebuttal to the idea of a fit of cathartic violence.

Cooper mostly tamps down that Sexiest Man Alive demeanor that follows him from film to film, and Lawrence – a continually startling young talent – counterpoises her Bardot beauty with a blistering snarl. They both play hurt people clawing their way toward wellness, but it's Lawrence who makes you feel the hurt in your heart – and the hope that it'll get better soon.

Complicity is the offense under investigation in The Assistant, the first fiction film of the #MeToo era that indicts the system along with its colluders, willing and unwilling.

A countrified, monolithic thing of beauty -- gorgeous to behold despite the fact that its overlong two-hour-and-45-minute running time plays off Redford's weather-beaten golden boy good looks far too often for its own good.

It is filled with unsettling imagery and a paranoiac atmosphere, and has a wicked slant on the horror genre’s obsession with burgeoning sexuality. You’re not likely to shake it anytime soon.

Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.

It's not nearly as complex and eerily existential as the director's debut, "Moon," but in its own way it's an even more satisfying time slice of identity-scrambled sci-fi.

Working from a well-worn template, Turbo Kid nonetheless delivers on all fronts. The one-note characters you’ve seen a million times still surprise with solid performances and refreshing eccentricities thrown in for good measure.

John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself.

Though the history and the palace intrigue are not at all difficult for Westerners to grasp, a tighter running time would probably help this epic reach more eyes in America, where it has received the biggest release ever for a Bollywood

In many ways, Not One Less resembles the socialist-realist dramas of the early Communist regimes.

Somewhere between the pop jouissance of Guy Ritchie and the social realism of Ken Loach, this ballsy drama freeze-frames bleak Thatcherite Yorkshire and exposes its racist underbelly.

If there was ever a role model for brave but savvy self-acceptance, it’s the still living Saúl Armendáriz. ¡Viva Cassandro!

Fraser, Martin, and the rest of the flesh-and-blood characters look like they’re having a ball, which translates instantly to the audience as well.

Director Dan Trachtenberg proved deft at re-envisioning franchise when he dumped the kaiju found footage gimmick of Cloverfield in favor of character-driven survivalist paranoia for 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey is no less of a worthy twist of the garrote.

This Japanese film by that country’s preeminent surveyor of contemporary familial relationships explores humanity’s ambivalence regarding the matter.

It’s bravura, classic Hollywood filmmaking, and you like to think that Hughes himself would have viewed it, if not appreciatively, then at least with a sense of kinship.

Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.

Set against the gray backdrop of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this is old-school melodrama writ big from a director who’s probably better known to mainstream American audiences as the man behind the spectacular Wushu action epics Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Curse of the Golden Flower.

The film has no script; it goes from moment to moment unhurriedly.

This is the rare movie to acknowledge the impact popular music can have on our lives, particularly during the period of your life when you’re struggling to figure out who you are and – more importantly – who you want be.

Qualitatively different from its cinematic forbears: It doesn't linger on the gothic curlicues of its source material, it moves straightforwardly from place to place, and it emphasizes the emotional development of its characters with dramatic interplay rather than expressionistic, atmospheric gloom.

The subtlety and restraint in the way Reichardt links the vignettes is also commendable. It’s as if she’s reminding us that we’re all part of the grander scheme of things but at the same time disconnected from one another.

Mixing faded rock glory with Nazi-hunting and American road-tripping creates an odd hybrid that is completely transfixing, although some viewers are likely to find this film an awkward mishmash. The drama, however, is consistently offset by comic underpinnings, which are well-played by the actors and seamlessly presented by Sorrentino.

By the time Tawfiq, Dina, and the band’s boy Lothario, Haled (Bakri), commiserate over “My Funny Valentine” in the film’s sublime third act, writer/director Kolirin has created a remarkable world where no struggle is too severe to overcome with a little empathy and the Great American Songbook on your side.

The finished product is two hours of fist-clenching action, suddenly violent and steadily horrifying.

Of course, Mackerras' real target is society's hypocrisy when it comes to sex work. Prostitution is something Alice does, not something that should define her forever. Even an overly-optimistic denouement cannot undercut either that message, or the audience's desire for Alice to have a happy ending.

All in all, In the Mouth of Madness is a fun, clever horror picture, full of creepy crawlies, things that go bump in the night, and references to everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Dario Argento.

It smartly skips the goofier aspects of the original, too. Once you’ve shed musical numbers and Eddie Murphy cracking wise as a dragon, you’re in far less jocular territory...And that feels right for the material.

If nothing else, the performances of Connery and Hepburn are welcome delights.

For no matter how derivative this carefully calculated sentimental journey may be, there’s still an undeniable magic in its voice and its step likely to enchant adults – and hopefully kids – alike. Uncle Walt would be proud.

It's smart; it's silly; it's – kill me now – shear terror.

As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

The height of drollery, a cheeky ode to the liberating power of popular culture, and a fascinating look at an old dog learning some new tricks.

Hardly a serious caper film, Out of Sight instead takes a lighter approach, effortlessly offering up as many unexpected chuckles as it does bullets.

Endless Poetry is an oblique road map as much as it is a guiding aphorism. It is also a pretty decent summary of what this film has to offer.

Mistress America is maybe Baumbach’s most probing consideration of the writer’s process and development, a continuing point of interest in his filmography, from "Kicking and Screaming" to "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding."

While there are a few loose ends in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, which is faithful to but necessarily less detailed than its source, the film is a triumph of storytelling, a tribute to the power of the crowd-pleaser.

There is no surprise or justice or sense to the whole thing. Just sadness. And a sense of all the lonely people and where they all come from.

Yuasa entrances the eye, but he also know how to make your heart soar with this deft, delicate, and highly entertaining story of loss, of coming to terms with grief, of moving on without ever forgetting.

Happily drifts into the same kind of sci fi-tinged bourgeois relationship drama territory as Elizabeth Moss/Mark Duplass four-hander The One I Love, or the dimension-hopping dinner party of indie fave Coherence. Snide, sleek, and effortlessly biting, Happily is wittier and meaner than either, but also curiously romantic, like an episode of The Twilight Zone with a score by the Mountain Goats.

Doesn't just raise the bar on sci-fi and action films, it rips that sucker off and sends it spiraling into the sun.

The chaos, the confusion, the ongoing struggle between personality and purpose, The Paper really gets the beat, gets how a paper comes together and the beat at which that happens.

A sex-positive comedy that has a wit and a bite that are undeniable even though it at times traffics in traditional rom-com conventions.

Tickled doesn’t quite answer all of the questions it brings up, and there’s a nagging feeling that there is much more to this story than portrayed.

You don't have to be a student of Buddhism to be entranced by the dreamlike images that form Coleman's intimate portrait of Tibetan monks.

I was unfamiliar with X Japan (as they’re known outside of their home country) but after watching this thrilling documentary I’m a rock solid fan, scouring eBay for old concert T-shirts. As Gene Simmons notes, “If X had been born in America, they might have been the biggest band in the world.”

What writer/director Lee (himself from hill farming stock) catches is that their passion is welded in pragmatism. Homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, and callousness all float beneath the surface here, but as quiet subtext. This is the silence of the hills, where three words are volumes.

Boyle, MacDonald, and Hodge honed this wonderful coupling of music, visuals, and clever words, as well as a strange affection for toy babies, in their first film.

This comic Disney Western is at its best when Don Knotts and Tim Conway are onscreen as the bumbling bandits who try to steal from a bunch of orphans. Few people remember anything about this movie apart from the hilarity generated by this scene-stealing duo.

And Favreau? If you'd told me 12 years ago that Swingers' comic linchpin would end up helming one of the best, most visceral, and downright fun foray of all the comic-book franchises waiting in the CGI wings, I'd have told you to amscray, kid. But what the hell? Turns out irony's good for your blood.

The elegant emotional narrative is informed by their toxic relationships with their fathers.

This is an emotionally devastating piece of advocacy journalism, as it should be. It should also be mandatory viewing for both college-age teens and their parents.

It’s a crowded subgenre but among all of its haunted/psycho-killer doll forebears and contemporaries, M3GAN is still brisk, fresh, and delightfully compelling.

While there is poetic grace, that's not to say that there's no didacticism. Like Baldwin, Jenkins has a rigorous sense of what is broken in society.

A film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.

Ismael’s Ghosts drops a number of seemingly disparate ingredients into a stew that ends up coalescing into a satisfying treat, full of surprises and flavors you wouldn’t expect.

Honor Among Thieves is a big, bright, iridescent gem of a heist movie in a spectacular, vibrant, and fantastical world.

Gleeson is triumphant in this portrait of a complex man who is concurrently sensitive, boorish, brilliant, singular, and unforgettable.

Small in its movements and thoughtful in its observations, All We Imagine As Light is quietly resonant – so quiet you might wonder if it has much impact.

Charmingly subversive animation like this is a rare thing indeed, and the fact that you don't have to be under 10 years of age to thoroughly enjoy Mr. Shrek's wild ride is an added bonus.

It's a visually stunning film. For every kid everywhere, and for every adult still a kid at heart, the dinosaurs are the thing, and here, finally, Disney does justice to our dreams.

The Israeli comedy Ushpizin begins something like Guy Ritchie's "Snatch" and ends like the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" – in between it's a wholly original movie.

Yet, like it or not, the MPAA ratings is a system in which we all participate – which makes this film important to see if anything is ever going to change.

It's a knockout, sucker punch of a performance, and although it doesn't completely erase the memory of Rapace (and why should it?), Mara's doomy gaze cuts through the hype and bores straight into your soul.

The film is a sharp and keenly etched study of a man who would be the sidekick to kings.

Luce’s power is that it refuses to ever pander to absolutes. Its commitment to ambiguity, to complexity, is defining.

An unnerving descent into the extreme, anxious corners of a mother’s relationship to and comprehension of her 9-year-old twin sons – and vice versa – gone weirdly haywire, Goodnight Mommy is required viewing for both lovers of neo-gothic paranoia and mommy-haters everywhere.

Torres mixes in everything that makes his specific brand of comedy unique into Problemista: Alejandro's toy pitches are obscurely sassy, his imaginative use of CGI and costuming is fantastical, and his dry delivery is the perfect juxtaposition to the film's outlandish absurdity.

It recommends itself best to viewers who can appreciate its novelty and roll with the risks it takes.