Chi-Raq constantly shifts tones from comedy to drama and back again, while most of its dialogue is delivered in rhyming couplets. The transitions can sometimes be bumpy, but never when Samuel L. Jackson pops up as nattily dressed and off-color one-man Greek chorus.

McKay has made a protest film, plainly seething – a primal howl from a guy who used to just goose howls of laughter.

It's definitely quite the spectacle as directed by the modern-day king of epics, David Lean. The movie is something that should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

Director Howard, his actors, and indeed the entire salty sweep of the film are all aided tremendously by visual-effects supervisor Jody Johnson and his team’s spectacular combination of live action and flawless, awe-inspiring CGI creations, chief among them the great, white whale.

With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast.

Smith gives the appearance of wanting to provoke, but along with his smuttiness, he wears his heart on his sleeve.

From the pure entertainment standpoint, ABL's nonstop action helps it avoid the slack moments that marred “Antz”. The dialogue, kiddie-accessible though it is, is plenty intelligent for adult enjoyment.

Shaw works mostly because Samantha Montgomery is such a compelling and likable character, that you want – nay need – her to succeed, and that is Haar’s ace in the hole.

It’s an understated performance in many ways, but in those quiet moments, whether it be a new haircut or a tapping foot, Ebrahimi provides an astonishing education of what it means to be a woman fleeing an abusive relationship.

This is a lovingly rendered, feel-bad chamber piece chock-full of elliptical psychodrama.

Offers more questions than answers. Even the Kurds, who seem the closest thing to a success story, long for a unified Iraq.

An unrelenting throwback to a gleefully caustic view of America's capacity for untrammeled nastiness.

The film is also comic, mysterious, and structurally ambitious, while offering numerous points of entry and perspective.

Despite its reliance on some overworked symbolism, the screenplay by David Tranter and Steven McGregor is smart. However, the intercut flash-forwards and flashbacks do little to aid our understanding or appreciation of the story, and seem like artistic frippery.

A staggering document of the lengths parents will go to for the sake of their child.

While the movie’s nonlinear construction is its selling point, at least for those moviegoers who prefer a bit of a challenge, an underlying vibe of melancholy gives Mothering Sunday thematic weight.

Like the doomed vessel from which it takes its tale, Cameron's film is a behemoth, svelte, streamlined, and not the least bit ponderous.

Another friggin’ superhero story that acknowledges comic-book tropes while rarely subverting them, Big Hero 6 is powered nonetheless by its witty charms, lively animation, and swift pace.

They don't make women, sexy but regal, like Pfeiffer much anymore, and Cheri is quite a monument to her.

The film’s approach suits an audience broader than the usual documentary crowd, though it’s worth mentioning that those pictures can really stay with you.

Danner’s even better on her own, as she honestly, even angrily, wrangles with not a paradox, per se, just the raw rub of life: that it sucks to be alone, and it’s scary to try not being alone. She’s exquisite.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.

Unfamiliar to most these days and it goes without saying that Harris performs a great service in the eyes of history with his film.

Celebrate Father's Day in grand movie style.

This is a character study in extremis, built around the strengthening bond and rising tension between an aimless serial killer lover and her more driven but mysterious counterpart.

With a small cast and a handful of locations – the only other character of note is Rachel (Seimetz), Thomas’ unsuspecting wife – The Secrets We Keep blends the best of B-movie thrillers and black box theatre.

Invades theatres with its fangs bared for action. It's bloody hell and we love every minute.

Be forewarned: Anthropocene is often an overwhelming experience. The human accountability on display can be tough to swallow.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

Moreover, dark as Better Days gets – and it is often an uneasy watch because of its delicately-handled themes – there's still a hopeful story about how honesty and courage and fix even the most broken systems.

At a time when conspiracy theories, in their relentlessness, their humorlessness and in their assumption of the monolithic, seem almost to protect the conspiracists by promulgating a sense of hopelessness, Sneakers's sense of fun, by contrast, seems empowering and almost subversive.

Despite its flaws, which become more evident as time elapses, Lions for Lambs is worth seeing for no other reason that you’ve never seen anything like it before.

Look at Me marks the character's shift from being the object of attention to the subject of her own dreams.

The portrait he (Hossain) paints, while visually arresting thanks to cinematographer Sabine Lancelin’s eye for Dhaka’s colorfully saturated and gritty milieu, is a grim one.

Hopper, unsurprisingly, devours scenery like he's already dead and loving it, but for once his penchant for overacting is overshadowed by the real stars of Romero's world: They're dead, they're all messed up, but it's great to finally have them back in town.

You get the sense that this elegant, tough-guy jazz caper is a movie Clint Eastwood might have been proud to make.

It gives the illusion of a conclusion and cuts to black before it has to answer for how many more questions have been raised.

With The Guest, Wingard and Barrett have once more upped the ante for the indie horror flick pack.

Helgeland's film positively seethes with bad vibrations; it's kicky, nasty urban sangfroid with pointy little teeth and a serious case of the angries, an existential hand grenade disguised as a heist film.

More than any other filmmaker making movies about the new “kids” generation, it seems to me that Araki -- with both Doom and Totally F***ked Up -- has his finger tuned most acutely to the human pulse and not just the lens shutter.

Neither Iya or Masha (in astounding first-time film performances by both women) know exactly what they want, and it is in their path to fumbling towards that understanding that they show compassion, cruelty, longing, forgiveness, and flashes of joy that fracture into melancholy.

Visually, Batman Returns is marvelous to behold. There are images on that screen that make you laugh with delight and admiration for the sheer imaginativeness of it. But Burton also brings up some really interesting themes only to lose interest somewhere along the way.

All the players deliver performances that kill.

The Last of the Mohicans rarely flinches in depicting the eye-for-an-eye savagery of war. Although not explicit in the way you might expect, it nevertheless requires you to screw your courage to the sticking place. Perhaps that's a tribute to its ability to take you along its journey without much effort – real enough to elicit a visceral reaction, romantic enough to remind you it's only a movie.

One of Linklater’s greatest filmmaking instincts involves his casting decisions. Newcomer Emma Nelson is a real find as Bernadette’s daughter. Although Blanchett’s performance seems a bit mannered and slightly reminiscent of her Oscar-winning performance in "Blue Jasmine," these are hardly flaws when the outcome is so riveting. Wiig beautifully toes a difficult line between drama and comedy. It’s a line similar to the one etched by this film: an emotional crisis mixed with laughs.

If Honey Boy was just the actor doing primal scream therapy at the camera for 93 minutes, we'd arguably be obligated to watch it. But that he delivers a captivating, haunting, and brutally honest exploration of a life we think we know.

Like every good musical, Emilia Pérez is a movie with big feelings, even if the feelings sometimes (often) outpace the logic.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.

Consisting of five years' worth of interviews illustrated by a mountain of archival footage, the film sails on the actors' consistent ability to spin a good yarn.

Combining elements of slapstick, horror, and psychodrama (not to mention Darwinism, bestiality, and harelips), Men & Chicken is a film – nay, a world – into which you just dive, and unlike most of the stuff out there, from one moment to the next, you have no idea what is going to happen. It is a black comedy that nimbly switches tones so often it can feel like whiplash.

There’s a profound mournfulness to this elegiac portrait of the end of an era, given greater poignancy by Jones’ understated performance.

Although Eska’s story is fairly simple (and created prior to "12 Years a Slave"" and "Django Unchained," which made slavery-era films part of our contemporary dialogue), it’s an emotionally rich tale.

The Hoax isn't Gere’s best movie (that honor will always and forever belong to "Days of Heaven"), but it might feature his best performance.

It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.

The "Citizen Kane" of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to death-comedy-love stories... So gleefully over-the-top that it's decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent... Sick. Perverse. Brilliant.

Filmed primarily in desaturated colors and oblique shadows, the look of J. Edgar is spot-on. The time frame jumps around, spanning decades in a single leap, but it doesn't strain the structure. Eastwood and DiCaprio have delivered a nuanced story about a man, a mythos, and an institution that relies on the facts rather than the legend.

The film’s love for its subjects is mirrored in their passionate frenzy for words, and language – spoken, written, body – in general. Above all, and what sets it apart from other cinematic takes on the Beatified, is how much fun it is. It may end in tears, but then, don’t all great love stories?

Instead of entering the jungle to find the heart of darkness, Stiller (the director, co-star, and co-writer of Tropic Thunder) goes in to take aim at the Achilles heel of Hollywood: its utter pomposity and self-importance.

It's a disturbing film on many, many levels, but beautifully shot (by Seamus McGarvey) and shot through with a horrific sense of false hope. The kid is not all right.

There are no hard truths to be found in Finding Vivian Maier (really, how could there be?), but it’s an engrossing doc nevertheless – a portrait of an American artist hiding in plain sight, a mystery with too few clues, and a sincere inquiry into how best to divine the wishes of the dead.

Farmers’ market jokes and “desert vibes” hashtags aside, Ingrid Goes West cuts to the quick, ultimately revealing a toxic, yet oh-so-appealing demeanor that has come to define our current existence.

Great fun to watch, thoughtful and timely, Thomas in Love is likely to generate some decidedly interesting post-film conversations as well.

Its doomed portrait of guileless dreamers may be found lacking in plot activity and empathetic characters. But for anyone interested in a movie that wipes clean the grungy patina of self-delusionment, Jackpot hits solid pay dirt.

There are good guys we don't care much about and bad guys that we do and even badder guys we're supposed to hate. But on the sliding scale of culpability, everybody's just a few clicks away from the next guy.

An emotional triumph.

The Nest pushes up against the edges of the supernatural, of the way that shadows in big, empty houses play tricks on you, but it's all in service of a simple drama of a couple falling apart as the rocky foundations of their world are exposed.

On the Rocks is light-hearted and, ultimately, more a story about a girl and her father. The good and the bad of that parental legacy and the task of disentangling from it forms the subtext of On the Rocks.

The ninth film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands flips the whole Predator equation on its severed head from moment one by, for the first time, really concentrating on the Yautja rather than on humans.

The movie isn't about the band, really; it's about having a chance when the cards are stacked against it. It's about climbing out. When they sing those great soul songs, it feels like a better world for everyone and that's how Parker manages to get us into his box with him.

Cruella is not as perfect as the seams Estella stitches, but there’s something ever so charming about its strut.

Audiences wanting a more rounded discussion of the U.S. occupation of Iraq might find it too militaristic and Americentric, while flagwavers wanting raw jingoism may find its questioning too probing. But as a depiction of the futility of conflict from those who fought, Warfare is far from ambivalent.

Director Ben Young’s first narrative feature is loosely based on actual events, which makes watching this psychological horror show all the more harrowing.

Frame's story is told with an intriguingly naked honesty but one that never drags the viewer into emotional prurience. It creates a fascinating portrait.

While some of the re-creations of clandestine meetings and shots of faceless men transporting the painting can be a bit cloak-and-dagger cheesy, that’s the only stumble in a film that tells a strange tale populated by a cast of eccentric and dangerous characters.

The kind of quiet, effective film that burrows under the viewer's skin and takes root before you've had a chance to realize that it's permeated your constitutional makeup.

Pamela Gray's script and the way these actors bring the characters to life are the film's real treasures.

I tried to imagine what it would be like watching this movie if I were unfamiliar with the source material. The story may be a bit strange, but certainly no less touching. That’s the thing about classics: Each reiteration, if done properly, puts us closer to the story at heart.

Leaves you scratching your head a bit, wondering what just happened, and worrying if maybe it could happen to you too.

It’s a rat-a-tat-tat animated comedy that rarely lets up, clever and silly and funny, and yes, a bit batty.

It’s a juicy role for any actress, but Lawrence takes it two or three steps further than anyone else who comes to mind could. She’s a true original, a rara avis with beautiful plumage.

Easily one of Disney’s more imaginative and detail-oriented CGI offerings in a while, Zootopia uses the classic tropes of anthropomorphized animals and comic references to pop-culture touchstones to slyly puzzle out what it means to be “civilized.”

A literate, sophisticated comedy whose humor and loss and hope linger in our hearts, like the jazz music it reveres, both sweet and lowdown.

Writer/director Seth Worley is clearly having fun with the Amber-inspired monsters made real: They bear googly eyes and vomit sparkles before incrementally scaling up to more malevolent creatures that may test younger viewers’ mettle. But Worley is just as invested in the emotional nuance of the story, which meets each of its grieving characters at their own speed and shows them a lot of grace.

Since so many of De Palma’s films have become part and parcel with the American cultural consciousness of the last 50 years, I can’t imagine this filmmaker’s insights not providing every viewer with some memorable takeaways.

Elisabeth Holm and Robespierre’s screenplay is both quirky and grounded, gleaning pearls of wisdom about the toxicity of secrets in the face of truth without getting preachy.

Just the kind of vicarious excitement for which the movies were invented.

Plenty of killings abound, nevertheless the film is a masterful -- albeit warped -- love-story-cum-road-movie that revolves around three of the most invigorating performances of the year.

A quietly searing drama about morality, priorities, and absolute truth. It’s told in a matter-of-fact manner that eschews melodrama, yet is loaded with haunting human moments and circumstances.

Wild Indian is a horrifying and thought-provoking thrill ride that packs quite a punch when it hits right.

Until things devolve into a stormy conclusion, Dheepan is a sharply observed drama about identity and separation, strangeness and commonalities, and making do while hoping for something better.

Yes, the action sequences are hilarious, and yes, the design department gets to cut gloriously loose with the kaleidoscopic, shifting microverse of the Quantum Realm, but this is first and foremost about family.

First-time feature director Kapsalis understands that the best way to capture a performance like this is to just leave the camera on her as Holly leans in to her worst instincts.

It's that rare horror-comedy that is both comedic and horrifying.

There’s an interesting tension at play within Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the strongest MCU outing since Black Panther, that’s nevertheless as much Marvel Machine as it is Raimi enjoying his return to the big screen after almost 10 years away, deploying every trick he keeps up his sleeve.

Based on actual events, this claustrophobic epic is as emotional as they come: a Holocaust story shot through with a layer of darkness both literal and figurative

Enthralling and effortlessly relevant, Birdboy is a searing contemporary fantasy, and often unrelenting in its savage attacks on greed, acquisitiveness, the disposable society, and some not-so-subtle jabs at Spanish Catholicism.

The film is so alive, so joyous and raucous at times, that the empathy you feel for these characters is all the more poignant and the catharsis is well earned. This is a film you fall into, like an embrace you wish two sisters would hold, but one that the world denies them.

A holiday film with no conscience whatsoever, Mars Attacks! will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and it definitely will make you wonder about Earth's ability to defend itself in the face of higher life forms.