For those who only remember Houston as the train-wreck spectacle she devolved into during her latter years, this documentary will do a good job of providing the basic outline of her life.

Everything about this swift and gorgeous and tremendously enjoyable film is played out in a rush of staccato edits, crisp performances, and charmingly giddy subplots that coalesce into Spielberg's most purely entertaining movie in years.

Capitalizes on the audience’s familiarity with the many players and their complex backstories, but never advances the ball down the field, tenders no new thought or wrinkle to the franchise. It’s the difference between a diverting entertainment, and a riveting one.

The masterful Land of Mine slowly, almost without notice, transforms into one of the most viscerally intense anti-war films since Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun."

An action-packed and hilarious story of two sisters whose bond is tested, Polite Society is worth seeking out. Come for the action and loving send-up of martial arts films, and stay for the sisterly support that shines through.

The debut feature by writer/director Cory Finley began as a script for stage, not screen, and that shines through in the intricate dance of dialogue. There's a hint of David Mamet in his use of strictly defined silences, and flat statements as heavy implications.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen every episode of all 12 seasons of the show or if you’ve never watched the Animation Domination mainstay on Fox in your life. The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a summer fun carnival ride through the Belcher universe.

The film further establishes the Philippous as some of the best directors of young actors working today.

The problem with this American indie filmed in Korea is that, despite the captivating faces and sad predicament of these little girls, nothing much happens.

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

At the age of 81, Altman may show signs of mellowing, but he again emerges as a master filmmaker.

These women are marvelous, with ancient, creased faces and the kind of admirable f...-all attitude that comes with age. I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Truly, this is some kind of wonderful. (Horrific, hilarious, disturbing … but wonderful.)

Among the many things that Baadasssss! is, it is also a movie about moviemaking. In fact, the film should be a primer for anyone about to make an independent film.

Trainwreck can be furiously funny. It just goes down too easy. It’s scared of its own sharp edges. The sly raging against the machine of Inside Amy Schumer has gone missing. Here, the rage, curiously, is turned inward.

A real winner -- smart, funny, subtle, and resonant -- and there's not a hanging chad in sight.

The film's greatest strength undeniably lies in Gosling's revelatory portrayal of Danny.

About a Boy knows exactly what it wants to do: It wants to make you smile, and grin, and then laugh with recognition, and it manages all three, again and again.

By trying to give these women happy endings, or proposing fake reasons for how they came to produce indelible works, these alternative histories only achieve the opposite. They rob them of the truth of their lives.

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.

Holding this highly mannered but incredibly beautiful work together is lead actress Swinton who appears in nearly every shot. Also a favorite of director Derek Jarman, Swinton conveys such an intelligence and grace that it penetrates and expands whatever material she is handling. Let's hope that the arthouse success of Orlando makes Swinton a more frequent visitor to our shores.

Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it.

That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.

Point Blank passes enjoyably, relentlessly, and determinedly to the moment of its final gasp.

Feels feverishly dreamlike while keeping its subject firmly rooted in the present. If you desire a female empowering musical manifesto with both claws and kisses, here it is.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

Michael Mann is in top form here helming this bone-chilling thriller.

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

Titane is a dance. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her engrossing debut Raw is a flashy, traumatic body horror explosion that is just as gnarly as her first film.

The Deeper You Dig may be a small production, but everything in it feels aspirational, so much bigger and heartfelt and horrifying than can be expected.

Overall, Rogue Nation is a solid, mildly subversive entry into the series that will have you humming Lalo Schifrin’s indelible theme music for the rest of the week, but probably not lingering over the finer points of the plot.

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

Hatching does its best at cracking the surface, but never quite sinks its claws as deep as it wants to.

Fernandez is excellent as the maladjusted daughter, but the film's heart and soul is embodied in Galina's noble, understated performance.

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

Sweet, wild, and openhearted, Diamantino is as charming as its muddle-headed protagonist. He may be football's version of a bear of very little brain, but he's the only one with a clear thought in his head.

Owen’s story is unique, and deserving of singling out.

The movie doesn’t stand in judgment of its characters, which will probably disappoint audiences who think it ought to, but its breezy tone and ultimately affirming message should please comedy fans with an appreciation for the offbeat.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

Terribly Happy isn't, but it is wonderfully unhinged, and a painstakingly constructed meditation on a place where good and evil meet, mate, and make sour times sublime and, dare I say it, beautiful.

The final payoff is a good one and relates to something tossed out in the film's opening minutes. Still, this is middling Chabrol, not as tight and suspenseful as his best work.

It’s a bleak and introspective movie, interrupted by outbursts of bloody, senseless violence, made tragic by the interactions between Nathan and Polly.

Berserk from the outset, Natural Born Killers lunges for our collective viscera in its opening sequence (surely one of the most brilliant establishing sequences of all time) and never lets go for the next two hours.

This film is sweet and frequently very funny. It isn’t perfect. Some of those imperfections – or, more to the point, irritants, such as the twee chapter headings and college-essay framing device – are carryovers from the YA novel, written by Jesse Andrews, who also adapted the novel to screen.

It’s that rare film that truly tackles how people live within a bloody conflict.

If you’re a movie geek and Hitchcock freak (guilty!) who can never get enough of this kind of stuff, 78/52 will rock your world.

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.

Though we will differ on the methods of improving the American health care system, Sicko's enduring contribution is the undeniable evidence that the system is broken. If the film brings the debate out into the open of our movie lobbies and living rooms, it can’t be long before the conversation trickles into the corridors of Congress.

Doesn’t provide any answers, and that’s both its strength and weakness.

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.

As a mood piece, A Bigger Splash leaves a lasting impression.

Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.

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

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.

Even though some of the religious and traditional aspects of the film may not travel well, its spirit is universal.

Frankenweenie is that rare film that's both kid- and adult-friendly.

It’s ridiculous and smart, hilarious and terrifying, difficult to swallow and probably a necessary antidote to the cacophonous history of a land that all too often seems anything but holy.

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

With a modest budget that belies the eye-popping visuals at play, filmmaking duo Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have affectionately crafted a sweet romance surrounded by the tart crunch of satire.

As in Richard Linklater’s lovely "Before Sunrise," the film’s principal pleasure comes from watching two people connect as they get to know each other over the course of several hours.

With a running time of only 84 minutes, Rize frequently feels padded. However, there’s no denying the fascination of watching these bodies in motion, and perhaps the ascendency of a new, American-born art form.

I could say Bottoms shines because it nods to nostalgia but feels totally of our time, or expertly inhabits the buddy comedy genre formula while providing its own absurdist twist – but most importantly, it is simply, joyfully, ridonkulous.

Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.

Throughout, Horan tactfully pulls from archival interviews and footage of the singer to mark her meteoric rise as a teenager in the 1970s; her tumultuous, tabloid-fodder, 1980s career; and her effective blackballing from the industry when she became too rock & roll and irreverent for country sensibilities.

Foulkrod's film instead airs some of the hard-won truths learned by American soldiers from experience.

For a film that is so fresh, thrilling and overdue in its very existence, just by having three Asian-American women leads, the narrative seems hidebound: for a story that break so far from the traditions of the Disney fairytale, it's still deeply predictable.

As for that central question: Yep, it’s art, all right. One only wishes they’d gotten down to the business of it sooner.

Wasted! is sure to be mind-expanding for anyone who’s never contemplated what happens when excess food is scraped off one’s plate. But the film’s real novelty lies in the demonstration of actual solutions that have already been put into practice.

Director Maggie Betts never lets herself be saddled by historical events in crafting a narrative filled with empathy, humor and life.

Understandably, a filmmaker tackling the retelling of a national hero must do so with great delicacy, but The Sea Inside presents not so much a hero as a saint in Sampredo.

The cast is uniformly excellent and delivers enthusiastic performances, even the ones played by puppets, and the pacing is lively and not at all boring.

A spare, discomfiting score and uniformly excellent performances, and you have a quiet little masterpiece of dark and chilling beauty.

Flushed Away has a wicked, smart, and subtle sense of humor.

Visually, this is a charming addition to Japanese interpretation of pastoral England, with the overall vision of manor houses and rural idylls feeling perfectly bucolic. There are moments when some elements of culture or set dressing ring a little false. It's in little details.

Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen.

Writer/director Megan Park follows up her debut feature, the South by Southwest award winning high school shooting drama The Fallout, with another look into the lives of teenagers. But whereas her first film took a suffocating dive into the emotional extremes of their inner lives, coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is sweeter without being cloying.

For a movie about happiness, Thirteen Conversations is terribly joyless. Thirteen Conversations tries hard and its ambitions are provocative, but its conversations often fall like that Zen tree in the forest.

Barcelona does have brief flashes of brilliance.... For the most part, however, Barcelona offers nothing much interesting beyond some beautiful scenery and generally annoying characters.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame ultimately misses its target, as it's more likely to find acceptance with an older-than-average Disney crowd.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think jackass forever is exactly what we need right now.

Not in recent memory has a movie so short – 90 minutes on the nose – been so stagnant and stubbornly slow to build. And that's exactly the point.

Nolan’s end-act pacing has always felt ponderous – but it’s not enough to ruin what is surely the most intellectually and viscerally engaging action film in years. The soul doesn’t stir, no, but everything else is wildly somersaulting.

Serenity evinces the kind of swashbuckling bonhomie that made so many of us fall in love with the original "Star Wars" films, a love that was mightily tested by George Lucas' humorless prequels.

It’s a query with no answers, a period piece about the present. It’s idiosyncratic, actively noncommercial, and doesn’t follow the rules – like playing a game of chess on a board with no squares.

This veteran actor is always great, and it's just a little bit sad that he has to play a big, scary demon for us to sit up and finally take notice.

There's also a little something smarmy about the interactions between the lawyers and their clients, all of whom are poor.

A handsomely constructed and executed movie, the kind of effort that deserves appreciation, on its own terms, for what it both dares and accomplishes.

Hitchcock's comedic charms shine in this delightful story about a corpse that just won't stay buried.

This French import is as casual as the summer afternoons of childhood that it depicts.

If taken merely as a vaguely historical spy thriller, Farewell is a dandy tale.

Ultimately the composition comes off as both overplayed and underdone.

As grisly and disturbing as Bones and All is, the film strikes me more as a romance, a coming-of-age movie, and/or a lovers-on-the-run chronicle. Dark and bloody, definitely; but also, at times, sweet and hopeful.

If Villeneuve's grand and epic take evokes any earlier cinematic vision of Dune, it would be the first failed take, which would have seen director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt cross similar wastelands as they did in Lawrence of Arabia.

There are a number of things that work in The Invitation: The cast is uniformly great (Tom Hardy – er, I mean Marshall-Green – is a standout, Lynch basically has a monopoly on the creep factor at this point in his career), and the film is elegantly shot.

You can't help but feel conflicted watching this superb documentary about the seminal New York-based punk rock vanguard, the Ramones.

The slowness of the film's first half will be off-putting to many, but the film's turns and final twist will reward the patient.

It's a kick, it's a gas, and it gives the Rat Pack itself a run for its money.

Plenty of fun while it lasts, but its aftereffects are mighty fleeting.