As a leading man, Casey Affleck has a nebbishy quality and a mumbly speaking voice that I personally find disruptive to a movie's flow.

The Insult shows how personal resolutions may be the only recourse and pathway to personal peace.

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.

Soderberg enhances the meager storyline with some creative camerawork (again shot by himself under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). The club scenes are always entertaining and some of the backstage imagery is unforgettable.

Buoyed by a soundtrack that’ll have fortysomethings cracking open 40-ounces and recalling a marginally simpler, if still chaotic, time in their lives, Straight Outta Compton’s bark is just as snarly-cool as its bite. Take that, Tipper Gore.

For a while, the freeing experience of the clan’s nonconformity gets tamped down, and the movie appears headed toward some kind of moralized conclusion. Once back on familiar ground, however, Captain Fantastic rights itself toward as happy an ending as possible, without too much compromise.

One of the most extraordinary debuts of the year.

The contrast of light and dark, good and evil, enlightenment and ignorance, innocence and corruption is the heart of this absurd, insightful, sincere, very funny fairy tale of a movie. The cast is uniformly superb.

A surface viewing of the film makes it feel like this is one of Scott’s lesser magnum opuses but on closer inspection this is a story that’s all but contemporaneous given its through-line of amoral acquisitiveness.

It’s the movie’s love story that will grab your heart however. Despite inevitable comparisons to "Away From Her" and "Amour" – other recent films about the challenges of love in old age – Still Mine is distinctive.

Nanny isn’t able to follow through on all of its ideas, but those ideas are pretty undeniable.

The horror-movie clichés form the backbone from which the film's humor and creativity emerge. This Cabin may not be the Parthenon, but it's definitely a place to worship the gods of horror.

What further sets Friendship apart from its predecessors is the sincerity at its heart. This is a movie, essentially, about the contemporary issue of male social isolation and its nasty consequences.

Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."

The film holds its twists too close to the chest, and there's little to chew on till the ambitiousness of its plotting is revealed late in the film.

The film is a wonderful choice for older teens and has considerable crossover appeal for adult audiences.

This film's intelligence and uncompromising originality commend it to even moviegoers with zero tolerance for top hats, parasols, and crap English accents.

The film is sufficiently methodical and well-researched to walk the walk behind its controversial premise. More to the point, it's terribly involving, intriguing enough to hook documentary-shy viewers.

Fun and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Brittany certainly deserves a happy ending, just perhaps not quite in the time allotted.

Paradoxical as it might seem, this planet suffering from human activity requires even more human activity if there’s any hope of saving it. National Geographic documentary Sea of Shadows is hell-bent on reminding us of that fact.

Dueñas and Lucas give knockout performances as two twisted souls seemingly locked in a match to the death to determine who is the madder one. I’ll call it a tie, and I’ll also say Alleluia is a grotesque masterpiece. L’amour fou, indeed.

In filming this movie with such artistic precision, the movie ironically winds up objectifying Griet just as much as any appreciator of the original painting.

Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory.

As a subversion to rape revenge films, it’s only halfway there.

The Wedding Plan isn’t a romantic comedy in the familiar screwball tradition. In fact, what makes this Israeli film so intriguing is its absence of tradition.

It’s a cliched happy ending, one you’ve seen countless times before, but never in this way.

I suspect it's that spirit as much as the injustice of her incarceration that drew so many people to her cause and inspired this labor-of-love documentary about her journey to hell and back.

In the House, from the eclectic French filmmaker François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Women), is an almost perverse delight, an egghead thriller that slyly shell-games its truer purpose as an inquiry into the construction – and deconstruction – of fiction. Scratch deconstruction: Make that tear-the-house-down demolition.

Egoyan's greatest strength as a filmmaker may be his ability to create and sustain particular moods and atmospheres. In that sense, Exotica lives up to its name.

Why remake Norman Jewison's staunchly cool 1968 heist film in such a lackadaisical, uninspired manner?

It’s a fun watch, and familiarity with Los Angeles isn’t required to get a kick out of these toe-dips into Koreatown and Tehrangeles and all the other micro-communities that make the city a macro-paradise for eaters.

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.

It's challenging not to see shades of Robin Williams, who was not just Belushi's equal in talent and predilection for pharmaceuticals but also his friend. Williams admitted more than once that it was Belushi's death that made him get sober, the ultimate wake-up call.

More factual rigor wouldn't hurt, but directors Quinn and Walker delve instead into the lives of their subjects with a fly-on-the-wall candor, revealing as much about American life as they do of African life.

That Aimée & Jaguar manages so well in triple duty as a wartime melodrama with a lesbian twist is remarkable.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

Taking a cue from the horse in question, Ross’ film takes its time getting into the race, but once it gets going, the going gets good.

Pattinson is fully committed to the performance – performances – and his impact subtly evolves from giggling to genuinely moving. That same evolution applies to the whole of Bong’s film, which dances so close to the edge of grand folly, the effect is exhilarating.

It sounds high-minded, but 3-Iron is in fact simple and economical, blessedly straighforward, absorbing, and hard to forget.

As small town crime stories go, Blow the Man Down is intriguingly low-key, but it's in the filmmakers' quietly bold decisions that it swells above most of its ilk.

This first release from Disney’s self-explanatory new arm, Disneynature, is at the very least peripherally concerned with the planet and its dwindling prospects, but the real renewable resource here is the groundbreaking "Planet Earth" miniseries.

There are echoes of Greta Gerwig and Dunham, and Barr’s voice never fully comes through in her homage. Instead, Sophie Jones feels like bites from these auteurs Barr so clearly admires, with brief blips that feel genuinely her own.

Bone Tomahawk is not your typical Western retread, to be sure. If someone had told me that it was adapted from one of Joe R. Lansdale’s genre-hopping horror stories I would have believed it. Kudos then to director Zahler, who on his very first film, buries that g--damn tomahawk deep in the audience’s memory.

In the end, however, Poitras’ portrait of Assange in exile exudes a less acute sense of history unfolding before our eyes than does "Citizenfour."

Mugen Train plunges straight into the continuity that its huge fanbase wants, and that opening walk among the tombstones sets up that there will be no release from the historical horror aspects that have made the show such a massive success.

Just because 7 Days knows the beats of the classic rom-com, that doesn’t make it a cover version. Instead, it’s a delightfully new riff, one filled with cultural specificities and timeliness.

In fact, I liked wrestling with Nine Days, liked feeling the act of moviewatching as an active, not passive, one, and the way Antonio Pinto’s strings-forward score nudged my brain to stop churning long enough for pure emotion to kick in

Ultimately, it asks the one vital question: Was Wallace worth his cost?

Yes, this Superman soars, but he doesn't always take us with him.

The joy and grace of Weathering With You is in how Hina and Hodaka don't reject a world that rejects them.

Like the inky void of space, there's really not much here, but what there is, is certainly entertaining.

Even if this is a film that does not always make perfect sense, Infinity Pool is a film that does not shrink from its transgressions.

Hair is personal. It's also political.

Brilliant, surreal, and emotionally draining, this first feature from American Film Institute grad Aronofsky recalls such low-budget sci-fi epics as "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" and more traditional paranoiac suspense films (Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" in particular, but also Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby") and yet manages to be a wholly original animal.

The film's politically correct repudiation of the familiar black-and-white characterizations of the white and red man is ultimately undermined, however, when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction.

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.

Even if it still isn’t the band’s time (as Bowie might say), Fanny: The Right to Rock is essential viewing for every student of rock history, not to mention feminism.

What unfolds is a deeply honest and perturbing look at petty viciousness, teenage desire, and two very different causes of psychological scarring: receiving suffering, and inflicting it.

Picture scenes of excess followed by degradation, shame, teary promises of “never again,” resolve to start anew. Then the record skips and we’re right back to the beginning of the song, and it doesn’t sound any better on repeat listen. The Outrun hits similar beats, yet manages to do so in ways that feel novel at first, and ultimately transcendent.

Sweet enough but in the end a bit of a corny-syrupy wipeout, this is middling family-night fare, but it never even comes close to the emotional or technical wizardry of Pixar's finest moments.

It's no "Metalocalypse" (pretty much the only metal comedy to completely break the rules), and there are no new classic anthems here, but if you want to bang your head to a very familiar beat, Heavy Trip is a solid cover version.

Laika's stop-motion animation is every bit as inspired here as it was in their rightfully lauded "Coraline," and the storyline never wavers from its boneyard-deep message: Being different from others is a good – nay, great – thing, no matter how many villagers (or zombies) are after you.

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

Tomei looks far too fresh-scrubbed to be anywhere near a bloody, messy hell like this, but the rest of the cast is grimly realistic, particularly Harrelson, who manages to bring some goofball credibility to what is essentially a very small role.

Junge’s ridiculously entertaining documentary includes a wealth of archival clips that still, after all these years, make you wince.

It’s a scrummy omelette of a movie, a dish that’s off the menu. The ingredients are unorthodox, but they come together in an uproarious way. As a Dubliner would say, it’s absolute gas.

Josh Brolin has rarely been better than in this role as the team’s leader, Eric Marsh.

The film’s basic problem is that it jumps around too much, with an array of speakers from Montana to Washington, D.C. to California.

It's less an examination of the psyche of one man than a PSA about manipulators. As a judge is quoted as saying: If you see Michael Organ coming, run.

While the film ably thrusts longtime fans of Mignola’s highly stylized artwork and newcomers alike into the world of that ol' debbil Hellboy, the film suffers from both scattershot character development and a serious case of H.P. Lovecraft overdose.

While celebrating the lushly romantic, it also tweaks the tradition so that Sleepless in Seattle ends up something akin to a feature-length Taster's Choice commercial.

The Outwaters stumbles because it fails to clear the second hurdle of any found footage movie: not simply answering why would the camera stay on (that's the easy part), but why would anyone edit what's been recovered in this way?

It’s both more and less than the sum of its parts, but its never less than thoroughly watchable.

Nearly three hours in length, the movie becomes an endurance test with each heartless act, relentless in its depiction of a Hobbesian state of humankind, in which life has little innate value.

So ingratiatingly good-humored that it's hard to take it seriously enough to complain. Sure, it's no great triumph of moviemaking, but it is entertaining, and a more or less plausible way to kill 95 minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Ultimately, the new life in this adaptation of The Color Purple is still worth revisiting, with performances from a stacked ensemble that help the film rise above being a straightforward adaptation.

This is one fish tale that’s well nigh guaranteed to linger in the viewers’ midnight memories long after its cinematic nocturnal emissions have unspooled.

Smart, uncanny, resistant to the short cuts of pop psychology, and shocking in the best since of the word, Steers' debut is a stunner.

What holds Earth back from greatness is that, like the human erosion of the planet's surface, it too ends up being a little wearing.

Generous and warm and howling funny, there is such a light touch to Babes, you might not even clock the depth of its observations – its inspections – of body and heart both.

I found myself falling for it, hard. It's Trevorrow's feature debut and we'd like to see more, please.

Fascinating, troubling, and dutiful, Christine, if nothing else, houses a great performance.

There is enough intrigue to keep it interesting, and if it ever feels too slow, try counting the number of people who get betrayed.

Screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and fanboys’ favorite whipping boy, Damon Lindelof, keep the film moving at a quippy clip; there’s really no fat here until the film feints a climax only to lurch the coaster-car back up the hill again.

Messages about learning to be comfortable in one’s own skin and the hypocrisy of the ruling class are delivered with genial humor and mild pokes.

In his three-acts-and-an-epilogue structure, Guadagnino inserts more story than Burroughs intended, and Queer becomes aimless.

To the filmmakers’ credit, the points of view in The Great Invisible are comprehensive and varied, though it’s clear who they view as the good guys and bad guys here.

Hey, hey, it’s the monkeys that rule this particular spot on the Earth, and watching them monkey around is a G-rated trip and a half. And with Tina Fey’s enthusiastic narration, you might even learn something, too.

True, the odd quill may scratch the surface, but there’s nothing really penetrating.

The performers are strong, the plot is good enough, and the Hong Kong setting allows Master Z: Ip Man Legacy to occasionally prove its political ambition.

The performances of these two leads are compelling and the Cheonggyecheon area can almost be seen as another character in Kim’s morality tale. And even if forgiveness is not always possible in the human condition, Pieta allows that expiation of one’s sins is within the realm of the possible.

Feuerzeig has made a fascinating documentary about a fascinating occurrence. Author implicitly stokes so many of the moral questions the incident inherently raises.

Possessor is queasy-smart near-masterpiece of psychotronic slippage. Like its protagonist’s risky psychogenic recollections, it’ll stick with you whether you’d like it to or not.

The result is a film that looks like no other in recent memory.

He even slips in a moment that will make fans of his transgressive masterpiece "Ichi the Killer" squeal with nauseated delight.

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.

It’s an erotic thriller set-up matched with the sort of morally dubious character that would have De Palma’s ears perked, but it plays like more of a farce in practice.