In the end, the film is caught in a tug-of-war between absurdity and sincerity.

Ultimately, it’s an aspirational and inspirational tale of daring to reach for the stars even when authority figures tell you they don’t exist – and the value of having a friend who believes in you, even if they have an umbrella handle for a nose.

For a film about looking for a sign, looking for solace, Room quite brazenly offers neither. It isn't an easy film, but the world's already got plenty of easy and easily digestible films.

The film provides invaluable context in its detailing of institutional racism in the Sixties and Seventies and in its emphasis on Ellis as an advocate for equality and as a righteous shit-stirrer.

The film stars “It Girl” Clara Bow and a very young Gary Cooper in a WWI love triangle, but the film’s real highlight is its spectacular aerial photography.

No other film in recent memory has featured such a terrifically retro maniac or revisited the heyday of Eighties gore films with such gleeful, moist abandon.

Gaunt, reserved, unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight having risked life and limb to avert nuclear war, he's a figure from a bygone time, a bygone culture, and that's what Dominic Cooke captures so perfectly.

It's a film that you can take home and chew over later, both abrasive in its loudness and reflective in its fleeting, feminine moments of silence. Well done.

In the end, Zentropa is above all unique in its radical take on the inherent confusion of postwar Europe, offering the viewer a glimpse like none he has had before.

In the Aisles is a triumph of mood, aided by an eclectic soundtrack that skips from Delta blues to electro-pop to Strauss and Donizetti, and a worthy stage for Rogowski to continue introducing himself to an international audience.

Though its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, Tarantino has created a movie with all the gritty punch of a .44 in the belly.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance's byzantine plot appears fairly straightforward at first, but slowly, deliberately moves into uncharted waters with the fluid grace of a tiger shark bumping up against a potential meal.

A slow-burn stunner, where nothing much of consequence happens, except life itself.

A kicky, knockout thriller that ingeniously taps into the current climate of paranoia surrounding personal privacy in the Information Age.

A romantic screwball comedy, one is as intoxicated by words, dialogue and characters as by love.

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.

Dyer’s masturbation scenes feel innocent as opposed to titillating, and she charms with her mix of cautious curiosity and wide-eyed expressions.

Rebuilding Paradise speaks to the resiliency of human beings, and maybe something about the American can-do spirit.

The Long Game is shot well and sounds good, and has potential on its quest to be a first generation American anthem.

The Rocketeer is a gung-ho all-American summer flick with the guts not to try and be anything else.

A bright, amiable chronicle of the vivid lives of the women of Juchitán.

It's not perfect -- Thornton's slack-jawed yokel Jacob is played a bit wide of the mark and Fonda continues to irk in some indefinable way -- but it's a revelation for longtime Raimi fans. And it's a hell of a ride too, for both Raimi fans and newcomers alike.

Wingard’s film is its own subset of fractious family crazy.

Housebound nimbly jumps through the hoops of horror tropes, inventively subverting them along the way. The fact that it sticks the landing is a testament to Johnstone’s solid script and direction.

Set against a backdrop of deep budget cuts and high-stakes testing, this story makes an eloquent plea for the crucial but endangered role of afterschool programs in public education.

As with "Sunshine," I'd call Juno a family film if only it didn't make teen pregnancy look so sporting. Instead, we'll settle for that rare bird, an indie comedy that uplifts – funny and smart, totally trying to be cool and succeeding, and heartfelt to boot.

It is beautiful, quiet, tender, and borne aloft by that rejection of the idea of hopelessness. You don't have to believe in one particular romance, it whispers, to still believe in romance.

Because Wendy and Lucy is so lean on plot and dialogue, there are long spaces to contemplate Wendy and her situation, and the logistics are mind-boggling.

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

It's a daredevil's ride that keeps you glued with fascination.

Flesh and Bone is far from a comfortable experience to witness, so if you like your films “over easy” this will not be to your liking. But if you like entertainment that cuts to the marrow, then Flesh and Bone is something to see.

Beguiling performances and a story that veers between social observations, period detail, and genuine humor make this movie an end-of-the-summer stand-out.

Is nothing if not exquisitely detailed: It's like a blood orange that del Toro spends the film seductively unpeeling, revealing layer upon layer of meaning and pathos.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an outlier: a space opera in a largely earthbound movie cycle (excepting the occasional red-eye to another dimension in the Thor pictures), candy-colored and bopping where the other Marvel movies are muted and imposing, and the funniest one to date, without a doubt.

The World’s End affectionately takes a page from our Fifties sci-fi films.

The Homesman gives us a West devoid of gunslingers and heroes and hearth vs. hunt dynamics, and instead shows us people trying to get through their days alive and sane.

When Les Misérables is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it's usually because Russell Crowe has opened his mouth.

As the energy-beam projecting, space-flying defender of the underdog, Brie Larson has captured the pugnacious, charming, steely Captain Marvel in the ways she deserves.

The film is one big advertisement for the multicolored building blocks from which it’s made. The Lego Movie may be the shrewdest marketing ploy you’ve ever seen.

The saga unfolds in a fairly charming fashion, and only Allen’s abrupt ending breaks the spell. Clearly, the filmmaker has no more ideas than Jasmine about how to resolve her predicament.

An outstanding cast have crafted a delicate, eloquent picture of believable humans in so many gradations of hurt, but it stops just shy of catharsis.

The atrocities against children begin to acquire an unwelcome redundancy in their relentlessness and threaten to inure the viewer.

If you scratch the surface too deeply, a few things might not ring true, but there’s no greater pleasure to be had than the film’s opening and closing sequences during which Murray, alone on the screen, dances, then sings along to the music coming through his headphones.

The storyline is something of a hodge-podge but what the narrative lacks in honing and straight-ahead storytelling it more than makes up for with well-aimed barbs and acutely focused observations...this funny, funny satire gets us where we live.

Diary of the Dead is meant to scare your pants off, blow your mind out the back of your skull, and then deposit you ungently back into reality, quaking a little, maybe, but still alive and, unlike the undead, thinking.

The problematic issue of “keeping up with the Joneses” has rarely played as delicately or as honestly as it does here.

Out of a terrific ensemble cast, Pugh (Midsommar, TV’s The Little Drummer Girl) emerges as the star.

While the story may be a common one (for the action genre, at least), Rodriguez, who wrote, produced, shot and edited the entire film himself, has a uniquely straightforward wit that makes what might otherwise have been just another shoot-'em-up something more than that.

What is so surprising – even exhilarating – about The Names of Love is that it shucks off the desultory roadblocks that engine the modern romantic comedy – all that razzmatazz of missed connections and dunderheaded misunderstandings.

Frankly, I'm shocked that Disney, frequent purveyor of sleeping beauties and singing animated animals, is the studio behind this wonderfully black comedy/morality tale for children, but maybe Disney, too, saw past the material's deliciously macabre bent to find also a thrilling little essay on friendship, fate, and the restorative powers of onions.

[Yuasa's] latest, magical and bloody historical musical drama Inu-Oh, is a rock & roll, stadium show, pyrotechnic extravaganza.

Gentle and comedically nuanced exercise in mourning.

A new film that takes an unflinching look at a nation’s anti-Semitism that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

It is at times a beguiling and compelling piece of cinema, but it’s not without its frustrations.

Writer-director Greg Mottola's first feature is a deceptively quiet and funny film that sticks in your memory long after you think you've left the theatre.

This is Cage trying to find himself in all those messy decisions he’s made, trying to make amends while accepting and celebrating who he is.

A fatalistic fantasy that positively bleeds, bruises, and blows holes in its stoic antihero even as the odds consistently favor his imminent demise.

Austin Powers is the kind of movie Mel Brooks used to make -- extravagantly funny, with plenty of juvenile humor, but as much or more of it smart, delivered with a dead aim at a cultural milestone, affection for its victim, and style.

It's all poppycock, of course, but it's done with such vim and vigor and both narrative and visual flair that you care not a jot. Summer has arrived.

What’s clear is that after watching Dolores, this woman becomes an unforgettable figure in the annals of Mexican-American history, the workers’ rights struggles, and feminist legacies.

Sublimely ridiculous film.

The signature refrain of "Hollywood Ending," with its high-kicking energy and table-punching emotion, is just irresistible. It's the sweet that balances out the bitter of a film that makes it clear that this won't all end well. Anna and the Apocalypse is like biting into a candy cane and getting jabbed by those sharp, sugary shards.

Like an early Clash number, it's by turns lovely and ugly, loud as bombs and quiet as a revolution's first-thrown stone; it acknowledges the legend while uncovering the truth.

Post-viewing, I was still coasting on the giddy high of kinetic cinema, only to have the astonishing callousness of its conclusion slowly settle in. It's a better film for it – one only wishes that Reprise on a whole had been of the same mind: a little less cool, a little more cruel. That's where the really good stuff is.

Occasionally a bit preachy with its critique of advertising or the Eighties commodity mindset, this one's still relevant, and that's because Robinson isn't just trashing tactics -- he's trashing an entire industry.

Ambitious, brutish, ruthlessly unromantic – has the right idea casting its heroine as a Joan of Arc-type crusader and its evil queen a dissertation (albeit first draft) on beauty as the most direct path to power for the disenfranchised female.

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this light romantic comedy, but it helps.

The movie isn't perfect – Spielberg-slick, its power is sometimes dampened by melodrama that overstates its message – but it is compelling and thought-provoking and topical as hell.

Witty, astute, perfectly absurd in a plausibly grounded way, and political without feeling like a polemic, Hutton' quiet satire is merciless about life in the daily hustle - and a lesson about the power of the worker.

Writer/director Moshé (South by Southwest 2017 selection The Ballad of Lefty Brown) grounds the tension of the various ethical dilemmas in Aporia by focusing more on his characters than on the gimmick of his delightfully lo-tech time murder machine.

Despite these quibbles, Django Unchained offers an embarrassment of riches (and actors in tiny cameos).

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.

Broken Flowers is as elliptical as the haunting jazz music by Mulatu Astatke that permeates the soundtrack.

A tight, compact, and visually sumptuous origin story that revels in the surrealistic vision of Doctor Strange’s legendary creator and artist Steve Ditko.

A complex and fascinating look into a convergence of creativity, money, and iconoclasts, Meow Wolf: Origin Story is a tale that to my knowledge has no precedent. And while Meow Wolf might not be to everyone’s tastes, they are trailblazers. I’ll take their elaborate and inventive installations over pastel desert paintings of horses and clouds any day of the week.

It plays very much like it advertises itself: a mixtape – Fear of a Black Planet, then and now.

Stays remarkably true to a kid's-eye perspective and dormant fears.

It's Stiller's knowledgeable use of these smaller touches that (along with the excellent cast -- it's great to see Winona relinquishing period gowns and back where she can do some real damage) pushes the film along a solid, fresh line and toward its admittedly Hollywood conclusion. Stiller and company imbue their film with an honest, sarcastic wit that's all too familiar: apparently, somebody's been filming our lives. Does this mean we'll all be getting royalties?

Blood Quantum operates from a place of tribal identity and that no white audience members will truly be able to understand. In this way, Barnaby’s film rejects the default white gaze of so many horror films, choosing to tell a story through an unapologetically Indigenous lens.

Gunn’s script grasps two major aspects of the Superman mythology. One, that journalism done right will save the day as much as punching bad guys will, and two, that immigrants will often subscribe to the principles that Americans claim are so self-evident more than most Americans will. Corenswet embodies both in a way that no one since Christopher Reeve has, willing to be the gosh-darning nerd if that means doing the right thing.

It’s fine; it works. The future is bright.

Ranks as one of the season's most intelligent and polished films.

Two Lovers is an intensely felt, character-driven film, and there's no stronger character onscreen – not even Leonard – than Leonard's wise, Jewish mother, Ruth, played with effortless, pure perfection by Rossellini.

Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal, and Ahmed – a murderers’ row of outstanding character actors who all moonlight as leading men – take the script’s raw materials (daddy issues, the trauma of being bullied, the civilizing effect of a toothbrush) and forge new bonds with a few words, a light look. The film treats their growing intimacy, in all its permutations, like an objet d’art, to be turned over and examined, delicately, from every angle. When they’re together, the film is electric.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

Hacksaw Ridge is drenched in the blood of the fallen and the mud forever caked on the boots of those who survived to tell the tale. It’s the closest thing to feeling as though you’ve marched a mile in those shoes.

Even if it doesn’t manage to be quite the "Hunger Games"-level hit its producers would clearly desire, it’s the best of the wannabes we’ve seen so far.

The horror imagined by Évolution does not depend on the genre’s familiar tropes but instead its arousal of dread and fear, not unlike Guillermo del Toro in "The Devil’s Backbone," in which the peril is intuited rather than defined.

As always, the tale is in the telling, and Standing Up tells it well.

From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen.

Part 2 is something else altogether. Such digital effects as the marauding giants that squash baby wizards like bugs or the inky terror that is the Death Eaters – acolytes to the mad, bad wizard Voldemort (Fiennes) – are magnificent and experienced in one long, clutched breath. But what's missing is what has been the chief pleasure of the series: the chemistry between its young leads.

In the game of eXistenZ it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in "Laura," "The Last of Sheila," "Chinatown," "The Sixth Sense," or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s "Murder on the Orient Express" (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.

While Fantastic Beasts suffers from some symptoms we’ve basically taken as par for the course in recent high-profile Hollywood spectacles: too many set-pieces, various plotlines stitched together like a quilt, and one-note supporting roles (pretty sure Jon Voight – playing a newspaper mogul – is just there to introduce himself for subsequent entries), it is also really fun.

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.

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

A political thriller with topical currency, Spartan delivers the goods.

Pocahontas' arrow, tipped with tender romance and feathered with spirited folklore, hits the bulls-eye dead on.