"Always be good to rock and roll and it will always be good to you," the film quotes Phil Spector as saying, and a more fitting explanation of the Bingenheimer mystique you'll likely never find.

But let's be honest: Any actress can do melancholy; it takes a special talent to recognize that there's a certain luxuriousness, a certain joy, to be found in longtime self-hatred.

Elvis' third movie is surely his best. He plays a guy vaguely like himself, who hits it big after learning to play music while in prison. Not only does this film have some of the best tunes in an Elvis movie, the choreography is great too.

Finds a way to impart this sad history while raising our spirits at the same time.

River's Edge is a great movie. Based on a true story, the general plot is straightforward - stoner guy kills stoner girlfriend, leaves her body by the river, and brags to all of his stoner buds - but there are darker undercurrents that stir up thoughts about the disillusionment of youth, the devaluation of women, and the death of Sixties idealism. Director Hunter is a whiz at pacing and keeps the plot rolling while he further muddies the waters with his intriguing montages.

Haynes brings the emotional underbelly to the surface, he also tricks up the visual surface with elaborate color schemes that provide unspoken clues regarding the characters’ frames of mind.

This is highly personal artwork writ in a grand, towering script, and all the more intellectually and artistically legible for it.

Take the politics out and you’d still have a powerhouse action film. But please, don’t take the politics out.

One thing about this extremely talented artist: He never sees anything in just black-and-white.

Narco Cultura smartly and movingly focuses on the cultural cycle of violence, beginning with a young, Los Angeles-based rapper, Edgar Quintero, whose main job is penning lyrics celebrating the orgiastically violent lifestyles of the drug thugs for his band Buknas de Culiacán.

Sometimes people grow up sane despite the best efforts of society to drive them mad. This is the case for filmmaker Jonathan Caouette.

It ends up seeming more real and more artistically, morally, and spiritually honest than any dozen bedrock documentary films you'd care to name.

The Dogme pedigree rarely distracts; there is too much emotional investment to care much about dogmatic fidelity.

The quiet respect Venus displays toward lions in winter, defanged though they may be, is rare enough; the film's respect for unfinessed lionesses-to-be is rarer still. Wherever they're going, no one here is going quietly.

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

It’s a spooky, moody doozy of a debut, lensed by Director of Photography Lyle Vincent in a radiant monochrome that somehow makes even the darkness sparkle.

That they were just hormonally blitzkrieged kids at the time, unaware of their role in history, only makes Peralta's superior doc that much more winning.

A revealing, heart- and mind-engaging insight into a uniquely American character type many of us may have known.

The plot is gripping and relatively fast-paced, and Winger and Russell are excellent counterpoints to each other -- Winger is earthy and likable, and Russell is sexy and sinister.

The way Ly and cinematographer Julien Poupard choreograph the film is amazing, especially the third act, which can be breathless at times.

Fresh and raw like a blown-out vein, Narc takes a walking-dead, cop-flick subgenre and beats new life into it.

This is the ideal example of a big summer blockbuster and one of the best legacy sequels we’ve ever gotten: a movie that knows how to move along and give you what you came for.

12 is every bit as much of a moral powerhouse as its predecessors but with the added bonus of being simultaneously intellectually riveting and, at times, almost indescribably poetic.

Absurdist humor abounds throughout a story whose underlying themes echo Elvis Costello’s eternal question, “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?” even as corpses dangle from a foregrounded gallows.

Provides that rarest of documentary accomplishments: a glimpse into the artists' sunny, dark hearts.

The sum is something deeply profound: about awkwardness, culture clash, failed connections, and – ultimately – the strength that comes from surviving a trial by fire.

When looking at the one-two punch of The Lighthouse and "The Witch," Eggers seems to find inspiration in how superstition and folklore blurred the boundaries of human knowledge throughout history. His characters live in the space between mankind and mysticism, where things like witches and mermaids can (and maybe even do) gain access to our homes.

Even at 163 minutes, there’s so much crammed in that threatens to make Dead Reckoning Part One feel at once overstuffed and overfamiliar. So it’s a credit to the film that, even as the third- or fourth-best of the series, it’s such an exceptional piece of entertainment, one to serve as a reminder that we can and should expect more from our ultra expensive tentpole franchises.