Hustlers is an absolute joy and one of the most refreshing movies you’ll see all year.

Let the Sunshine In has many pleasures for those seeking a languorous, provocative, and enchanting look at a woman who is trying to carve out something authentic.

Life of Pi, ironically, soars when it confines itself to land and sea; when it grasps for the celestial, the film goes beyond its reach.

Let Me In is by far one of the best-looking films of the year, genre or no genre. It's a nightmare, sure, but what childhood isn't?

This is Denzel Washington’s third at bat behind the camera while directing himself and, holy smokes, does he knock it out of the park with a vicious, visceral performance that fairly sets the screen ablaze.

Moments of great suspense are sometimes invested with intrinsic humor, moments of trauma can yield great compassion. Often, these seemingly conflicting tones exist all at once, while the oblique mystery never clearly identifies the correct emotion.

It's all pretty involving and sweetly ingratiating in a Charlotte's Web-by kind of way.

Keep the Lights On feels like a first-rate, late-Seventies experimental student film, or early Scorsese. But then the cycle of addiction takes over the film, and the plot about stagnancy ends up stagnating the film itself.

Fill the Void is almost more like an ethnographic film than a fictional narrative in regard to our rare observational perspective. Yet Shira also shares attitudes in common with Jane Austen heroines, whose worlds are dominated by their marital prospects and domestic matters.

The problem between Anika and Martin is the problem they had from the beginning: He is a shell of who he once was, lost in his own middle-aged melancholy. The problem is not the substance, it’s the person, and with Another Round, Vinterberg has crafted a beautiful dissection of that conundrum.

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.

Seligman's script will strike a sharp chord in anyone that has run into overly-complicated situations at a family gathering (i.e. just about everyone). It feels like a hurdy-gurdy that is just enough put of tune to leave you uneasy, a sensation of queasiness further unbalanced by Ariel Marx's discordant, scratchy, string-and-timpani soundtrack

This documentary does boast some bowl-you-over reveals best experienced blind.

As long as Sing Street stays on this sweet, sentimental path, the film is an agreeable toe-tapper. Scratch the surface too deeply and you’ll find some historical inconsistencies, idealized events, and a depressing environment roiling in Conor’s familial home and nation.

Lodge Kerrigan is one of the great, though largely unheralded, filmmakers of our time, and with Keane, his third feature, he finally shows himself to be in full command of his uncompromising talent.

Visually inventive cartoon is complemented by clever, whimsical narration and 11 songs from the Beatles.

Its warm humor and love for its characters ultimately wins us over to its side.

Spiritually, Official Competition’s closer point of comparison may be the films of Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), which similarly chronicle humans at their worst (gawwww, humans really are the worst) with visual wit and from a wry remove.

Baichwal is comfortable with those moral and aesthetic ambiguities as well, and, as a result, she’s created a visual poem of devastation that makes one question one’s entire relationship to the world.

At 2 1/2 hours, the film is too long in the telling and too short on suspense.

Watching Priscilla feels much like reading a book, with images of white pills pressed into open palms and home-movie montages enhancing the text. Once again, the younger Coppola demonstrates she is as accomplished a filmmaker in her own way as her father.

Vogt brings out the ugliness of childhood (the shallow empathy, the lashing out, the selfishness, the curiosity about the disgusting) and ramps it up with endless malice that slowly builds to horrific action. It's the anti-jump scare, with a sickening catharsis that what you think is coming does, indeed, come to pass.

The rush subsides, however, the minute the movie ends, and leaves the viewer with the faint aftertaste of a processed sugar high.

This drama-horror hybrid, set within a New York ballet company, strikes a tone more along the lines of the terrifying hallucinatories of Aronofsky's breakout film, "Requiem for a Dream," revisiting, too, favorite themes of monster mommies and female hysteria.

The Painter and the Thief doggedly reminds us that vengeance cannot be the sole redress against a crime.

It is an exhilarating feat of control, and a scathing deconstruction of the sacrifices made in the name of art. You have to confront those threatening corners of the psyche. You have to embrace the black bear.

For all its knock-'em-dead acting and aggressively stylish direction, Hilary and Jackie is still best described as arthouse comfort food.

Indignation, however, is not really about sex, but rather, the cataclysms that can result from the most banal of choices.