If you are unfamiliar with Dupieux’s cinema of meta shenanigans, Keep an Eye Out serves as a solid starting point. For those already indoctrinated, it’s another welcome dispatch from cinema’s premier purveyor of perplexing paradoxes.

For many films, all of this would be represented as little more than an onscreen epilogue. In the hands of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, here adapting the story of the real Buscetta, it’s the jumping-off point for a story of betrayal, modernity, and one man’s struggles with a lifetime of trauma.

Sharp-witted delight.

It is the product of a machine perfectly evolved for the sole purpose of annihilating boredom, a machine whose primary weakness is the utter indifference of those uninitiated or unimpressed by this point. For the rest of us, it’s a hearty helping of fine.

It's a simple set-up, it gets straight to the action, there's just enough personal drama to give the audience a good reason to root for the humans, and it's all just top-notch gory fun.

The worlds of the natural and the artificial are compared and contrasted in this non-narrative visual orgy.

Tangerine’s greatest accomplishment, however, lies with director Baker, who filmed the movie using an iPhone 5S. It’s an amazing achievement – the fluidity of the camerawork is exhilarating at times, the intimacy of the close-ups sometimes unsettling.

Knockout ensemble performances like these don't come around all that often, though, and when they do they ought to be savored.

Inspired lunacy.

While St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn is not the standard performative music documentary, it opens a window to her soul that many are never able to give away so freely in front of the camera.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

Actor-screenwriter Favreau and director Liman demonstrate with Swingers that they're definitely "money."

Dry, ironic humor is also one of the primary ingredients of The Other Side of Hope, and one of Kaurismäki’s signature elements.

The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride.

Wrath of Man may soon occupy the same rarified air as Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, another film anchored by an aging action star that promised revenge and delivered something more.

Neither slave nor mammy, junkie nor maid, these dawn-of-the-twentieth century African-American women are an unstereotypical breed unto themselves.

This is not a conventional love story but a philosophical one.

First-time feature director Adam Leon’s shots are precise and full of detail; it almost doesn’t even matter what’s being said (which is good, because the dialogue sounds stilted at times). What’s important is the art, and Leon and his leads have a palpable passion for it, but they also aren’t afraid to stop and smell the carnations along the way.

Sticking it to the man, German-style.

One Cut of the Dead isn't just charming. It's an earnest and funny love letter to all the microbudget dreamers who use all their heart and ingenuity to make their movie.

In his first effort at directing a feature film, Hanks chooses his material wisely and writes it with witty, beguiling charm.

It's a straight-ahead caper flick, very cool, and very, very Seventies (although it takes place in 1995), from production and costume design on down to the soundtrack.

As far as I'm concerned, you can keep your Sean Penns and your Brad Pitts and your Frank Langellas; if there's any justice in the world, this year's best actor Academy Award will be going home with Rourke.

The reality is that most criminal enterprises operate under a shadow of confusion, of disorganization. That's the story of Arkansas, a hard-boiled noir where the end is written in the messy beginning.

Though formally astringent, Police, Adjective is dotted with lots of humor.

Refreshingly anti-princess and sweet without degrading into sugary, Ramona and Beezus animates Ramona's frequent flights of fancy with DIY-like sequences that literalize, quite charmingly, how a kid colors the world.

The Raid 2 doesn’t so much raise the bar for action filmmaking as it pummels that bar into a mangled piece of metal that resembles nothing if not the gauntlet that’s been thrown down here. Just don’t forget to breathe.