Looking at the world around us, this is the perfect summer drama for a society that continually proves itself more and more obsessed with controlling women.

Something in the Dirt doesn't hide its answers, because there may not be any answers. It's the danger of obsessing over the mutability of facts that is its true and fascinating subject. In an era of post-reality politics, Something in the Dirt may be a quiet wake-up call.

The story, though structurally flawed, is an artful portrait of modern life: the 24-hour news cycle, class warfare, and rampant overconsumption leading to crippling anxiety and burnout, even in the young. It’s sadly all too familiar: Too late to be a cautionary tale, it reads more like society’s distorted self-portrait.

It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend.

A funny, seductive, and surprisingly honest dramatization of the ways we snooker ourselves into incompatible love.

July sees the world in a most unexpected way, and it's a shame that Me and You's preciousness sometimes overwhelms that uniqueness of vision.

Co-fabulists Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight have made a film that marries the former’s elliptical, experimental style with the latter’s penchant for alternative histories stuffed with archetypes. But it is Stewart’s performance at the center of it all that is the most startling aspect of Spencer. She brings a theatricality in the way she moves and speaks that transcends impersonation yet falls thankfully shy of camp.

True, few of the cutup crew ever had the depth of knowledge or stylistic panache that Godard – one of the last remaining masters of the 20th century's most vibrant art forms – brings to the screen. But then, is The Image Book really a film? Godard himself has re-engineered it as an art installation, to be shown on a TV with speakers surrounding it, and that would probably be a better home.

It all adds up to a portrait in decency, which isn’t nearly as sexy as the title would suggest.

The most punishing movie of 2015, The Revenant, is almost as brutal an experience for the viewer to watch as it is for its title character Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) to undergo. That’s not meant as a knock, but rather as a warning that the film may leave you as near-speechless and mono-minded as its battered returnee from the dead.

If there was ever a role model for brave but savvy self-acceptance, it’s the still living Saúl Armendáriz. ¡Viva Cassandro!

What Safe does so brilliantly is to plunge us down this frightening rabbit hole with Carol.

Richardson also lends authenticity to her character, a mother adept at playing the victim (even in this situation). There’s a complexity to the family dynamic that couldn’t be more true-to-life.

The cast is uniformly excellent in their roles, and Eyre's persistent use of long, trailing shots reinforces the story's elegiac tone.

Not enough can be said about Willem Dafoe’s amazing performance as van Gogh. It is some of the best work of his career.

Crammed to bursting with the director’s trademark magical realism. Occasionally marred by budgetary constraints, this is nevertheless a welcome return for an artist who truly deserves the sobriquet: El Maestro.

Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion.

It’s an indie film about abortion that comes snuggled in the broad strokes of a quirky relationship comedy. A grump might wonder when indie films got so soft, but I’m more intrigued by the inverse: Why aren’t more studio films this clever and winning and conversant in the same language as their audience?

When all is said and done, there ain't no mountain high enough that should keep you from getting to this movie. We've heard it through the grapevine for too long.

Iris is difficult to watch, given that it requires you to witness the transformation of the title character from a literate, vibrant woman to the ghost of her former self.

With its brief running time and revelatory story, this neat, fascinating documentary ought to be required viewing for art history students everywhere.

Director and co-writer Athina Rachel Tsangari wants viewers to fill in the blanks.

This second incarnation of the Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt-produced animation anthology is, if anything, even better than the first.

Most important, there are the photographs themselves – lots of them – which director Freyer freely uses to illustrate Winogrand’s genius in capturing the ambiguous now, urging the viewer to fill in the details of the story glimpsed in the shot.

The only reservation I have in recommending this film is the ultimate question of what value there is in this kind of naked, unmediated portrayal of such wretched situations. What Oldman has done is to open a window onto scenes we know are taking place everywhere, all the time. Why -- and if -- we choose to look is a personal call for every viewer.

The interplay of setback and triumph of the sports film genre, here informed by both racial and socioeconomic concerns, is comfortably familiar, and Green, with writer Zach Baylin, never met a tennis serve/time transition they didn’t run with, but they keep their gaze on Papa Williams and his provocative eccentricities, dutifully lionizing the man as good as any royal biographer.

Shirley is probably too niche to attract the Academy’s interest in Moss – how has she never been nominated? – but it’s a big, messy, masterfully itchy performance and yet another notch in her belt.

It’s an absolutely crazed fever dream of a film, and like a febrile infant it begins with a few odd notes and barely heard, often off-camera sounds, and then proceeds to build those seemingly minor instances of weird until it crescendos into an ear-piercing, panic-inducing visual and aural shriek.