What further sets Friendship apart from its predecessors is the sincerity at its heart. This is a movie, essentially, about the contemporary issue of male social isolation and its nasty consequences.

Fans of all that has come before (excluding Roger Corman's premature-ejaculation version of "The Fantastic Four," natch) will weep tears of giddy joy at how crowd-pleasingly cohesive – and ridiculously fun – this film is.

Because of the episodic nature of the material, Klown Forever feels more like a series of events rather than a cohesive whole. That’s fine with me, as I enjoy spending time with these bumbling, emasculated males grappling with their ultimate insignificance in the world.

Where Shinkai remains peerless is in taking those big, magical, melodramatic swings and landing them with a gentle, compassionate touch.

The result is a climactic scene that is pretty near perfect: both laugh-out-loud surprising and endearingly inevitable.

It isn't about where you get, but how you get there -- and the getting there is a chewy delight.

In its bloody denouement, Bacurau feels like a Spaghetti Western, playing with post-"Seven Samurai" idea of peasants learning to be soldiers at the hands of warriors. But it's also a subversion of that idea, and brings in elements of the old horror conventions about bloodthirsty killers in remote places.

As the goofily endearing Doris, Field is perfect. She makes this movie work.

Chappaquiddick portrays the “incident” with the delicate meticulousness of an autopsy – which is ironic because the body of Mary Jo Kopechne never got one.

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.

What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.

Although the film tends to suffer from a severe case of overt preachiness in the third reel (shades of James Cameron's "The Abyss"), it's still a wonderfully visual, exciting ride.

Still, for a film that is so much about the healing power of words expressed and feeling brought into the light of day, Monsieur is strangely reticent.

A riot of colors, Kika is sometimes sick, sometimes playful, but consistently hilarious and entertaining in ways that few films have been lately.

A lauded Shakespearean actor and adapter who won an Oscar last year for his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on "Bridge of Spies," Rylance portrays the body (via motion-capture) and certainly soul of this gentle giant. In his mournful, lyrical cadence, he makes poetry out of the BFG’s gobbledygook command of English.

Possessor is queasy-smart near-masterpiece of psychotronic slippage. Like its protagonist’s risky psychogenic recollections, it’ll stick with you whether you’d like it to or not.

When Eastwood is at the top of his form -- as he is for much of this film -- there's no more spellbinding storyteller in American cinema.

The Nightmare Before Christmas said that it’s all right to wrap a few scares up under the Christmas tree. Terrifier 3, the latest in the extreme gore franchise, sets fire to the decorations, cuts off your eyelids, and makes you watch the whole house burn.

In this charming, funny, tear-inducing, and instantly recognizable world, and through the (in)actions of Grace, Elliot tells a gentle, touching, bitter-but-ultimately-sweet fable with a warming message: It’s OK to leave your shell behind.

It is a brilliant high-wire act. Yoaz is utterly unpredictable at any given moment, and so too, is Synonyms.

Before lapsing into the land of the insipid,... John Hughes actually made a few movies that shined some light on the trials of modern adolescence. The Breakfast Club is one of them.

Good performances elevate the material.

Watching Bloodlines is like watching a nature documentary where a woodland creature is ripped to shreds in graphic detail. If you’re someone who roots for the prey over the predators, this might not be the movie for you. Otherwise? Cut loose, friend.

As Lo and Behold anecdotally lays it out, in the blink of the eye of human history, this invention has become essential, and in another blink – a solar flare, or cyberwarfare – its failure could trigger a civilization’s collapse.

We the Animals isn’t the sort of film that much concerns itself with the more usual conventions of filmmaking, such as the passage of time or even plot itself. It’s more of a mood, punctuated by clear whacks of emotional trauma. It’s a little bit like watching a poem.

Not only the best date movie of the year, it's also a -- dare I say it twice -- delightfully charming -- and totally American, I might add -- slice of comedic bliss.

Though writer Bill Kelly’s script takes extreme liberties with plot development and never really leaves you guessing about who’ll get the girl, the jokes rarely miss and the result is a refreshingly sardonic fairy tale.

If anything, Ross’ work reminds us that the camera need not be God’s unblinking eye on a story. He has crafted an exceptional film driven by captivating performances.