Although its ambitions often exceed its reach, the meta-mad Filipino film Leonor Will Never Die (a terrible Americanized title) bursts with imaginative impulses, scoring slightly more hits than misses in a Charlie Kaufmanesque storyline that flip-flops between reality and fantasy using the tropey device of a movie within a movie.

Amreeka is anything but a depressing digression on American wartime paranoia.

Grounded and sweet, delicately bawdy, and decidedly hilarious, CODA puts an effervescent and original spin on the coming-of-age comedy-drama.

It's a deliberate effort by director, co-writer, and rom-com veteran Nicholas Stoller (The Five-Year Engagement, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to get inside modern gay relationships – or, more especially, affluent, white, middle-class, cis gay male relationships in New York.

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

Consisting of five years' worth of interviews illustrated by a mountain of archival footage, the film sails on the actors' consistent ability to spin a good yarn.

His effort to cram in every aspect of the history of late Medieval witch fever, from repression of women to fear of the outsider to mushroom trips, becomes a chore, and a grisly twist in the final chapter, fire, just feels shocking for shock's sake. A historical psychological study like this doesn't deserve a stomach-churning moment like that, especially when all it does is push Albrun even further away.

It’s an ambitious, sometimes too bitter, second feature, but Lee somewhat manages to corrode the too-often fetishized queer period drama into something much more modern than its setting suggests.

Skate Kitchen’s mild melodrama meanders all over the place, not unlike the many skateboarders who shred the skate parks and streets, carving hypnotic, slo-mo figure-eights or outrageous triple ollies on every available surface and obstacle.

An impression is ultimately all that coalesces in 105 minutes, and I wonder if that has something to do with how little the film engages with his songwriting.

There are blood-red visual motifs all over the place, but The Devil’s Candy isn’t particularly bloody in and of itself. It suggests acts of terrible evil far more than it shows, and is all the more intense for it. Highly recommended.

As a leading man, Casey Affleck has a nebbishy quality and a mumbly speaking voice that I personally find disruptive to a movie's flow.

The Insult shows how personal resolutions may be the only recourse and pathway to personal peace.

There are moments where Fremont can lean a bit too far in the direction of Miranda July-esque eccentricity – admittedly, not always its strongest gear – but Wali Zada is always there to anchor these scenes in a genuine, desperate need for interpersonal connection.

Soderberg enhances the meager storyline with some creative camerawork (again shot by himself under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). The club scenes are always entertaining and some of the backstage imagery is unforgettable.

Buoyed by a soundtrack that’ll have fortysomethings cracking open 40-ounces and recalling a marginally simpler, if still chaotic, time in their lives, Straight Outta Compton’s bark is just as snarly-cool as its bite. Take that, Tipper Gore.

For a while, the freeing experience of the clan’s nonconformity gets tamped down, and the movie appears headed toward some kind of moralized conclusion. Once back on familiar ground, however, Captain Fantastic rights itself toward as happy an ending as possible, without too much compromise.

One of the most extraordinary debuts of the year.

The contrast of light and dark, good and evil, enlightenment and ignorance, innocence and corruption is the heart of this absurd, insightful, sincere, very funny fairy tale of a movie. The cast is uniformly superb.

A surface viewing of the film makes it feel like this is one of Scott’s lesser magnum opuses but on closer inspection this is a story that’s all but contemporaneous given its through-line of amoral acquisitiveness.

It’s the movie’s love story that will grab your heart however. Despite inevitable comparisons to "Away From Her" and "Amour" – other recent films about the challenges of love in old age – Still Mine is distinctive.

Nanny isn’t able to follow through on all of its ideas, but those ideas are pretty undeniable.

The horror-movie clichés form the backbone from which the film's humor and creativity emerge. This Cabin may not be the Parthenon, but it's definitely a place to worship the gods of horror.

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.

Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."

The film holds its twists too close to the chest, and there's little to chew on till the ambitiousness of its plotting is revealed late in the film.

The film is a wonderful choice for older teens and has considerable crossover appeal for adult audiences.

This film's intelligence and uncompromising originality commend it to even moviegoers with zero tolerance for top hats, parasols, and crap English accents.