What elevates this conventional tale is how Waititi tells it. With sharp, nimble humor, and one-liners that come a mile a minute, Wilderpeople is a sweet story told with biting wit and an editing style that keeps things going at a rapid pace.

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.

The Dark and the Wicked pulls no punches, either in its sense of perpetual unease, its occasional moments of understated yet truly stomach-churning gore, or in its emotional heft.

Fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse will doubtless revel in these lengthy concert scenes, and although occasionally the band's songs wander off into what appear to be impromptu jam sessions, Year of the Horse is never boring.

Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.

Although Super Size Me benefits from a number of interviews with nutritionists, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, the film inevitably (but not unenjoyably) is dominated by Spurlock, who offers his sober-minded statistics and cheeky asides without ever devolving into an off-putting Michael Moore-like moralizing.

Where Rolling Thunder Revue works best is when it's clear in its ambiguity.

If you’re just along for the spectacular ride, then Furiosa is Miller at his nitro-fueled, chrome-covered, overblown best. But if you’re trying to make any sense of this, you’ll find it increasingly stalled out.

The college archetypes get a bit on-the-nose, and some lingering underwater scenes feel jammed in to match other coming-of-agers. But ultimately, the imperfections just feel cute.

For older and more reflective viewers, it’s a quirky, fresh slice-of-life more inviting than a tater-tot pyramid.

Hair is personal. It's also political.

This movie achieves a rare grace: it tells a story that could only exist in the form of a movie (or, perhaps, as a piece of poetry). The story is told not so much in customary narrative structures, but in glimpses, hints, and intimations. It has a way of taking the solid and making it chimerical.

So whether you’re here for obscure characters like Charles Xavier’s lost twin Cassandra Nova (Corrin), grisly sword vs. claw fights, queer comedy, MCU mythology, the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251, or just Jackman and Reynolds having a blast being hams, Deadpool & Wolverine has you covered.

It's easy enough to forget there are special effects involved, so convincing is Stu's rippling fur and big beamy eyes filling up with tears.

Morrone is superb in the part, exuding a sort of saintly solitude while caught up in the midst of turmoil from within and without. Even at its most dire, Mickey and the Bear is tinged with an almost holy hope for all involved, a rare and remarkable feat to pull off so well for a first-time director indeed.

It should be mandatory viewing for right-to-lifers and prospective parents as well as fans of creepy, crawly filmmaking.

There’s gore, all right, although the real terror lies in the tease, and the often dark, herky-jerky DV format ratchets up the tension to an almost unbearable degree.

The Deeper You Dig may be a small production, but everything in it feels aspirational, so much bigger and heartfelt and horrifying than can be expected.

Field trips to a cheese aging facility, a winery (of course), and a cattle farmer, whose methods of grazing are plotted out with mathematical precision, highlight the care and passion that are instilled into each and every morsel dropped onto the plate with the tiniest of tweezers. Menus-Plaisirs is a fascinating exploration of that passion, and perhaps the closest many of us will get to experiencing it at all.

Perhaps the bigger canvas here is a native daughter’s tribute to the resiliency of the people of her homeland. It’s no coincidence that the mascot chicken in this rustic Utopia is named Survive.

Movies about writers can be notorious slogs but, amazingly, The End of the Tour is not one of those films. In fact, it is so much better than any movie based primarily on conversations has any right to be.

It's such high sports drama you'd swear this documentary is fiction.

Despite the notable camp value of Blanchett channeling Gloria Swanson, Cruella de Vil, and an extraterrestrial succulent plant, the doomy villain thing is rote.

To a one, they nail the humor, all right, but they also, quite crucially, humanize the high concept.

No one has ever succeeded with anything approximating the sheer energetic brilliance of what Lee has managed here. For all intents and purposes, this is a comic-book movie in the very truest and most vibrant sense of the phrase.

It’s heady stuff, and Brie Larson’s gentle narration helps you navigate this quite complex topic.

This is frightening stuff, ably helmed (by writer/director Gorak, art director on the nerve janglers Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), viciously acted, and altogether horrific in ways George A. Romero could imagine only through the lens of the darkest sort of fantasy.

It makes for an interesting dissection of an American cultural divide in a way that is both thoughtful and funny.