The Wedding Guest arrives with unexpected gifts.

This astonishing animated feature from first-time Slovenian director Krstić is required viewing for art history majors and anyone else with even a glancing interest in the works of everyone from Warhol to Gauguin, Diego Velázquez to Joan Miró.

The Mustang, Clermont-Tonnerre’s impressive debut feature, is a slow-burning, tightly coiled character study of felony offender Roman Coleman (Bullhead’s Schoenaerts).

Level 16 is a mystery horror that gets darker as it unravels.

Gloria Bell is its own thing. Lelio inflects the film with a believably Californian vibe, all washed-out easiness, and the faint feeling that so much easiness must take an awful lot of work. And Moore can so exquisitely convey two emotions at once, the actorly equivalent of patting a head and rubbing a stomach at the same time.

Bisexual coming out stories are basically nonexistent in cinema, and that would be enough to set Giant Little Ones apart from the pack. But that's just one element of a wider story, told with a charming earnestness, about sexuality as a spectrum.

Dragged Across Concrete is a nihilist's morality tale. In the end, Zahler suggests, there's the dead, the innocent, and those smart enough to know that running is the only path out; and even then, there's a lot of innocence on that pile of corpses.

What truly binds this film is the love story that lies at the heart of it. It’s a love battered by fate and bad luck, quite the opposite of such forces as planned redesigns of China’s social and geographic landscapes.

Most important is that there's no caricatured, mustache-twirling villain, or low-grade local bullies, driving the action.

Perhaps the fault lies not in our stars, but in our shameless need for a sappy ending.

At its best, Captive State blends imaginative science fiction with the caliber of detail-oriented espionage you might find in an Alan J. Pakula film.

Screenwriters Nina Fiore and John Herrera have modernized Keene’s decades-old storyline without completely chucking the quaint qualities of the original.

But for all our Tony Montanas and Pablo Escobars, both imagined and real, I guarantee you have never seen a drug-trafficking movie like Birds of Passage.

It’s a celebratory movie designed to rekindle awe and admiration for the accomplishments of the NASA astronauts and ground scientists, as well as a reminder of the endless realms of possibility that can be achievable when a country and its politicians work in unison toward a shared goal.

Pratt delightfully plays against type here as a fierce bully, and Hawke looks as though he were born to wear spurs and a badge.

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.

By turns wry, quirky, joyful, and above all human, this easygoing but never less than fascinating documentary focuses on the surprisingly tolerant township of Eureka, Ark.

You could fault A Madea Family Funeral for its many other shortcomings. It runs about 30 minutes too long; the tempo of the numerous dramatic scenes is on par with drying paint; characters lack consistency from scene to scene; the dialogue sounds like a first draft that needs major editing; its occasional technical sloppiness; and so forth.

As the energy-beam projecting, space-flying defender of the underdog, Brie Larson has captured the pugnacious, charming, steely Captain Marvel in the ways she deserves.

The Wandering Earth is as much a love letter to disaster films as it is a worthy entry in the genre itself. That, combined with some truly eye-popping visuals, makes it a film that should be seen on the biggest screen possible.

The Hole in the Ground is filled with all the tropes of the "sinister child" subgenre, but first time feature director Cronin (best known in horror circles for his 2013 award-winning short "Ghost Train") deftly weds it with the same rural Gothic sensibilities that have made Irish horror such a vibrant and unsettling scene for the last few years.

Despite the buildup of these horror expectations, there is no predicting how deliciously enjoyable it is to witness the macabre dance performed by Moretz and Huppert, two of the best actresses working in today’s movies. They play their game of cat and mouse with claws out; by the end of the berserko film, their characters are practically swinging from the rafters. Everyone appears to be having a grand time in Greta, and it would be crass for us as viewers to not respond similarly.

The real delight here, however, is Broderick’s mensch, a middle-aged man painfully aware that he’s become a loser.

There’s a degree of mythologization at work here, an attempt to frame the birth of the Texas oil industry as this great drinking game between old money and new money. What it lacks is a distinct perspective; for all its period details and solid acting, the underlying message about this time in Texas oil history – that it was right, that it was wrong, that it was necessary – is lacking. This makes The Iron Orchard a film that is both worse and better than it could have been.

The director is notorious for not having a working script, writing the day’s scenes the morning of, and improvising at any given moment. The internet tells me that this film was shot in two weeks, and while Hong’s off-the-cuff style seems restless at times, it coagulates like a small scab that never quite stops itching.

In transgressive cinema, there is only one real sin, and that is to be boring. Somewhere around the six-hour mark of Gaspar Noé's 96-minute drug freakout fable Climax.

It may be a simple, old-fashioned, underdog-gets-their-day, feel-good story, but it sure as hell will leave you feeling good.

FP2 is all stupid surface, held together by Trost’s surly charm. It may be filled with dumb “beat off” puns, but it’s just smart enough to be all heart.