It’s a fluffy spin on the recovery genre, but it’s a fresh one, and deGuzman’s hard-won life experience adds veracity and honesty to the snappy narrative. She’s also just plain wonderful to watch, providing a tough character in a tough situation with the maximum of grace.

By making a satisfactory crowdpleaser that doesn’t overextend itself, Swanberg has delivered his most traditional movie to date — and for this prolific filmmaker, who spent ages defying conventions, that’s nothing short of a radical step forward.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed lacks for drama in its portrayal of the quotidian realities of sexual kink, but Arnow’s voice is distinctive, shrewd, and spiky enough to keep it afloat.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

Zero Fucks Given is refreshingly unwilling to be prescriptive or teach Cassandre any moral lessons, but it often struggles to crystallize how she finds the strength to seize control over her own flightplan.

Ornette isn't just a love letter to the liberty of jazz rhythms; it excels at expressing them.

Slight and discursive even by the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic standards, Introduction refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn’t already speak conversational Hong.

Acclaimed filmmakers often face the challenge of big expectations on their second features, but Kent joins the ranks of sophomore filmmakers whose new movies expand on their debuts in startlingly ambitious ways.

The problem is that, while the film is conceptually solid, its story gets shakier as it goes along.

Robbie, for her part, has never been better. Making the most of her first leading role since Z for Zachariah, she does a brilliant job of skating along the thin line that runs between glory and the gutter. Sympathetic but not too sympathetic, her performance is all that allows the film to maintain its tenuous hold over its queasy tragicomedy.

This is the story of evolving consciousness that leads to the birth of skepticism — and, more specifically, a mistrusting of authorities that yields the desire to seek out a better world.

Obsession should keep everyone awake long after they get home from seeing it.

Its broad, slapstick send-up of human foibles prefigures Takahata’s more pointed My Neighbors, the Yamadas (1999). At 119 minutes, the film feels a bit long and the story rambles, albeit genially.

While there’s a certain “muchness” to Rankin’s style, and it goes without saying this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, the filmmaker’s refusal to temper his vision serves him well in the long run, as his feature debut eventually achieves an operatic wackiness that carries it over the finish line.

As a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, Maestro succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic.

To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.

Relic exists firmly in the realm of allegory, and if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie.

A Band Called Death lacks the thrill of mystery but makes up for it with pathos.

It’s not episodic, but feels more like the first act of a larger story begging for further exploration. Nevertheless, with a complex, ever-evolving turn by newcomer Sheyi Cole at its center, the story it does offer up turns on McQueen’s usual sophisticated narrative techniques and the same striking penchant to render Black British culture in complex lyrical terms.

Writer/director Josh Margolin squeezes surprisingly funny freshness from the musty themes of aging, death, and lost autonomy in his poignantly written Thelma.

The Tuba Thieves is about embracing uncertainty and misunderstanding — something d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing people do every day. In fact, the film’s entire genesis was intended as a large-scale “game of telephone,” deliberately seeking out disorder and unexpected end products.

It doesn’t look or feel or move like much else, all those other cinematic comparisons aside, and the sheer scope of its ambition is enough to inspire awe. Maybe the most obvious answer is the best one: love itself is a drug. So is cinema.

A truly adult comedy with plenty to say and even more laughs to share.

Girls State gradually moves away from the reality show-like competition baked into its premise in favor of something more interesting and less resolvable.

Even as it delivers an emotional wallop, not every moment of "Calvary" goes down smoothly, as comedic scenes transition somewhat abruptly to tragic moments and the final reveal never reaches the heights of its Hitchockian inspirations.

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! offers an effervescent spirit so often missing in this milieu, with a lovely performance from Kikuchi at its center.

A personal work not because the director chooses to make himself a part of the story, but rather because he implicates all of us in it.

It is a spiritual journey through the very fabric of a land, anatomizing how we navigate nostalgia for home and grief for lost loved ones when both have been long-destroyed by the senseless strike of an invisible force.

This is a movie full of lovely and lilting moments that invite you to reflect on the value of your own painful memories, and yet precious little of it is specific enough in a way that makes it hard to forget.

Tragic and terrifying in equal measure, Wu’s intimate portrait of China’s live-streaming culture uses one country’s recent past as a dark portal into our collective future, sketching a world in which even the most basic pleasures of human connection can only be experienced vicariously.

The best Springsteen songs sound as if they’ve pulled directly from his diary, and while this “Road Diary” might have a bit more polish and gloss, it’s more than worth the read and the ride.

The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz.

Philibert’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is all the more effective because the director refuses to pretend that he isn’t visible — not in this place where people come to be seen, and not merely looked at.

A tense prison drama that’s penned into the trappings of a classic Western, The Mustang is a small movie about a subtle transformation, but its closing moments — however contrived they might be — are as touching as they are unexpected.

Thru You Princess develops a fairy tale quality that calls into question the nature of its production. However, the air of manipulation throughout the story only helps to pronounce its themes.

Clara Sola is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. It’s bound by the sense that we smother the things most precious to us in order to keep them from getting away.

Frequently sublime ... a piece of work so feral and full of life that you’d never guess it was (at least) the 90th feature its director has made in the last 30 years.

Pryor’s best film and his best performance and that’s not taking anything anyway from his co-stars Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto.

Changing the Game goes beyond those dehumanizing headlines to show the real people affected by harmful anti-trans policies or lack of any meaningful legal protection.

Gray's fifth directorial effort is a conflicting experience admirable and powerfully executed in parts, cold and meandering in others.

Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act.

Unfolding like a symphony of small humiliations, there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel at least vaguely familiar, and there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel completely true.

Logan isn’t always a satisfying movie, but there’s a very satisfying answer to those questions waiting for viewers at the end of it. Satisfying not only because Mangold resolves things with some brilliantly expressive imagery, or because he endows this story with a no-shits-left-to-give honesty that defies its origins and justifies its spectacular violence and salty vocabulary, but because it proves how iconic Jackman has made this character over the last 17 years.

28 Years Later effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize.

Gugino and Greenwood deliver first-rate performances enriched by their characters’ ambiguous qualities.

It’s more of the same, but more of the same has always been what “Phineas and Ferb” does best.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff often feels like inside baseball for film buffs, but if you’re of that group you’ll be charmed by it. The loss of theaters feels particularly acute at the moment and that too should also make this loving documentary feel even more poignant.

The film feels like a tribute, and an eventual goodbye — to two extraordinarily unique people, their unconventional home, and their truly remarkable way of life.

Gallner and Weaving’s erotic chemistry, which begins at a simmer but quickly reaches a boil, helps smooth out the lumpier patches in Carolina Caroline that comprise the film’s middle section.

It has a couple of nice reversals, two or three good laugh lines, and a caustic but not too acid skewering of cultural institutions. It goes down easy, it’s relatively unmemorable and it’s fine. Close, on the other hand, is exquisite.

This is a strong movie about a man in need of a new start, made by someone who could benefit from one of his own.

From laugh to laugh — and there are many — you might question the target of the jokes, but that’s often because The Disaster Artist rarely works on one level: There’s meta humor, self-referential gags, and human reverence paid to the earnest pursuit of a Hollywood dream. Such are the layered joys of this exuberant — if surprisingly conventional — buddy comedy about the making of the worst movie of all time.

Herzog acolytes will find the usual dose of eccentric musings; others may find it alternately perplexing and thoughtful when not hijacked by Herzog's intrusive remarks. But one thing is certain: You've never seen the internet discussed like this.

Keep Quiet is far more compelling as a portrait of a man in transition than it is as a man reborn, but Blair and Martin never solve the problem that they only have access to the latter.

A sharp and well-made comedy with a better drama glued on the side.

Leaning Into the Wind will inspire anyone who sees it to look for the beauty in every gust, to admire how nature constantly rearranges itself, and us along with it. Even at its most self-conflicted, this is a fascinating reminder that some art wasn’t made to be owned.

Writer/director Jarmusch has called “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which he wrote in three weeks, an “anti-action film,” but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.

Moors isolates a well-known drama with the fleeting nonfiction prologue and explores it from the inside out: It's not an attempted reenactment, but it does aim to get at certain truths.

Making her feature debut, writer-director Chandler Levack has pulled off a rare trick here by making a movie that feels warm and safe without coddling its protagonist.

Having established such an electric pair, Tramps doesn’t quite know what to do with them beyond the initial setup.

Miller applies Gerwig to the center of a busy story with simple themes, but it glides along so effortlessly that its reductive qualities barely register. The filmmaker's exceedingly smart screenplay is the real plan, and Gerwig's performance puts it into action.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

While not his best work, Like Someone in Love is a nimble expression of Kiarostami's appeal: He remains one of the few directors capable of pulling you into a narrative and making you question its motives at every turn.

Showing the uneasiness of a first-time documentarian, Rapaport has a difficult time exploring the drama. That has extended beyond the movie itself and into a long-running media dispute with Q-Tip, who has refused to plug the movie.

Sweet’s work is a time capsule of a bygone era, preserved in glorious, saturated technicolor. He was the master of the unexpected composition, and in that sense, The Last Resort is a fitting tribute.

With no score and zero levity, Lady Macbeth maintains a constant atmospheric dread. Oldroyd crafts a masterful sense of uncertainty about how far Katherine will go to preserve her dominance.

While Much Ado About Dying strives to be a tribute to caretakers and Chambers’ dearly departed uncle, its baggy structure, dictated by David’s declining health, renders the film frustratingly inert.

Nothing is phoned in here, everything is calibrated to a unique frequency so that even though you can trace the influence of Bette Gordon, Catherine Breillat, and Lucille Hadzhihalillovic, “Piaffe” is its own playful and majestic beast.

You've never seen anything like Chico & Rita, simply because that jubilant palette and likeminded jazz soundtrack embraces its predictability with such vitality.

The film retains its overall strength by focusing on its mother-daughter leads, their enduring bond, and their efforts to carve out a bit of serenity in a chaotic world.

Unfolding like a slaphappy cross between “Baadasssss!” and “Bowfinger,” “Dolemite Is My Name” may not be quite as spirited or hilarious as any of its most obvious reference points, but its big-hearted buoyancy keeps it afloat, and the movie doesn’t slow down long enough for you to really care that it’s following a timeless formula.

Though the special effects win the day, Guardians of the Galaxy holds court with a sense of humor that transcends its more familiar ingredients.

Paul's increasingly hectic attempts to retrieve the book dominate the movie so heavily that it leaves little room for considering how this effort fits into the rest of his world.

As this unclassifiable wildfire burns itself out, all you can say for sure is that these little zombies are alive in ways that most adults have lost the ability to imagine. Whatever demented game its characters are playing, Nagahisa’s live-action Twitch-fest is delightful for how it lets us watch along.

Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s film is not so much the story of a fighter as it is a story that wants to fight you.

I Carry You With Me succeeds in distilling a very engrossing and moving narrative from this real life drama. Ewing’s visual choices are at once sweeping and precise.

Although Corsage makes a worthy attempt to recast Elisabeth as independent of her constraints, its final note leaves it feeling a little too much like its own sort of requiem.

With its lethargic pace, Hara Kiri may disappoint more often than it delights, but the payoff is extreme in more ways than one.

Red Rocket is so arresting because of how it keeps hope alive by rescuing devastation from the jaws of happiness.

Like a waltz, Wolf Children unfolds with a slow, graceful rhythm. Hosoda allows scenes to unfold at their own pace, often using minimal dialogue or mime. The forest backgrounds are strikingly handsome, and the simple drawn animation captures the expressions and emotions of the unusual characters.

It’s a touching scenario, and one so well-acted and laced with superb special effects that even its more obvious beats cut deep.

Buck Brannaman, the subject of Cindy Meehl's engaging documentary profile Buck, has a warm presence and knows how to tame horses better than anyone else.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

The romantic scenes are cute, but they feel at odds with the drama. The laughs land like chuckles, the love registers as mere fondness, and the salient observation that countries recast themselves during wartime is reduced to a fleeting detail.

Creepy is both a return home and a return to form.

It’s flecked with murderous black humor, told with all the subtlety of getting run over by a car, and generally sees Indian society as a giant rooster coop where servants either kill their masters or spend their entire lives waiting in line to get their heads chopped off.

Enduring racist policing, violence, poverty, and employment discrimination; they also found joy, humor, sisterhood, and community. By celebrating these women’s humanity and spirit without minimizing their hardships, that duality is what makes The Stroll so markedly different than what’s come before it.

Regrettably, “never again” proves to be a misguided ethos for a film about pain that’s so nakedly unresolved, both in its characters, and in a world that has learned nothing from the lessons they were born to teach it.

It’s a film that ends in a far more ambivalent place than it starts, and puts much less emphasis on Lane’s moral fiber than it does on the ever-shifting nature of morality itself.

Hypnotic from start to finish and unexpectedly hopeful for a movie with so much arsenic in its blood, Islands knows that even the greatest of vacations can never compete with the rewards of fostering a reality you actually want to return to when it’s over.

Funny, joyful, and brimming with confidence, The Colors Within chronicles its characters’ tentative first steps into a world outside of the ones built for them by their families and teachers, and it does so with a vibrancy that allows us all to feel as if we’re seeing that world through Totsuko’s eyes.

To watch terror become desperation become despair is wrenching, more so because this puts names and faces to events the rest of us are fortunate enough to read about while sitting on our couches.

This is a rare nonfiction chronicle of an artist that also avoids hagiography — we see Dion at her lowest because that becomes the reminder of who she is at her very best.

Shelton’s work is understated, but elevates seemingly forgettable scenarios with a wise, humane approach that makes even a lesser work like Outside In a cut above the market standard.

Alas, the trouble with trying to capture a mercurial artist on such a legible canvas is that the attempt — no matter how sincere and self-aware it might be — can only do justice to its subject through its failure to see them clearly.

The onslaught of death is more relentless (and numbing) here, yes. But we don’t know these young men as well when they do meet their deaths, which makes the loss hurt just a little less.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is particularly suspenseful for the way it recollects the past through the prism of a murder mystery, brilliantly fusing an archival history with the elements of a detective story.

Slickly paced and carried by mature performances, Flight embodies one of the finer strains of Hollywood filmmaking in recent years.