This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.

Director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ exciting and unpredictable look at a pair of Mexico City police officers blends documentary and narrative techniques to deliver a refreshing and innovative look at the challenges of modern-day police work — as well as the underlying corruption that makes the most earnest officers vulnerable to a system rigged against them.

Hewson never sees her as some kind of tarty punchline – neither does Carney, and neither will the audience. You know all that stuff about “strong female characters” who are also “flawed” or “human” or whatever other insane word salad Hollywood is still requiring of its female leads? Here’s a real one.

This is a study of power, and what power will do to survive; a study of how morality is more historically significant as a condition, and not a cause. The rich won’t save us — that’s what makes them rich. The fascinating Citizen K will leave you to determine the value in one of them saving themselves.

The Light of the Moon is a lucid, clinical, and wholly necessary drama about life after rape, and the while the film is far more watchable than it might sound (thanks in large part to Stephanie Beatriz’s rich and involving lead performance), viewers should know what’s in store for them.

An entertaining and informative new documentary, Denise Ho: Becoming the Song, reveals the singer’s motivation and personal sacrifices while also offering a vital survey of Hong Kong history and the fight for independence.

It’s a muscular, high-octane story about cops living above the laws they’re paid to enforce, and growing more desperate and dangerous with every threat to their unchecked power.

This is an idea familiar to anyone who has waded through Bigelow's universe of conspiratorial agendas in which no good deed goes unpunished, and might not be a good deed at all. Cartel Land plants that dilemma in our backyard, and ends with the tangible perception that it won't go away anytime soon.

While the moments focused on the kids’ lives are the best part of the film — James and Ramirez have natural chemistry and are compelling to watch — Baig occasionally falters on that front too.

The Meaning of Hitler doesn’t have to make sense of this decade’s chaos to clarify just how much it remains vulnerable to the same complaisant attitudes exploited by the German leader decades ago. The movie isn’t just another cautionary tale; it’s a jagged intellectual wakeup call that cuts deep, and America can’t hear it enough.

While much of the film is built on repressed pain, there are moments of celebration, some reconciliation, and even laughter.

Lane has an unmatched ability to strike the right balance between anger and absurdism, and frames the Temple in a revelatory moral light.

There’s no outright preaching, no plea to condemn or sympathize either way. What unfolds is far more complex, morally speaking, even if the bones of the narrative and how it’s shot are deliberately pared down.

The Whistlers goes down easy and dissipates soon after the credits roll, but with a murky plot in which the heist in question is often beside the point, the accomplishment of the movie lies within what it says about that agreeable flow.

Director Janicza Bravo’s zany road trip comedy about a pair of strippers on a rambunctious 48-hour Florida adventure embodies its ludicrous source while jazzing it up with relentless cinematic beats.

A bundle of taut nerves stretched to their vomit-inducing breaking point, Talk to Me, the directorial feature debut from Australian Youtube brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, is the type of horror film whose effectiveness arises from its barebones simplicity.

McQueen’s pointillistic approach invites our minds to wander freely between then and now, his film less interested in shuddering at the specifics of its awful facts than it is in probing our ever-evolving relationship to them, but the documentary’s monotonousness resists deeper engagement.

The beautifully lensed drama is, like its protagonist, compelled and often obsessed by the human shape and form, and Ahn’s film artfully uses the physical to tell a mostly standard issue coming-of-age story with style.

The film is a wild ride and a loving portrait, providing a vital record of this outsized figure who was so ahead of his time it seemed as though he transcended the laws of the universe.

More than a cock-eyed peek back at an unprecedented culture clash, the film provides a bittersweet glimpse at a small, stained-glass window of time when anything seemed possible, and the concept of change was rich with promise.

The Hand of God doesn’t always find the clearest way of knotting these various stories together, and the film’s second half — replete with so many highs — also feels like it leaves a number of important characters dangling in the wind.

Like its central character, Listen Up Philip exudes a kind of highbrow affectation that charms more than it alienates.

The musicality of Diao’s cinema has never been more symphonic, but it comes at the expense of his ability to properly conduct this script.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

In Son of Monarchs, Gambis has mapped the butterflies’ migratory paths and genetic patterns onto Mendel’s search for belonging. It’s an inspired blend of science and narrative, and an affecting allegory emerges from the unique imagery.

Wonder Woman is as much about a superhero rising as it is about a world deserving of her, and Diana’s hard-won insistence on battling for humanity (no matter how frequently they disappoint) adds the kind of gravitas and emotion that establishes it as the very best film the DCEU has made yet. There’s only one word for it: wonderful.

A murky, vaguely sinister, but ultimately dreary coming-of-age film about a young woman’s blossoming sexuality under the spell of her mother’s old flame.

Something in the Dirt functions as a disturbing and acerbically comedic riddle of a movie where finding the answers is a secondary, mostly unfruitful goal. What we are after is understanding the personal voids that push some of us to look for them in the first place.

There are any number of movies about gay men trying to liberate themselves from the long shadow of heteronormative oppression — a regrettably, enduringly relevant premise — but few have been told with the extraordinary nuance or compassion of Jayro Bustamante’s Tremors.

What Corbijn lacks in filmmaking panache here he makes up with strong journalistic chops: These interviews are great.

Amid all the barbarity for barbarity’s sake, Jonsson carries the film with a deep well of unspoken regret.

The Iron Ministry turns the chaos of modern China into dense, frantic poetry.

Billy Wilder’s trademark sardonicism lends welcome bite and wit to this twisting, turning murder mystery from Agatha Christie.

The adorable eccentricities of the movie’s second half are balanced out by the sincerity of the beauty that surrounds them.

Indie animation remains one of the toughest niches to find traction in, but here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the film career of an artist who graces us with his whimsy for decades to come.

Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, Spencer is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon.

More media installation than movie, The Image Book bemoans a vapid world well into the process of disintegration, and his film is engineered to simulate that process in visceral terms.

No amount of ingenious camerawork and breakneck pacing can obscure a simplistic core.

The Kingmaker clarifies the harrowing situation facing the future of the Philippines, but more than that, it’s a warning sign for the entire world.

Like nearly all of Dupieux’s previous work, Incredible but True stretches a high-concept, low-execution premise about as far as it can go, wrapping things up the nanosecond before they outstay their welcome. But unlike his previous work, this film leaves the viewer with a pleasant, and almost bittersweet aftertaste; it almost leaves you wanting more.

Glowing with García Bernal’s magnetism, “Cassandro” balances the triumphant exaltation of Arbendáriz’s singular evolution as a trailblazer who didn’t set out to become one, with the obvious, still not entirely eliminated bigotry that made his trajectory so significant and groundbreaking in the first place.

Even as the movie devolves into an ineffectual shaggy-dog story shoehorned into a baffling and abrupt real-life backdrop, it remains a slick and enjoyable pastiche about messy outlaws adrift in a world designed to screw them over.

However you slice it, Hill’s artifice proves intriguing even as it insists upon itself in ways that distract from Stutz’s lessons (which sound great but speed by in a blur of terminology that means almost nothing without him there to help us apply it to our own lives).

It’s not clear where else the series has to go — both in terms of the character’s journey and the fact that Finland only had so many geopolitical foes in the 1940s — but if the story ends here, our journey with Aatami will have been a satisfying one.

Bolstered by sterling turns from stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, and Miranda Richardson, the film is a showcase for what Green has always been able to do so well, and what his actors continue to excel at.

As the two men circle each other in the film’s second half, it shifts from contemplative drama to full-blown suspenseful thriller. It is in the latter mode that Mantone shines best as a filmmaker and Pierfrancesco Favino does as an actor.

September 5 works most powerfully as a behind-closed-doors, single-room thriller, even as what we see on a wall of monitors is almost too unreal to believe.

Schnabel fuses form and content in a way that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved; in risking the same derision with which Van Gogh was sometimes met, he transcends the limitations of the conventional biopic and creates something that feels genuinely new.

Pavements is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too?

This is a lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.

The real triumph of Obvious Child involves its ability to make familiar ingredients work just fine on their own terms. In doing so, it makes up for a lot of lost time in the pantheon of female-centric comedies, and studios would be wise to take note.

Teller's rough, uncomplicated filmmaking style does little to elaborate on Jenison's story, as the subject's unending curiosity singlehandedly carries each scene.

The only certainty is Tsangari has delivered another intriguing and thoroughly original character study, which this time serves as an apt metaphor for Greece's larger problems.

The reality-show aesthetic pervades the movie as well. Garrone's roaming camera style draws you into each moment with extreme close-ups and long takes that wander through each scene and get lost in it. Luciano's plight is crushing because Garrone renders it with such detail.

Suspense is rarely delivered with such distinctive patience.

Garry Winogrand hated being called “a street photographer,” even if he was regarded as the most essential of them all. The great success of Sasha Waters Freyer’s straightforward but evocative documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, is how well it explains why someone could have such a strong aversion to a term that was practically invented to describe them.

The film embodies its namesake’s oft-repeated — if increasingly suspect — ethos of making sure that fun comes first.

Decker’s characteristically sawtoothed and delirious new film is set in the same latent space between fact and fantasy — a story and its telling — where she located all of her previous work.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

Filled with considerable dread and mystery, 10 Cloverfield Lane functions just fine as a standalone genre title. But as a spiritual sequel to the original, it builds out the so-called "Cloververse" far better than could be expected from even the most straightforward of tales.

In the movie's final shot, Jung's confidence crumbles and he looks supremely troubled, still uncertain of a world he once believed could be explained with textual prowess. Better than any analysis, his expression sums up the dangerous method at the heart of every Cronenberg movie.

This is a beautiful film, and an ugly one, and the tension between those two sides doesn’t abate until the very last scene.

It’s every bit as candied and superficial as you might expect from such a self-mythologizing stroll down memory lane, but its subjects bring some occasional edge to it . . . and the documentary’s slickness befits the story of a team that had been created to promote the NBA on the world stage.

While the broad strokes of Riegel’s story might sound familiar, Holler finds its power in the particularities, especially Barden’s unfussy and wholly believable performance.

The appeal of El Planeta lies with a pair of women who prefer to live in the moment rather than considering its consequences.

No matter how outwardly anodyne, nearly every frame is a product of rigorous blocking and choreography, stamping each shot with a kind of Good Filmmaking Seal of Approval that makes the chasm between the film’s deliberateness and opacity all the more vast.

If this is what a Hollywood-ized and -sized blockbuster looks like in 2022, bring it on. Bring them all on. They’re worth the fight.

If Cold Case Hammarskjöld resolves as Brügger’s most rewarding film, it appears to reach that point almost by accident. His usual methods achieve most unusual results, as he digs into the facts with the wry amusement of someone who doesn’t expect to find anything.

American Symphony greatly suffers from a lack of focus.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

As the action progresses, the film seems more concerned with the hitting beats of the story than sending its characters on an emotional journey.

Where "Bridesmaids" has plenty of solid gags, it's not much to look at; Submarine always has something impressive to watch even when its plot is on autopilot.

Godard’s revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of Nouvelle Vague.

Herzog shoots first, and asks how the footage might be pertinent to his project later; Into the Inferno often feels scattered and listless as a result, but this tactic is also responsible for so many of the movie’s most perfect moments.

This wise and diaphanous little drama finds Kore-eda once again exploring his usual obsessions, as the man behind the likes of “Still Walking” and “After the Storm” offers yet another insightful look at the underlying fabric of a modern family.

It’s an impressive feat of filmmaking, but one that reveals nothing new, a major misstep for a film seemingly dedicated to doing just that.

As mercifully non-didactic as one would expect from any French movie about a constellation of hot people banging into each other as they rotate along their respective orbits Paris, 13th District is much less interested in judging these characters than it is in watching to see how they keep their balance.

Nothing about Dead Man's Burden reeks of homage to oaters of yore -- instead, Moshé has made a legitimate entry in a genre he clearly adores.

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? bears the stamp of Gondry quirk but allows it to feel a lot more intimate than anything he's done since "Eternal Sunshine."

The movie deals less with awkwardness of this comedic scenario than the emotions it creates for its central duo, and the psychological struggle when words can only go so far.

What emerges is a more ephemeral portrait of the time and place that O’Connor sprang from and was rebelling against.

Mars Express may have benefited from the luxury of being able to slow down (this story could have easily sustained a 13 or 26-episode anime season), but Périn makes the most of its propulsiveness, as this eye-popping movie launches toward a future where tech might be liberated from the people who created it.

It’s when the film mostly gets out of its own way and lets the men’s experiences do the work that Soul Patrol really shines.

Pálmason’s overall sincerity has its dividends, even for what it lacks in candidness: the poignant closing shot distills that this is his vision on this eternal topic, open to the risk that its alternating visual modes won’t harmonize.

As a sociological experiment, Five Star offers plenty of talking points, but its real triumph is that the cast delivers, yielding a story in which the heightened suspense emerges organically from a gritty foundation of realism.

The film still ends in rousing fashion, but it recognizes something far more profound: There are no actual conclusions in real life, even if we can feel moments of triumph throughout. It’s what next that matters.

Loveless proceeds like a messy younger sibling of Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" as it tracks Andrew's ongoing denial of the mounting pressures to settle down, many of which come from his reasonably sane ex, Joanna (Cindy Chastain).

Encanto feels like one of the Mouse House’s more emotionally complex animated features, even if its story ultimately tries too hard to wrap up that nuance in a very tidy bow.

The actors’ gifts are all heightened by Msangi’s delicate touch in this empathetic portrait of immigrant life in America that is, refreshingly, less interested in big drama than in a family quietly building itself back up when it may be too late.

The film arrives at its last shot with a sense of purpose, but Cedar’s clumsy plotting and uncharacteristically sterile compositions suggest that he’s charted the least enjoyable route to the film’s satisfying finale.

Ghost Trail is a film that refuses to let anyone treat the plight of Syrians like a thing of the past, or to delude themselves into thinking that the war ends once Syrians are relocated to safer countries.

For all the energy of Gerwig and Kirke's shared chemistry and the lively dialogue that compliments it, the story of Mistress America never keeps pace, ultimately sagging into formula to the detriment of the potential displayed by its compelling protagonists.

OBEX is a warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.

Abbasi grounds the narrative in an emotional foundation even as it flies off the rails.

Barnard once again proves herself the bard of the British working class. In Ali & Ava, she abandons her occasionally bleak realism for a kind of stubborn hopefulness, letting the delight of unexpected connection break through the storm clouds.

You always know a Plaza performance will be good, but over the past few years, Plaza has seemed to make it a priority to surprise her audiences with just how good she is.

Though more in love with its silliness than the insights buried inside them, Frank works to amusingly irreverent effect when combining the two.

While overlong and occasionally too reliant on a formulaic set of motives to drive the action forward, Easy Money retains its suave composure right through the engrossing finale.