For Godard junkies Goodbye to Language is rich with Godard's temperament—and thus an enjoyable provocation, even if it doesn't all add up. But what Godard movie truly does?

Robot and Frank succeeds where "Ted" fails because, unlike McFarlane, Schreier and Ford render the relationship between the human character and the robot in largely credible terms.

This intimate, unvarnished, and occasionally transcendent micro-portrait may seldom leave Dunning’s property, but it takes stock of the whole world.

Gibney's narrative drags to some extent when the focus widens to explore the Vatican's overall policy for covering up sex scandals, but he successfully demonstrates the systematic failure of a system designed work flawlessly on the basis of spirituality that never existed in the first place.

This poignant, minor-key work from the only major filmmaker to carry the torch of silent comedy into the 21st century is rich with feeling, even as it enters a self-reflexive zone that sometimes distracts from the legitimate concerns at its core.

Too distracted to be a love story, too contained to be a city symphony, and not didactic enough to feel like an essay film, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? gradually coalesces into a kind of abstract pastoral romance more than anything else — it finds the romance that fringes everything around us, and captures it on camera with the unbearable lightness of a movie that knows we could never hope to see it with the naked eye.

Its creators are so clearly on the same insane wavelength, nimbly blending camp and social satire and actual terror, that “M3GAN” is poised to crack the murder-doll pantheon and stay there forever. Oscars!

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.

The real strength of Sierra Burgess Is a Loser is the steely determination and sharp intellect of Sierra herself, for which Purser must be given most of the credit.

It is a vital reminder that, no matter where you live, the past and present must always be in conversation if we ever want to see a brighter future.

Stearns’ tone involves a tricky negotiation between the melancholy and the macabre. “The Art of Self-Defense” doesn’t always pull that balance off, but it has enough ambition and wacky payoff to make the zany gamble worthwhile.

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.

While the movie risks smothering the heart of its drama in all the movement and noise, the sheer sensory overload often leads to astonishing bursts of emotional sophistication.

Friedland, who also wrote the film‘s script, is not given over to histrionics or blaring displays of emotion, instead asking us to follow Ruth and experience the world through her eyes. The impact is profound.

Even as Quest toys with expectations, (there are no chart toppers to be found here), the triumphs in Quest are much harder to spot, though they are mighty; love, family, and hope in the face of adversity. Nothing could be more harmonious.

The only thing scarier than Prey at Night is the possibility that we might have to wait another decade for more of its very special mask-faced chills.

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

The grim subtext of The Wind Rises goes largely unacknowledged, leading to a gaping hole in this otherwise beautifully realized narrative that celebrates the power of curiosity as a motivating force.

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.

Lloyd’s feature strikes a fine balance between all of life’s ups and downs, illustrated by Sandra’s unfortunately relatable traumas and a series of stellar performances.

My Little Sister regains its footing in its final scenes, eschewing the expected for the raw emotion of real life.

The devil is in the details, and the details? Well, they’re in the kind of patchwork-guessing and random sign-seeing that so many are forced to endure as they embark on the horrors of modern dating. Brooks just takes them in some delightfully daffy (and occasionally deeply scary) new directions.

Bird has crafted a gorgeous world rife with creativity and inventive images. A Spielbergian sense of candid awe and wonder permeates each scene with a nostalgic edge.

Dealin' With Idiots is powered by a cast of terrific character actors.

Anaïs isn’t so different in the wonderfully surprising last shot than she is in the first, but at last we can see that she’s having the time of her life.

The whole movie is suspended in a pleasant and intimate space between order and chaos, love and abandonment, leaving the nest and building a new one. Every time Shithouse borrows from something else, it only seems to become more itself.

Spurlock’s quest to put Chick-fil-A out of business is always entertaining — the filmmaker is still a charming and quick-witted man of the people, and his shtick has aged much better than Michael Moore’s — but if “Super-Size Me 2” isn’t quite as funny as the first installment, it’s considerably more horrifying.

Cronenberg has become known as a purveyor of body horror, in which the monstrous arises from within rather than without. The Brood cunningly turns this motif into a metaphor for psychotherapy itself, which seeks to dredge up and cast out the monsters haunting the unconscious.

A meditative universe of self-contained artistry, Junun offers no clear-eyed statement on its subject, but develops an enveloping internal logic about the thrill of artistic innovation.

In the Earth may not run deep enough to grow roots, but it’s the first COVID movie that dares to think beyond what it can see in front of its face, venture into the world outside, and confront how terrifying and necessary it’s going to be to commune with nature on new terms when the nightmare is over.

With trademark stoicism and inscrutable poise, Krieps gives a performance that never tries to extract easy pity from the viewer or reach for low-hanging fruit.

This is powerful and uniquely disquieting cinema that should reward the curiosity of those brave enough to seek it out, but you can only stare into a bottomless abyss for so long before you lose the will to keep looking.

Neruda turns all of the filmmaker's preceding statements on his native land into a unified whole. In essence, the film asserts that even as history passes into legend, it speaks to deeper truths.

It’s a fascinating role in an uneven but frequently insightful movie riddled with amusing asides and enigmatic developments, partly because Huppert doesn’t undergo a radical transformation. Instead, she subtly finds herself at war with her inner confidence, and it’s often hard to tell which side has the upper hand.

While nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity out of the traditional supernatural thriller tropes at its core.

If On Her Shoulders struggles for an ending, perhaps that’s because we have to supply our own. People like Nadia can’t fix the world, but this vital documentary is proof that it’s heroic enough just to be heard.

[A] delightful and unusually spirited love letter ... Tempting as it can be to wish that Wright had slowed down, probed deeper, and leaned even harder into the Mael brothers’ love of movies, it’s so fun and thrilling to watch the movies finally love them back.

Ideas might be recycled in “Funny Pages,” but they’re converted into something distinct.

There’s a reason this Altman picture isn’t as recognized as his other ’70s classics. But as laid back and matter-of-fact as Thieves Like Us is — there’s no score for example, just diegetic sound — it’s still a fascinating piece of work in Altman’s not-always-perfect, still-interesting ouevre.

A heartfelt and hopeful portrait of four of the original AGs that feels more complete and finds each of them on steadier footing — eventually.

As usual, Strickland has made a sumptuous meal out of social impropriety — a strange cinematic delicacy about the discomforts that need to be shared so that others don’t have to be stomached.

The emotional rawness of that super-real encounter is typical of what viewers will find scattered across Cutler’s film, an 135-minute opus — complete with intermission! — that indulges Eilish fans without alienating casual passersby.

It’s gut-punch cinema, uneasy and unpredictable, though Foroughi keeps it clicking right along into the rare open ending that feels earned.

Perhaps it’s the talent in her genes, perhaps it’s her unique life experience, perhaps some combo of that and more, but Englert is already a formidable, fully formed filmmaker. Dumb labels be damned: She’s the real deal, and Bad Behaviour is proof positive of that.

It’s a remarkable educational experience for anyone eager to go back to the basics. In the process, it arrives at a deeper understanding of the underlying impulse, while delivering an emotionally resonant narrative with plenty of cute animals to spare.

“Hard Times” offers no radical change from the (quite deliberately) repetitive construction of “Spring,” but does feature subtle shifts in focus and certainly a lot more in the way of incident and splintering effects.

It’s not a movie about healing so much as a movie about learning to hurt in the healthiest way possible. And if its diaristic, inside-out approach has the strange effect of keeping us at a distance . . . it also invites its most vulnerable young viewers to appreciate that even their favorite superstar is still fighting to be closer to herself.

All of a Sudden is so prescriptive with its ideas that its characters are liable to become vessels for them. It’s the one regard in which Hamaguchi’s impulse to mash everything together softens the power of his point rather than sharpening it, and the one regard in which this three-and-a-half hour sit threatens to seem too short.

"Prom Queen” blitzes through familiar pop-comic vignettes, only pausing to make its loathsome characters’ adolescent nightmares just a little bit freakier.

I can’t say whether Hong has suffered any of the creative self-doubts that animate his latest heroine, but the film he’s made for her feels as revealing as the one she then makes for herself. Free your art, your art will free you in return — a nice idea, but one that the uniqueness of Hong’s career makes easier to admire than it is to internalize.

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

For all its youthful self-seriousness (or maybe in part because of it), Permanent Vacation is a touching vision of what it was like to be head over heels with art, love, and oneself in late-1970s New York.

The film’s greatest achievement is the measured and elegant gaze on a woman in the prime of life, often referred to as middle age, whose desires (both sexual and professional) are neither diminished nor pathologized.

With its subject still behind bars and the Russian government on the brink of reelecting Kremlin's United Russia party, the biggest triumph of Khodorkovsky is the case it makes for a sequel.

Watching “LaRoy” is a lot like the seedy motel affairs that all of its characters seem to be having — two hours of fun, followed by a tragic feeling of emptiness and a desire for a shower.

It lacks the same constant surprises of last year's "Gravity" or the visual poetry of "Mad Max: Fury Road," but Kormákur's movie nonetheless marks the rare fusion of effective craftsmanship with focused storytelling.

While at times too over-the-top and operatic for its own good, those same flawed ingredients echo the rough edges that define the movie's iconic subject.

Burton's id explodes onto the screen with a plethora of demonic mutated critters.

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.

This heartfelt origin story is more than the sum of its immense charm and Spielbergian attention to detail.

Felix and Meira can only speak in vagaries about their feelings. At times they come across like underwritten archetypes, but the superficial aspects of their scenario are elevated by a pair of deeply empathetic performances. Giroux excels at implying his characters' internal processes.

This haunted and harrowing psychodrama — based on surviving records from the 18th century, and rooted in the day-to-day tedium of Styrian farm life — has too much respect for its emotionally isolated heroine to frame her unraveling as part of a broader phenomenon.

Decker's narrative work practically celebrates a willingness to follow outright silly pathways in order to arrive at unsettling results.

It’s Furhman, steadily building Alex from the inside out, even as she’s crumbling around her, that adds the most tension and intensity to the film, offering a fully realized performance in a story all about the pain of realizing how much further you have to go.

It’s the stirring chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as committed siblings that transforms these lively, violent circumstances into a sweet and intimate journey designed to catch acolytes of the genre off-guard.

Even as the movie lingers on the question of whether one woman has more talent than the other, Always Shine is an effective actor’s showcase for both of them.

No disrespect to the similarly Proustian rewards of “Ratatouille,” but here is a 73-minute movie — animated by about 10 people — that manages to deliver twice the flavor with a fraction of the ingredients.

Big Words at times seems like it's heading towards a microbudget version of "Hustle and Flow," but Drumming aims for a much smarter and subdued look at the various regrets and hang-ups haunting men of a certain age. Their blackness is only one piece of the puzzle.

With one film left in the franchise, “P.S. I Still Love You” effectively operates as both its own feature and a bridge to the more adult questions Lara Jean and company will face in the final offering. It’s a love letter to teen movies of the past, but also a smart look at what they might be in the future.

As with Snowpiercer, this is a story almost too eager to fire in multiple directions, sometimes with messy results, veering from broad satire to softer exchanges with little regard for finding balance between the two.

Berberian Sound Studio constructs a perpetually strange, unseemly series of events overshadowed (and sometimes consumed by) the spooky movie-within-a-movie that hangs over every scene.

A quiet work with major ambitions, The Assistant is a significant cultural statement in cinematic form.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

The Bernard Hermann score adds another dimension.

While it’s a mild shame “The Naked Gun” peters out a little bit toward the end (at least before rebounding during the credits), it’s even more of a shame that it has to end at all.

Lessin, Pildes, and their many subjects eschew cheap emotion in favor of something much more intimate and, ultimately, more honest.

Choose or Die is a perfect entry point into genre for younger viewers, one that will also satisfy old school diehards even as it takes some pointed (perhaps deserved?) jabs at them.

This soulful and deeply satisfying film — a fitting swansong, if ever there was one — makes a compelling argument that change is always possible, and that the path we’re on is never as narrow as the highway makes it look.

This bitter and beautiful Sundance-winning doc focuses on a single beekeeper as though our collective future hinges on her hives.

With its dense assemblage of archival materials and candid talking heads, “Roadrunner” gets the job done, yielding a tough, infuriating tribute to Bourdain’s ineffable genius and the tragic inclinations that came out of it.

Shot in beautifully textured 16mm and told at an unhurried pace, Person to Person requires some getting used to, but once you settle into its groove the movie becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

More impressionistic than the searing intellectualism of his last work, Monrovia, Indiana at once demonstrates Wiseman’s formidable cinematic capabilities while posing a number of tantalizing questions about the community at its center.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

Dweck and Kershaw don’t build a narrative so much as an accumulation of encounters that often lead to the visually immersive thrill of watching a culinary ecosystem come to life.

Evil Does Not Exist is a slow-moving film with few epiphanies and no answers to the questions it posits.

The Last Viking elegantly juxtaposes the ludicrousness of the situation (one of the funniest side plots is Werner’s avid Beatle fandom and his apparently sincere belief that this makeshift band is going to deliver high quality covers) with the trauma that underscores the ridiculousness events.

It’s a sober account of police militarization in the 21st century that, no matter one’s stance on the matter, makes a brutal statement.

Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful.

Fans of Kwan’s books will not be disappointed by Chu’s adaptation, as “Crazy Rich Asians” lovingly brings to life some of the novel’s standout scenes, even as Chiarelli and Lim’s screenplay snips away subplots that detract from Rachel’s journey.

The movie ... sometimes sags into a lethargic pace and unwieldy tangents. ... But there’s no doubting the presence of a focused, intelligent vision guiding the small-scale material along.

There’s an effortless cool about Marsden's performance that's a perfect mismatch to Black's hysterics, and it brings a reassuring authenticity to some otherwise implausible plot twists.

Música heralds the arrival of a filmmaker, an actor, and a musician worth paying attention to, while also delivering a winning and visually inventive musical comedy.

The result is not a major work, but still a wildly funny portrait that succeeds at inducing the incredulity Morris always seeks out.

Terrifier 3 is decking the halls with a triumphant celebration that’s horrifying for all the right reasons and snaps into focus what it is that Leone does singularly well. That may or may not win people over, but it shouldn’t lose any repeat customers.

Gyllenhaal has been too good too often to label any one of her performances as her best, but she’s certainly never been better than she is here.

Despite the familiarity, The Old Guard manages to be both very grounded and very entertaining, a marriage of expectations and twists unlike little else the genre has inspired even during its most fruitful times.

As debuts go, The Featherweight is more than just a competent drama. It’s as nifty as its warts-and-all protagonist, with an inventive verité storytelling style inspired by John Cassavettes that also evokes the era’s filmmaking.

Hill’s story suggests equal parts “Freaks and Geeks,” “Kids,” and the adolescent-focused narratives of British director Shane Meadows, but Hill cribs from these precedents with a confidence that injects this lively snapshot of skateboarding reprobates with fresh confidence.