What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

What Beecroft achieves exists in its own unique realm. It reminds us that no matter who you are, how isolated your world may seem, or how unworthy of being seen you may feel, your life is still deserving of the cinematic treatment.

While some of Bispuri’s scripting can be a bit too pointed for a story that traffics in such elemental textures (a brief flashback scene is particularly ill-advised), the film renders each of Vittoria’s mothers with such riveting and unvarnished empathy that you hardly even notice how their daughter is growing up before your eyes, stronger than the both of them.

Much of what we see is what the Taliban wants us to see, but as that’s what’s really important to them, it’s also what we — anyone who’s a non-fundamentalist — need to see to understand them.

In constructing its gripping overview, After Tiller maintains a generally straightforward roundup of talking heads, but its unassuming construction gradually generates an authoritative voice. Only once the arguments have been plainly established does the emotion truly take hold.

The pair blends storybook visuals with a stream of clever gags and oodles of pathos to deliver an infectious romance almost too eager to please at every turn.

With Tom Hanks appropriately cast as good-natured Sully, Eastwood delivers an earnest, straightforward look at the way the captain’s professionalism saved the day. But while that aspect of the movie hits more than a few obvious notes, the crash is the real star of the show.

Brainy and exciting at the same time, Interstellar invalidates the need for mindless Hollywood product. No matter its shortcomings, the movie achieves an impressive balancing act. It turns the mysteries of the universe into a cinematic playground, but for every profound or visually arresting moment, it also encourages you to to think.

The conflict in The Attack is less about the reasoning behind immoral behavior than the problems involved in any cursory understanding of it.

Although Scrapper — and Georgie — have some rough edges, Regan’s film is remarkably gentle, without being schmaltzy. Its wry observations are more effective than the big emotional swings Scrapper sometimes, but not often, chooses to take.

Karen’s dogged pragmatism, and her complex relationship to the smut that provided her family’s livelihood for thirty years, is why Circus of Books is such a rare delight — and a nearly perfect documentary.

The movie walks a jagged line between conflicting sources, and overplays some of the more outrageous claims to the detriment of the trenchant investigation at its core. However, Kennebeck still musters a fascinating and provocative study of today’s misinformation age simply by adopting its elusive terms.

Like a Brueghel or a Bosch, Youth (Spring) is less an individual portrait than a bustling portrayal of types — lovesick fools and weary old souls, agitators and wallflowers, peacocks and young parents-to-be, all united and made equal by the same shared and endless labor and the same cramped living quarters. And all of them — but for two outliers — united by age.

Egg shows the Scottish actor-director’s continuing ability to ground her films with strong character work and a buoyant sense of humor.

This is a curious, slightly underwhelming offering. Even so, falling flat as a result of being understated to a fault is a promising event in a genre dominated by obvious signposting, and Wright is certainly one to watch for the future.

Hall and Tiexiera create something incredibly special with Subject. The subject matter (pun totally intended) yields a documentary that isn’t against the documentary world, but wants audiences to simply question what they’re watching

For all of its cliched youthful exuberance, the film finds its footing in the third act when it offers a bittersweet look into the tradeoffs of fame and how their conflicts with personal obligations can derail even the most promising artists.

With so much to say and a supremely talented cast embodying lovable and multi-dimensional characters, a sequel is a no-brainer. “Joy Ride” is easily the golden standard for progressive, raunchy comedy and the need for more diverse stories being told on screen.

Brimming with constant new ideas and visual innovation, Shaw’s work captures the flurry of thought and motion at the center of dangerous times, and even dares to make them fun.

By turning the tables and making a Black woman the landowner, the filmmaker manages to both subvert the past and illustrate the same economic forces that led to all the inequality we still face in the real world. It all makes for a fitting Fourth of July weekend viewing, with plenty of cannibal combat thrown in for good measure.

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.

If this weren’t a Cartoon Saloon movie, it would probably fall apart long before Meg LeFauve’s screenplay arrives at its touching finale, which trusts kids to confront some of the more difficult truths that childhood forces you to intuit. But good news: My Father’s Dragon is a Cartoon Saloon movie, and the open-hearted sincerity of the studio’s work breathes singular life into even the least engaging scenes of its most anonymous feature.

If you suspect The Duke is on the cosy and nostalgic side of the cinematic spectrum, you might be right. But it’s such an expertly crafted and highly polished piece of warmhearted escapism that it’s difficult to resist.

Spanning 50 years and multiple continents without ever shifting its focus from the universal human urge to ponder what could have been, Touch is an ode to accepting your life story without losing sleep over the things you couldn’t change.

While Magaro’s performance anchors the film, strong turns from both Wright and Solis give added depth. So too does Webley and Machoian’s obvious interest in their young characters’ perspectives and experience; “Omaha” is often not just seen, but felt through their eyes.

No one’s proposing the story should be as radical as “8 Women” or as dark as “Swimming Pool”, but it’s almost too restrained at times, to the point where you end up wishing Ozon would push just that little bit more. Still, it’s hard to complain when the end result is this accomplished.

Dream Scenario is simply the best absurdist comedy of its kind since “Anomalisa” (the Kaufman connection being further cemented by a Cage performance that feels like it was born from superimposing both of his “Adaptation” characters on top of each other. …And also by a running joke about antkind).

This modest recollection is a quiet act of defiance and course correction. “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” may not be worth anyone’s time, but The Ghost of Peter Sellers is another story — and a much better one.

Molly Shannon is brilliant and warm as the literary icon.

“How does he do it?,” someone asks. Music by John Williams doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.

While Will & Harper has moments both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny (a hot air balloon scene in Albuquerque is genius, and lifted even higher by a cameo from Will Forte), Greenbaum’s filmmaking is often far too reticent, as he tends to play things “straight” and take pains not to offend.

As a director, he finally shows a willingness to work on the same wavelength of the material instead of adding distracting bells and whistles that overstate his characters' grievances.

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

The most intense look at a social media-obsessed loner since “Eighth Grade,” Swedish director Von Horn’s Polish-language feature finds its character wrestling with the nature of her popularity, until she’s forced to confront the disconnect between her public and personal existence in vivid detail.

The story retains an inscrutable tone that sometimes makes its emotional qualities feel remote, but it still delivers a powerful message about the challenge of self-diagnosis by rooting it in universal experience

It’s often hilarious, confounding and downright strange; if not the director’s most polished work, it nevertheless delivers a demented philosophical puzzle that’s fun to scrutinize in all of its baffling uncertainties.

Kill makes very, very good on its goofy title by the time all is said and done, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it inverts expectations without ever getting off-track.

A film so calibrated when humming forward starts to lose its tonal footing when Jon’s creative spark dims to a too-faint flicker.

That Weinstein’s downfall was the product of diligent reporting, dogged persistence, and the resilience of a few brave souls is essential to remember. In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary She Said, we’re reminded of something else that makes for one hell of a movie: It was women who did it.

Showcases Jones' ability to provide ample entertainment value with sharply drawn characters in a minimalist setting.

Although it succeeds on its own terms in bringing to light the pathetic and exploitative behavior of plantation owners during the final era of Dutch colonialism, it succumbs to the same listlessness as Josefien, lying in bed, covered in mosquito bites, waiting for a climax denied.

Beast walks the line between taut psychological thriller and doomed genre romance, smartly remaining laser-focused on Moll and her fraying sanity.

If Joe marks a new beginning for some of its characters, the same description applies to its director and star.

For all its otherworldly beauty, “Utama” could benefit from slightly more robust dramatic beats to complement the hyper-sensorial experience that imbues in the spectator, especially in addressing the displacement of Indigenous communities across the Americas and beyond.

One of European cinema’s most unclassifiable auteurs has delivered the bitter pill we deserve.

Casually cathartic at times, cathartically casual at others, this affecting little film about fathers and sons knows that some wounds never heal, but it’s never too late to stop the bleeding.

As Angie feels caught between many worlds, so does her story. A little bit teen sex romp, a little bit female friendship plug, a little bit Asian American immigrant story, Inbetween Girl has no shortage of things to say. It just needed to trim out the noise so we could hear them.

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.

Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t break fresh ground by Marvel standards, but it livens up the proceedings just enough to grease up the wheels of this franchise behemoth as it careens along.

While Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project doesn’t wholly breach the bubble surrounding Giovanni, by the end, Brewster and Stephenson, through tender immersion and lyrical invention, inspires viewers who have maybe never read Giovanni to seek out her poems, the one that say everything about the spirit of the woman who cannot wholly be captured on camera.

Bird is not Arnold’s best film — how can you top the cross-country raptures of “American Honey” or the final synchronized dance to Nas in “Fish Tank”? But it’s certainly her most ambitious in terms of willingness to stretch her creative reach beyond the social-realist-only confines of some of her early work.

While even the movie’s best moments are derivative enough to deserve that kind of mix-and-match categorization, Welsh shoots the whole thing with such a knowing sense of time and place that its age-old story of revolt can feel like it’s happening for the very first time — like it’s now or never, and there’ll be no going back once the sun comes up.

The great shock of Wild Indian is Corbine isn’t afraid to paint Makwa as more of a sociopath than a victim. The filmmaker destabilizes that false dichotomy to such a frightening degree that audiences might see him as a simple monster as opposed to an overflowing vessel for centuries of genocidal trauma.

Matsoukas’ fast and furious filmmaking doesn’t always click, but it always crackles with purpose, refashioning the lovers-on-the-lam trope into an emotional black-lives-matter lament, and it deserves to be met on those terms.

With ideological clashes that span countries, Among the Believers offers an intricate and frightening look into the microcosm of our current world’s biggest international issue.

Both introspective and entertaining, Betts never forgets that her young nuns are still teenage girls, and Novitiate rings as true as any other film about coming of age.

Oppenheim relishes in the strange beauty of their lives with Rockwellian precision, and the bigger picture remains elusive throughout. Look closer, however, and the movie makes a sobering point, whether or not Oppenheim intended it — that the biggest threat to American identity isn’t confronting the nature of the society so much as the people who prefer to escape it altogether, ending their lives in solipsistic bliss.

The movie’s disquieting tone unfolds with a familiar kind of naturalism — devoid of soundtrack, it develops an engrossing reality filled with pregnant pauses and fragmented exchanges. There’s a palpable despair to this scenario rooted in the authenticity of its environment.

As Jess, Jasmine Batchelor (the film marks her first starring role in a film, the actress also produced it) turns in one of the year’s best performances, profound work that twists an already propulsive concept into a riveting character study.

Without hesitation, she talks about her own shortcomings too. She does so with an assured hand, an open heart, and a heady way of seeing the world. But other parts of her are obscured, and those questions might leave one wanting.

It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success.

It’s not a hard movie to watch, but it’s a thought-provoking test about one’s capacity to push through distractions and discover what’s important.

It doesn’t get much better than a rude maître d’ denied room on a life-saving elevator. And yet, even falling from the top of the Skyview, Bloodlines will have you laughing about that piano all the way down.

Throughout the film, both Dack and her revelatory star teeter through shifting concepts, black and white, yes and no, that only grow more jarring and tense as Palm Trees and Power Lines unfolds.

The moments when Moll lets the images reveal as much as the dialogue are the ones that linger.

Despite the strong performances and meticulously crafted world they exist inside, the film’s narrative isn’t nearly revelatory enough to match its most winning elements.

Durkin’s movie has its fair share of crucial moments in the ring, but none of them would land with a fraction of the same impact if not for the many crystalline little moments in which Kerry, Kevin, David, and Mike get to build each other up.

Director Maggio’s reverence for Parks is certainly palpable in his documentary. It’s just not the deep-dive necessary to complement the scope of the work he created, and the impact he made, that would make the film truly enriching and compelling. But it might be enough to serve as a cursory introduction for the uninitiated.

The Tale of King Crab is an engrossing, if slight riff on 1970s foreign arthouse classics — though not quite as spellbinding as its forebears, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

While its main characters are tough-minded, Rust and Bone is itself pure heart.

Setting aside its subjects’ lack of diversity, “Woodstock 99” is a must-watch documentary that reminds us, yet again, about history’s inevitable ability to repeat itself.

The Rape of Recy Taylor works as both artifact and indictment.

While the film lacks the originality of many of the films it tries to emulate, it’s still a solidly crafted reminder of the absurdly tragic fate that our current housing system appears to be guiding us towards.

While the entirety of Frantz holds less appeal than its gorgeous ingredients, it’s impossible to deny the sheer narrative sophistication that makes this gentle story much more than your average retread.

This is the role that he’s been rehearsing for his entire life, and Val is far more rewarding if you think about it not as an autobiographical documentary, but rather as a film about an actor finding a way to express more through his characters than his characters were ever able to express through him.

What starts as a blandly divided documentary eventually finds its way to something inspiring, infuriating, and unbounded by old ideas.

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

The story works wonderfully as an idea, but Kore-eda never quite manages to infuse it with the same depth of feeling his main character goes through.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

[A] suitably workmanlike documentary.

By the final jaw-dislocating cut to black, you’ll have no idea what just thwacked you.

Krige is magical enough in a complex role (and relative newcomer Eberhardt makes for a wonderful foil), but she can only pull the film along through sheer force of will for so long.

No amount of strong performances and good vibes can hide the sense that we’re just watching a paint-by-numbers routine. Nair puts so much effort into galvanizing the movie’s central figures that the slightest hints of conflict register as little more than an inconvenience.

Pop Aye never dips into cutesiness or sentimentality, even when you might find yourself wishing it would; it’s less a big-top circus and more a low-key character study.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

The American Dream may be a mass delusion, but it’s the realest thing in the world to those under its sway. Zhuk was able to manifest her destiny and make it across the ocean, and her movie offers a compelling glimpse at why that may have been the only choice her country ever gave her.

Hong gives us a soulful, subtly acerbic, tongue-in-cheek critique of narrative coherence.

The film is so self-aware, in fact, that it raises questions about which of its flaws are intentional and which are, well, flaws. The filmmaking here is as polished as one might expect from a Hollywood crowd-pleaser, well lit and only occasionally showy in terms of its camerawork. And the combat and car-crash stunts are great — they better be, given the subject matter.

Only in the film’s final half-hour, which (unsurprisingly) sets the pair on a path to duke it out in the ring, do they — and this film — really spring to life.

Musicals are meant to be big, expansive, overstuffed, emotionally rich, so consuming that the concept of singing and dancing about it make all the sense in the world. Just as “Wicked” starts hitting its highest notes, it’s over. For now. For another year. And not for good.

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.

This is yet another instance where the film’s short runtime seems to have shortchanged the depth of reporting.

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.

The movie contains an epic scope that feels out of sync with the smallness of its plot; you get the idea by the first act and then Laurence's world simply hangs there for another two hours like a slo-mo shrug.

These aesthetic flourishes are as necessary as they are nice to look at, and go a long way toward making the darker shades of Hounds of Love less of an endurance test.

As a showcase for his stellar casting abilities and knack for heartwarming storytelling, Griffin in Summer is a very fine feature directorial debut.

A Most Wanted Man allows Hoffman to go out with not only one of his best performances, but one that epitomizes his strengths.

Spaceship Earth touches down as a grounded and even clinical analysis of our natural skepticism towards dreamers — of how our hope can sour into hostility as soon as it loses an iota of its shine.