The title suggests a dramatic Shakespearean twist, but Clooney's aims are much simpler. As he builds to a western showdown divorced from political specificity, the Manchurian-like manipulation turns Ides of March into an allegorical monster movie in which everyone's competing for the role of the monster and most people can't see it.

As the Disney princess brand has continued to evolve, from the introduction of newbies like Moana to the continuing popularity of classics like Tiana and Mulan, Raya and the Last Dragon is a sterling example of how the trope still has room to grow — while proving that some of the original ingredients can still deliver the goods.

More fun than funny, more clever than smart, “LEGO Batman” moves too fast to acclimate audiences to the world it so eagerly dismantles and rebuilds (and too fast to make them want to stay there for a minute longer), but it serves as a frenzied reminder that laughing at the things we love is sometimes the best way to remember why we love them.

As a personal portrait, “Ailey” is lacking for charming anecdotes or nuggets of wisdom from the artist himself. But a true artist speaks through his work, and it’s appropriate that the revelations in “Ailey” arrive via the dance scenes.

Even as the story drifts off, Night Eats the World derives its power from a beguiling, provocative implication: It’s hard to confront a hostile world, but gathering the courage to do so doesn’t make the job any easier.

Magic Mike casts a seriously entertaining spell.

It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

For the most part, Black Box Diaries — per its title — is a personal testimony of a stressful journey, illustrating how survivors struggle, cope and find relief in support.

Sleep is fun enough the first time out, but a second watch will likely reveal even more natty twists and smart scripting, nothing to snooze at here.

Rubberneck has more in common with the growing Karpovsky oeuvre than it may appear -- and even inadvertently critiques it.

The juicy teen drama of Do Revenge is a contemporary riff on an age-old classic. It’s nothing if not of the moment, and at the moment, teenagers are reading the same panic-inducing headlines as everyone else. If they want to do a little revenge on a world that seems hell bent on driving humanity off a cliff, Do Revenge offers some clever entertainment for the ride.

When the concept really clicks, Casting JonBenet operates as a darkly entertaining look at how gossip can fuel legend to the point where truth loses its relevance.

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).

Ginsburg’s life — and its many lessons, both learned and taught — come to entertaining and energetic life. It’s a fist-pumping, crowd-pleasing documentary that makes one heck of a play to remind people of Ginsburg’s vitality and importance, now more than ever.

A slender but unholy cross between “First Reformed” and “The Exorcist."

While Scream VI still features its share of meta humor, it leaves no doubt that this universe is now fleshed out enough to support an infinite number of sequels.

Banel & Adama is a striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

[A] hypnotic midnight movie, which veers from astonishing, expressionistic exchanges to gory mayhem without an iota of compromise.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

You almost wish there was a little more magic, but that’s maybe because some of the truths Silva comes up close to are so skin-crawlingly real that you want to cover them up.

Yang infuses his earnest, semi-fictionalized story (inspired by his own father’s experiences) with the evocative narrative traditions of modern Asian cinema, from Wong Kar Wai to Edward Yang, resulting in a rich and intimate atmosphere at every turn. While the movie doesn’t achieve the narrative mastery of its influences, Yang’s first feature has a touching emotional through line grounded in authenticity.

Beanpole is slow to thaw, and its emotional impact is dulled by a structure that delays the story’s full power until the final moments, but there’s a resonant beauty to how these women seize control over their themselves.

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.

Girls Trip nails laugh after laugh even amidst — and oftentimes because of — dramatic issues that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lifetime movie.

Produced by Keanu Reeves, this talking heads survey of the transition from shooting on film to digital video is against all odds an imminently watchable overview, and not only because Reeves has decent interview skills.

More sad than salacious, it’s the rare film about a criminal that offers human details without humanizing a man who so many agree was a monster.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

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.

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.

Missing Link is a sweet, touching, and seriously fun adventure comedy about two lost souls who are struggling to reconcile yesterday with tomorrow in their bid to belong in a world that refuses to make room for them.

Goldhaber’s steady hand ensures that things are rivetingly queasy from start to finish, and Brewer’s performance is powerful enough to flip the script on the entire cam experience.

While DaCosta ably toys with the usual genre trappings — jump scares, things that go bump in the night, eye-popping gore — the filmmaker, directing only her second feature, effectively adds unexpectedly artful touches.

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

Even if it occasionally makes you crave more narrative heft or elaboration about the facilities it discusses, the film is a vital work of public service that demonstrates why we can’t cure these social ills by simply throwing more money at them.

But it’s the shadow of despair that “Wonka” traces most clearly; the cloud of disenchantment that can hover over every inch of our waking lives when the wrong people are allowed to monopolize our dreams. This may not be Paul King’s most satisfying film, but even at a scale — or at least a budget — several times larger than that of “Paddington 2,” the purity of its imagination remains unquestionable.

One Piece Film: Red sails a fine line, its story beats familiar enough for the newcomers, with details as bizarre and garish as a “One Piece” story could possibly get.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

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

The Eight Mountains lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.

In Bresson’s version, it’s the humans around the donkey who are the true center of the story. Not so in EO. This is Donkeyvision, and we’re better off for it.

Dastmalchian's screenwriting debut bodes well for an alternative career alongside his performances. While never transcendent, the story's patient rhythms allow for a wholly believable world to take shape before it comes crashing down.

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

Led by a few strong performances, and delivering plenty of heart-clutching moments, The Bye Bye Man is sure to appeal to horror lovers of all stripes.

With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood doesn’t reinvent the Rogers mythos, and even its innovative devices fall short of rescuing the material from some of the more obvious revelations. Fortunately, it’s not devoid of payoff.

It speaks to the masses with some treats for the discerning types in the back.

Leonard and Weixler’s lived-in chemistry and quirky writing (again, largely improvised) keep their characters feeling real even in the midst of their wilder adventures.

In its wryly amusing self-awareness at all turns, the film actively and relentlessly lampoons the very language and gesturing we all affect in trying to broach the political maelstrom of identity politics.

Despite a few predictable beats, What Keeps You Alive offers plenty of effective jolts, helped along by the chemistry between leads Anderson and Allen.

The film’s thesis isn’t as clear as his earlier efforts, but it’s still a highly effective story about how the world’s insanity poisons the mind.

The clock is always ticking in 1917, and even as MacKay is offering a heartbreaking study in restrained emotion, he’s still at least moving towards the end goal of his terrible task. There’s no time to pause, even for great beauty, a lesson that even 1917 is often loathe to honor.

It’s an impressive illustration of a director in command of the medium, but more than that, points to the potential in whatever she does next.

An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, Predator: Killer of Killers feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even.

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.

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.

Kahn uses the simplicity of his movie’s structure — the action rarely leaves the courtroom — to underline the complexity of the circumstances and the prickly figure at its center, Goldman himself, played excellently by Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter, who gives his character the fervor that apparently made him a figurehead in his day.

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.

With its everyday setting and social interactions mixed with an obtrusive, innovative soundtrack (composed by the band Aunt Sister, along with Colin Self and Ben Babbit) and hyperactive visual style, The African Desperate straddles the line between shock and banality.

More than anything else, Hello, My Name is Doris effectively conveys the cruel ambivalence of an ageist society, and despite its formulaic ingredients, the movie responds to that setback with Field's exuberant, virtuoso turn providing the ultimate critical response.

Artfully told and tenderly performed, Bantú Mama maps the history of the African diaspora in the Caribbean onto a tightly focused and compelling human story.

Beneath the pixelated gags, the stakes are relatively familiar. However, much of the humor in Wreck-It Ralph riffs on the nostalgia associated with real games.

Denis, Andrew Litvack, and Léa Mysius’ dialogue is only strengthened by its occasional awkwardness, as it subsumes Trish and Daniel into the same disordered humidity that swamps the film around them. The frequent sex scenes become a dialogue of their own — the lovers feeling each other out in search of something they can actually trust.

Anchored by a remarkably convincing performance by James Franco in the lead role, I Am Michael manages to explore Glatze's story without condemning him, even as it foregrounds the troubling nature of his path.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

Even though The President lacks some of the subtlety that made Makhmalbaf’s previous work transcendent, this film is still a worthy testament to a fiery storyteller determined to use the medium as a necessary means of subversion.

At heart, Inu-Oh is a film about storytelling’s power to keep the past alive, and while Yuasa’s carnivalesque extravaganza can be too slippery to hold onto at times, it always proves unforgettable in a way that serves that ultimate purpose.

You can hardly see the scaffold of a documentary film at all. In fact, “Simple” unfolds more like a riveting neorealist drama, with no trace of the woman and her crew behind the camera, no talking heads, no filmmakerly intervention of any kind

The moral is clear as day to any kid, though plenty of adults could use the reminder: Never judge any creature by the way they look. And, for animation devotees, the lesson is the same: Never judge a cute animated offering by its platform.

The Hunting Ground is at its best when it stops dwelling on variations of the problem and points toward a solution.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane.

If you've never heard of LCD Soundsystem or cared much for the group's work, Shut Up and Play the Hits still manages to explore the prospects of fame and contemporary rock music's lasting relevance.

With a chillingly relatable Airbnb setup, Barbarian mines multiple real-life scenarios and fears to unleash some truly unhinged terrors. It’s no “Get Out,” but it’s a hell of a lot of fun — with a little something to say as well.

Moner’s charisma keeps things pushing forward, and so does the film’s appealing spirit. If only every big screen adaptation of a beloved existing property could feel this funny and fresh, there’d be less to fear about an industry besieged by recycled material that never takes a risk.

Springsteen’s natural charisma shines through at every turn, and while Bruce neophytes might not totally buy his particular brand of profundity, old admirers will appreciate his usual tricks. As ever, Bruce means what he says.

Recently released from jail, Ai's full story remains to be told, but Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry competently summarizes his lasting relevance, regardless of what may happen next.

Beware of Mister Baker won the Grand Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival earlier this year, perhaps because it was the best embodiment of a recent trend in the non-fiction realm.

On the Beach at Night Alone is a fascinating sublimation of autobiography into Hong’s precise creative terms, a bittersweet character study as poignant, witty and deceptively slight as much of his work that also refurbishes it with a unique personal dimension.

Icarus: The Aftermath is a poignant and powerful document about the unpredictable burdens of heroism.

Dupieux's utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time.

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

With an eye for gritty, shameless fun, Friedkin unleashes the play's guilty pleasure center. Friedkin holds nothing back, but it's Letts' rambunctious plotting that enables the director to chart a path to the wild climax.

Problemista is not just funny, however, it is also rather earnest and compassionate towards its characters.

In Anthony and Alex’s capable hands, the Susanne Bartsch legacy endures just as brightly as it began.

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.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a small movie, far too modest and knowing to surrender to melodrama and apply cosmetic fixes to deep wounds...but it beautifully articulates the need for young people to realize the validity of who they are, and even more beautifully crystalizes the moment when that starts to happen.

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.

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.

For a quarter of a century -- unbeknownst to most Americans, including Rodriguez's original producers -- the singer landed a massive following in the country where his humanitarian outlook provided an escape for many disgruntled youth struggling under apartheid, elevating him to the stature of a "South African Elvis."

Even the best records start skipping after a while, and once The Sound of Silence gives in to the demands of conventional narrative it begins feeling less fresh and new than it did when it was simply introducing us to Peter and his work.

The director ensures this chamber piece of moral conundrums never seems too heavy-handed; his fluids camera roams through each room so that at no time does the theatrical set-up feel like a limitation.

Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.

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.

It’s a frantic, unnerving window into Syria’s collapse, and a nerve-wracking thriller that alternates between acts of courage and utter despair; through that paradox, it captures the struggles on the ground in intimate detail.

Julian Higgins’ excellent film constantly dangles redemption in front of our faces, begging us to imagine a better world, but ultimately delivers a stark reminder of how bitterly divided the country is.

The 4:30 Movie owes far more to John Hughes than the Richard Linklater movies that inspired Smith to make “Clerks,” but it contains its own versions of many of the elements that made that film great.

Adrienne is a beautiful testament to the power of Adrienne Shelly and will hopefully inspire fans, new and old, to revisit her work. Andy Ostroy’s documentary certainly emphasizes the emotional and sentimental, but that intimacy bonds the audience to Shelly as a woman. Bring tissues.

A rich, rewarding documentary that digs deep into major questions without being afraid of the answers.