The World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

While Johnsen competently follows Ai over the course of more than a year of contemplation and anger, "The Fake Case" doesn't introduce anything new to the equation, and mainly succeeds by virtue of its subject's inherent appeal.

Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.

Wind River may not blow you away, but this bitter, visceral, and almost parodically intense thriller knows what it takes to survive.

Air is a slam dunk and ultimately one of the best sports movies ever made.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

Giddy, exhausting, and breathtakingly violent.

American action movies are almost entirely defined by cutaways, blaring music cues and grunts. The Raid: Redemption, a hyper-energetic Indonesian martial arts movie, delivers an effective rebuke to that meek norm. Bones break, blood flows and swift, excessively complicated fight choreography puts virtually everything released in North America since "The Bourne Ultimatum" to instant shame.

Sorry Angel doesn’t strain from too much ambition; it’s a sharp snapshot of two men at pivotal moments in their lives, and ends on a note not too different from the one it starts on. But that cycle is central to its gentle intellectual flow.

In its haphazard search for facts, it happens upon a great many truths about how we see each other, and the price we pay for looking too closely.

As with most miracles, Sunset Song is more likely to evoke awe than any one particular emotion; it accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm.

If the film gives us hope for anything, it’s that such a miscarriage of justice can never happen again — and if it does, many will be there to answer the call.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

For all its filmic flourishes, this a sweet film at its heart, one interested in the darker side of childhood, not just the fears we have as children, but the anger as well.

Smart and affecting ... It’s not flashy. It’s not often revelatory for any super fans, or even anyone who watched "Being the Ricardos" ... "Lucy and Desi," however, is still meaty as a standalone work, and an essential, authentic salute to these trailblazers.

Yes, this crushingly personal film can make you feel like you’re intruding on a sacred ritual between perfect strangers, but that sense of trespassing (or TMI) is also what allows Last Flight Home to be such an immediate argument for the universal right to die.

It suffers from the greater problem of emphasizing a feel-good plot within the context of mass destruction.

Despite the film’s introductory text, most of Calle Malaga could happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there’d be no specificity to speak of.

If there’s any issue with “Lost in the Jungle,” it might be that there’s too little of it. At 90 minutes, the film is quick and efficient, but it leaves little time to explore more about the collaboration between these two search parties, or the unsteady relationship between the region’s indigenous communities and the narco-guerrilla units ruling over them.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform is not a subtle film. But these are unsubtle times, with unsubtle problems, and the most alarming thing about this grimly affecting Spanish allegory — which literalizes capitalism’s dehumanizing verticality with twice the gross-out terror of “Parasite,” and almost half of that masterpiece’s furious grace — is that it sometimes doesn’t seem like an allegory at all.

The dimming prestige of the brand perhaps allowed Hoppers the freedom to be something much more modest, and also way more fun and satisfying — a hilarious, joke-a-second comedy that has its moments of sweetness and emotional resonance, but isn’t looking to force tears out of you.

Montana Story doesn’t reinvent the Western wheel. Rather it offers tender mercies as a sentimental work that explodes in well-earned fury.

The first half of I'm Glad My Mother's Alive effectively inhabits a child's mind in a manner that recalls Maurice Pialat's marvelous 1968 debut "The Naked Childhood."

Every interaction is rip-roaringly funny — even the more disquieting ones — resulting in a film where you can’t help but laugh at the riveting absurdity.

For almost 45 minutes, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan is on pace to become the best, most urgent zombie movie since “28 Days Later.” And then — at once both figuratively and literally — this broad Korean blockbuster derails in slow-motion, sliding off the tracks and bursting into a hot mess of generic moments and digital fire.

A tribute to those children of immigrants, especially those in families divided across borders, pulling for their own aspirations while carrying on their backs their parents’ hopes for a life without fear, “Mija” beams with the knowledge that in its specificity it speaks to millions. That this documentary soon becomes a rock in an avalanche and not an isolated bright star of representation is the hope.

Propulsive battle sequences in which sandstorms make the fog of war quite literal are the ostensible focus of American Sniper, but the real tension comes from our anticipation of how they'll affect the life this sharpshooter is reluctant to return to until he feels he's done everything he possibly can.

The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

While Bill Nye: Science Guy may not spend all its time on the man himself, it proves that the guy behind “Science rules!” hasn’t gone anywhere.

The Forgiveness of Blood examines the barriers of ritual and the passage from youth to adulthood in Albanian society with the perceptive detail of a grand literary feat. At the same time, it retains the simplicity of a parable.

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

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.

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.

The success of Extra Geography rides largely on Clear and Duggan who make a wonderful odd couple pair.

“Homecoming” works by allowing itself to become an actual genre film, the first of its ilk to recognize that superhero movies might be more interesting if they were also something else.

The opposing genre extremes never entirely come together.

“The Last Wish” has no qualms about testing the expectations of its young audience while delivering a freewheeling tale about appreciating the nine lives we already have.

The parallels between Watergate and Trumpocalypse are so boggling that they preclude any other reason for why Ferguson chose to make this film now. And yet, it’s the film’s deliberate timing that calls its value into question.

Intermittently action-packed and lethargic, the movie dances around formula. By delivering an expressionistic character study with bursts of intensity unlike anything else in his oeuvre and yet stylistically representative of its entirety, Wong practically has it both ways.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

Even as Honey Boy settles into the tropes of a familiar coming-of-age saga, it’s an admirable variation — the earnest attempt by an elusive movie star to bring his mythology down to Earth.

The Killer is nothing if not committed to its own one-note bit, an existential nihilism that stays the same even as the protagonist, in a mostly silent Michael Fassbender performance, starts to change. It’s as unfeeling as any Fincher thriller, at once predictable in its simplicity but also strangely daring because of it.

My Name Is Pauli Murray balances Murray’s varied interests and causes with a deft hand, acknowledging their contributions to the women’s movement while not minimizing their trans-ness, as many scholars had done until Rosenberg’s book.

The Ivory Game may be a harsh wakeup call to anyone concerned about the future of the largest land mammal, but it’s also a keen evaluation of the efforts being made to correct the situation.

Hindsight has revealed the quiet resonance that’s been humming inside this tiny film ever since it first set out to sea.

Mr. Roosevelt is a sweet and shaggy comedy about someone who needs to renovate their idea of home. It’s a reminder that the 21st century is going to be full of coming-of-age films about 30-year-olds, and it’s compelling evidence that that might be alright.

There and gone with the fleeting nature of its youngest character's attention span, Little Feet ultimately feels more like an insightful sketch than a full-fledged movie, but it nonetheless leaves a major impression.

It’s shaggy in places and favors one side of its story above the other, but ultimately makes for a delightful time.

We are treated to all the joys and pains of 10 transformative months, with Ewing and Grady taking us inside an experience that’s both specific and oddly universal.

Intimately tender and boisterously fun, Something You Said Last Night announces the arrival of a vital new voice in trans cinema.

Though hardly a singular achievement on par with its precedents in the filmmaker's career, Results shows the first indication of Bujalski's ability to tell stories on a larger scale.

Appropriate Behavior isn’t a narrative about ethnicity or even LGBT struggles in the traditional sense, but rather a means of exploring the problems that result from reinforcing those very barriers. In the process, it introduces a thoroughly modern voice.

It's one thing to make a minor, accomplished work after focusing on grander statements, but Julieta mainly disappoints because it feels like the kind of straightforward, unadventurous drama that the filmmaker generally excels at reinventing through his own peculiar vision. This time, he plays it too safe.

Ferrari is more gritty than glossy even at its most tightly coiled, with Mann’s searching camera never quite fixed in one place.

If Greengrass’ broadly entertaining (if gallingly relevant) film is a bit too soft and spread thin to hit with the emotional force that it could, so much of its simple power is owed to the grounded nature of the director’s approach, which allows these desperate characters to feel as if they’re trying to escape the very genre that threatens to define them forever.

It’s easy to ascribe the success of Good Boy to the power of its canine star, but the film refuses to let Indy feel like a cheap gimmick.

Few narrative dramas (if any) have more sensitively explored the nuances of growing up transgender, the bravery required to transition, and the struggle for self-acceptance that can motivate or define that process. Likewise, few narrative dramas (if any) have more palpably distilled the pain of being deadnamed, the humiliation of being reduced to your body, and the cruelty of being misrepresented as something that you’re not.

The director excels at generating a nervous energy around his character’s mounting desperation, and the movie’s intermittently engaging for that reason alone.

The Club is a bold and bracing allegory of a church tainted by scandals.

As is often the case with Denis’ films, Fire grows more illuminating as it gets hotter; what starts like a constrained and unusually jagged French drama is eventually forged into an incendiary portrait of three people who — to varying degrees — all delude themselves into thinking that the past is possible to quarantine away from the present.

Share can be so traumatized and detached that it risks losing its grasp on reality, but few movies have so boldly confronted the complexities of sexual assault, and even fewer have had the courage to privilege a victim’s truth above the judgements she inspires.

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.

Megalopolis is one of those movies that feels like it offers an accurate window behind the scenes of its own creation process, and Megadoc confirms as much without ever becoming redundant.

This is a film that admires — even awes at — Billie Jean King, but it doesn’t share her commitment to the game. If anything, it has more in common with Riggs than it should, moving with the sluggishness of a player who underestimates their opponent.

While it certainly offers up a necessary-if-dour vision of patriarchy-dominated life in this particular corner of Europe, by-the-numbers storytelling and a flat, visual style occasionally lead to dramatic intertia. Still, Gashi is powerfully, effectively steely as a woman who must take matters into her own hands, even when they are tied by society.

Curtiz was a master of all genres but The Sea Wolf is his best. Darkly flirting with the noir genre that would capture the decade, there's so much tension and hostility, secrets and lies that permeate the ship. Ida Lupino has never been more beautiful as the criminal attempting to rewrite her past.

What I wish for this film is that it had trusted the lilting rhythms of its own initial story more confidently rather than a crash into various melodramatic episodes in the finale that only serve to get us to a hurtled-toward cathartic ending.

Renoir — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season.

This is a human story, as messy and complex and maddening as any ever told, and while Bratton makes it his own (how could he not?), the generosity with which he shares it with us make it special indeed.

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.

It’s a pretty intense film at times, and it may be too earnest for its own good; but it’s a finely acted film and one that also firmly makes a connection between the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of the women’s movement, as Spacek begins to find her spine and come out of her protective “good wife” shell.

Worth the wait? Yes, and we can’t wait for the next one to take wing (wink).

Throughout the very funny film directed by Lawrence Lamont and written by Syreeta Singleton, you are treated time and time again to the brilliance of Palmer — how she can transform any bit of dialogue into a laugh line, or make her eyes glimmer with gags.

It may feel a little too surreally awkward and plodding in its first hour. But as a sweet movie smartly attuned to the power of the weirdo bonds that bind us to our family no matter the geographical distance or emotional dislocation, Defa achieves a sledgehammer of an ending in which not a single word rings false or feels sentimental.

Rugged, elemental, and restrained to a degree that suggests its director finds poetry in even the simplest things (his camera lingers on rolling fog or the face of a farm animal with a reverence that might prove trying for those not on his wavelength), “Fire Will Come” is a slight but evocative meditation on making peace with something that isn’t possible to understand nor extinguish.

Sunao Katabuchi’s In this Corner of the World is scattered and emotionally disjointed from start to finish, but few films have done so much to convey the everyday heroism of getting out of bed in the morning — not just surviving in the shadow of death, but living in it as well.

Any weaknesses lie more in the slightly tired general themes Ma explores. The Mother and the Bear doesn’t bring a lot of new material to the familiar narrative of parents becoming enlightened towards their child’s sexuality.

From its title on down, Letter to You is a testament to the power of communion.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

With its persistent inventiveness and a lack of unearned sentimentality, the movie provides an antidote to a lot of lazily produced dramas about death, American or otherwise.

The Dig resists the the kind of obvious triumph that would overtake a lesser film. Whether it’s a mere whiff of romance, the memory of a loved one passed on, or the encroaching consequence of a nation readying for conflict, there’s a bittersweetness to “The Dig” that lingers just as much as the facts of the story.

Athena effectively taps into the class, racial, and religious angers of modern France, which it sees as a powder keg that’s just waiting for the right spark to explode, but the film’s broad saga of brothers in crisis is so thin and symbolic that any deeper connection to the real world is sacrificed at the altar of intensity. An intensity that resists psychology, muffles sociopolitical context, and eventually swallows itself whole.

The Taiwan Oyster manages to be consistently engaging despite its flaws.

While Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President doesn’t always manage to fuse these recollections together, it compensates in a bevy of amusing anecdotes.

In telling his story, Amalric is greatly aided by his ace cinematographer, Christophe Beaucarne, whose images pick up on a great many tiny but telling details, as if life were a mosaic composed of an almost infinite number of parts that are all equally important for the bigger picture.

The film offers no answer, instead choosing to examine the conundrum of a man who repeatedly washes his face when things get too overwhelming, right before heading back out to the streets.

It’s a crowd-pleaser that works its formula well, even as it breaks new ground.

Grounding the lightness and frivolity with real heart, Booster’s laugh out loud script and Ahn’s artistic corralling of the energetic ensemble is a match made in heaven — or gay paradise.

Eichner’s gay homage to the great American romcoms of yesterday looks and feels exactly like them, and that’s groundbreaking enough. We’ll take that any day over a movie that tries too hard to pander to gay audiences. This one just hears and sees us.

It’s no crime to have another wholesome heroine for a new generation to look up to, only a shame that this is a sanitized reproduction and slight distortion of one who already existed.

Lowe finds ways to make it all feel if not wholly original, at least quite fresh. You’ve heard this story before, but you’ve never seen it quite like this.

Even in their most intimate scene, Mary and Charlotte and their love remain at a remove.

Without breaking a lot of new ground, the result is one of the more positive depictions of millennial community-building in recent cinema. None of the group’s fancy flips or grinds top the degree to which “Skate Kitchen” turns its subjects into a fascinating microcosm of American youth.

Every clip of Buckley performing lifts the film off the ground, highlighting how his talents often felt otherworldly.

Though this thriller is packed with memorable characters, the diner itself might be its greatest.

While it doesn’t quite justify the sprawling courtroom antics or the blunt metaphor they entail, the movie nevertheless provides a profound look at the effect of historical trauma on modern Lebanese society.