Gemini resists easy categorization, evades tidy plot points and sometimes lead to frustrating dead ends. But it’s an absorbing world defined by open-ended possibilities, a kind of comedic psychological thriller in which the thrills exist in air quotes.

Even as Brad’s Status doesn’t overextend its reach, Stiller gives the material a touching, soulful core.

As Sebastian Silva wrestles with several different kinds of movies, the child’s perspective fuses them together, and the movie becomes a startling representation of a society collapsing into chaos.

If Lady is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist.

As his chops as an action and horror director have only increased, care of those natty set pieces and plenty of real ingenuity, Krasinski hasn’t lost sight of the human drama that makes it all work. Krasinski never meant to be a horror guy, but he’s always known what scares people.

The dancing alone is worth the price of admission, and Naharin is a dynamic if somewhat aloof subject.

Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

National Anthem is high on mood and feeling rather than story. This very horny queer Western is a rush of sensory pleasures, from the reddened, rust-colored rocks of New Mexico as captured by cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi to a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Susanne Sundfør, and Spiritualized.

The movie works as a fascinating psychological dissection, and avoids any precise judgement of Carman’s habits.

Steal This Story, Please! is the kind of film that has no problem sacrificing artistic merit if it means inspiring a few more people to get out and protest.

Another guns and glory war movie about young American soldiers having to shoot their way out of some rats nest they should never have been sent to in the first place, Rod Lurie’s The Outpost is a familiar but uncommonly visceral reminder of what it really means to “support the troops.”

The genius of the franchise-reviving “Prey” and last summer’s utterly awesome “Killer of Killers” is that they both cast the Yautja as a foil first and an antagonist second. Now, the super fun and fantastically spirited “Predator: Badlands” takes that approach to its logical conclusion by making one of these creatures the hero of a story in which he gets deprogrammed of his culture’s “The Most Dangerous Game”-inspired approach to other species.

Specificity is the film’s strong suit, and The Last Laugh is at its best when eschewing its gaggle of celebrity interview subjects in favor of sticking with Firestone as she reckons with their comedy.

The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film’s highlight.

While not designed to entertain on the level of style and spectacle that one expects from a Bond film, this tense period drama from the director of "Man on Wire" presents a far more credible take on the daring exploits of British agents.

Impressive as it is that The Wonder is able to squeeze so much from its spartan trappings, the film still feels clipped at 110 minutes; there may not be a lot to chew on, but there’s almost too much to savor.

De Wilde doesn’t strain for relevance or reinvent the wheel, she just unapologetically serves dessert for dinner until you’re left with the satisfaction of eating a three-course meal.

It’s truly astounding that Falcon Lake is the work of a first-time feature director. Le Bon demonstrates a masterful understanding of shot composition and pacing that allows her to craft a haunting vibe without turning it into a gimmick.

Sweaty Betty is the rare discovery that's bracingly original and down to earth in equal measures.

At a taut and elliptical ninety minutes, a couple of awkward final steps hardly feel like fatal flaws. Getting in, getting down, and getting out as style hopping sizzle reel, Disco Boy heralds a promising new talent who totally has the moves.

This particular tale of sound and fury signifies more than nothing, but only just.

The burden of familial obligation permeates Ms. Purple — who carries it and who passes it off, who outruns it and who lets it overrun them. It’s a ripe topic Chon clearly feels deeply, rendered in beautiful cinematography and delicate storytelling. It’s also a uniquely Asian-American story, rooted in loving specificity and beating with a universally human heart.

Sleepwalk With Me calls to mind Judd Apatow's "Funny People" for its focus on the eccentric, obsessive nature of the wannabe comic's mind.

With some memorably grisly moments and a star that’s committed to acting past his character’s spectacularly fucked fate, there’s plenty to enjoy while it lasts.

The Perfect Candidate can feel sedate and disjointed as a broad portrait of empowerment, but this is nothing if not a movie of its time, and it sings — sometimes literally — whenever it hones in on the unique struggle through which Saudi Arabian women might seize upon this historic moment.

The most impressive element of Paint it Black is the respect it shows for both women’s grief, even while condemning certain ways that they choose to compartmentalize.

The very last scene makes up for a lot of these misgivings: it’s a beautifully bittersweet last beat for the film’s theme of finding camaraderie in the uncertainty of life. For Campillo, it’s one of his greatest scenes as a director. For Cantent, it’s a fitting final statement.

Inspired by a rush of paranoia that Stourton once experienced at a wedding where he felt unwelcome, All My Friends Hate Me effectively splits the difference between Ruben Östlund and Ben Wheatley as it pinballs between squirmy laughs and sly horrors.

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.

Ingrid Goes West is colorful and flippant enough that it can survive a lot of its more senseless developments, but the movie never digs beneath the most obvious layers of its L.A. stereotypes.

This raw and lingeringly sensitive film resonates more strongly when it’s lost in the ice maze than when it’s tracing its steps back to the entrance. The Breaking Ice sticks with you because it doesn’t lead its characters out of the maze, it just melts down the walls between them.

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.

"It’s Only Life After All” paints a holistic portrait of two artists who became one, crafting a stirring collage of queer history with the engaging archival footage.

Foster’s performance is ultimately the only thing that holds The Survivor together across its three parallel timelines.

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.

Alien on Stage captures lighting in a bottle. Like a real-life “Waiting for Guffman” with a fairytale ending, it’s one of the funniest documentaries in years.

This elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense overcomes some of its more ridiculous ingredients thanks to endless invention.

The subtly profound ways in which this movie distorts the recent past makes it one of the most radically entertaining things its iconoclastic scribe has ever written.

Although Berlinger’s latest work is a dense, unsparing look at the offenses and trial of Whitey Bulger, it's equally concerned with capturing how the many members of Bulger's expansive web -- criminals and innocent citizens alike -- use their experiences to control their version of the man.

There’s a fine line between watching someone toil and feeling as though you’re toiling yourself, of course, and “Makala” doesn’t always land on the right side of it. It can be edifying at times to watch this, as the film is clearly a labor of love — even if the actual work depicted is not.

The ’80s-esque sensibilities and sweet quips, rivaled only by fellow Netflix film “To All the Boys I’ve Loved,” make “YASNITMBM” an easily watchable treat for the entire family. Cohen, who previously directed the Hulu feature “Crush,” and once again proves her bonafides when it comes to translating the pains and pleasures of coming of age to the screen.

If you have even the slightest emotional connection to Springsteen’s music — if you’ve ever found salvation in a rock song, or desperately wished that you could change your clothes, your hair, your face — this giddy steamroller of a movie is going to flatten you whether you like it or not.

The movie is able to ride a line right through so many of its genre’s worst clichés because it never stops negotiating between fear and desire, risk and reward. It’s an assured directorial debut from “The Mentalist” actor Simon Baker.

While Maine’s witty script is filled with more than enough sequences primed to get laughs out of any audience (with Dyer turning in a charming performance that never goes too broad), the real winners will likely be fellow Catholic school survivors, who will recognize many of the great truths in Yes, God, Yes.

Leguizamo may give one of his career-best performances in the feature, but it’s Ferreira’s surprising command onscreen that is the most memorable.

Padilha channeled national frustrations into zeitgeist entertainment. The follow-up, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, has less success than the first installment in achieving that aim, but still keeps the snazzy combination of spectacle and polemics in check.

While the plot is not overly complex, Lucky Grandma benefits from a compelling array of supplementary characters.

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.

That’s where the film truly succeeds: Frears doesn’t treat Florence like a joke, and neither does Streep.

The measured vérité style of Frederick Wiseman meets the visual polish of Terrence Malick in Dragonslayer, a fascinating slice of crude Americana from first-time director Tristan Patterson. However, it stands alone with an infectious hard rock attitude.

Remote Area Medical lays bare the injustice of a system that fails to provide for those who need it most.

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

Swanberg once again shows a capacity for capturing small moments that exist outside the direction of the plot. At the same time, the effective fragments of "Drinking Buddies" take his oeuvre in a new direction by accumulating into a reworking big picture.

No matter how much The Theory of Everything showcases the incredible process through which Hawking maintains a connection to the rest of the world, it falls short of burrowing inside his head.

“REC” delivers a steady stream of frights because its camera man never knows quite where to look — and by the time he figures it out, it might be too late.

Subtle as a great dane, and less convincing than a show poodle that’s trying to pretend she’s an untamed stray, Dogman is an obvious and strained little movie.

For two hours at least, Unicorns will help you escape the gray monotony of life with flair and color.

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.

What this potent micro-dose of a movie lacks in showmanship, it makes up for in purity and resourcefulness and a rugged performance from Kiersey Clemons that might feel revelatory if the “Hearts Beat Loud” actress weren’t always this commanding.

Though Get On Up never congeals into a satisfactory whole, its fragmentary portrait of the singer at the height of his fame — intercut with his troubled single-parent childhood — effectively shows his invasive power in popular culture.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

Keaton was an ahead-of-his-time innovator, and though Bogdanovich honors that legacy he doesn’t always live up to it: You’ll leave the film knowing more about its subject than you did when you walked in, but there’s little here that feels like it couldn’t be found in one of the many other accounts of Keaton’s life and work.

Gazer might be inspired by New Hollywood, but its existence is almost reason to believe that a similar filmmaking renaissance could be on the horizon.

The result is a watchable overview with few explosive details, but plenty of reasons to root for his downfall, and some modicum of payoff.

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

It offers a striking contrast to other visions of modern Israel and Jewish identity. It may be the wildest vision of ultra Orthodox Judaism ever, but it’s not an empty provocation.

Tellingly, The Damned only threatens to become anything more than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil War reenactment when Minervini allows his characters to articulate their fading dreams of salvation in the clearest possible terms.

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.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

While frequently very funny and sustained by a pair of boldly unlikable female protagonists, Fort Tilden adopts the glorious stupidity of its stars, and echoes their gratingly obnoxious temperaments.

By the time this highly evocative work of low-budget sci-fi arrives at its eye-opening final scene, the clearest takeaway is that our only hope for survival has been coded into us since the beginning of time.

Before all else, Villneuve's grim chronicle of the fallout when two young girls vanish in a small town succeeds at crafting one powerfully suspenseful moment after another.

It’s a challenge to conclude a documentary on an ongoing and fast-evolving conflict. The news will continue to tally up the dead bodies and destroyed cities, from which the film refuses to allow us to distance our emotions. But where “Freedom on Fire” proves valuable isn’t in the brutality of the corpses but in the reminder that these are individual people being broken, and real families being torn apart.

With a generous scope and ease of tone, Sankey never fails to let her most vulnerable material breathe even as the subject’s enormity threatens to suffocate.

Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.

Being a theater geek isn’t required to enjoy Theater Camp, but it certainly can’t hurt. Mostly, though, this is just funny and smart and sweet stuff, a crowdpleaser for the misfit in all of us.

While erudite, well-researched, and all too relevant ... [the film] is an unilluminating chore to watch, even as it convincingly argues the profound extent to which its subject helped blemish the moral complexion of the modern world.

Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared “Alien” into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own.

That this narrative is intense and entertaining to audiences — even those unfamiliar with the fashion world — is Tcheng's considerable accomplishment.

Roth’s expressions range from slightly dazed to slightly drunk, and so, as the days drift by, Sundown becomes a liberating blend of mystery and existential deadpan comedy.

It Is in Us All, a hyper-visceral portrayal of manhood in its purest unrestrained form, is anchored by the force-of-nature turn from its superlative star Cosmo Jarvis. Intoxicating to the senses, this film boasts an indomitable vitality, a zest for life so uncontainable it brims with mortal danger.

Plan 75 isn’t for or against assisted suicide, but it tenderly laments a society in which “death with dignity” is only offered as compensation for a life without it.

There’s a lot to enjoy about Companion, from Hancock’s sleek visuals, smooth pacing, and twisty script, to Thatcher’s uncanny performance as an android who borders on humanity without ever crossing the threshold. But while the film offers a snapshot of human-AI relations at an inflection point, it doesn’t fully probe some of the implications of its premise.

Viewers are spared by the tender mercies of biodoc tropes, as “Fauci” puts a pin in the action to wind back the clock and walk us through how its subject came to develop such an adamantium shell.

Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible.

It’s lovely, lively, and guaranteed to get kids interested in the wild world around them, all the better if that also includes some outside research into what really happened with Joao and Dindim.

While Ordinary Love is so hermetically sealed inside the bubble of its cracking relationship that the film always feels like it’s about to suffocate to death, it’s so attuned to the meniscus of a “healthy” marriage that it remains touching even at its most inert.

The singular vibration that Nichols brings to the golden age of motorcycles gives way to the all-too-familiar entropy that ended it, as a movie that busts out of the gate as some kind of new American classic ultimately runs out of gas on the side of the highway.

You couldn't ask for a more appropriate genre of music to carry a movie. As Didier explains the bluegrass appeal, "the banjo sort of snarls," bringing a primal form of energy that even he can't put into words. It's also the element that manages to rescue "Broken Circle" from the meandering nature of its structural looseness, which sometimes distracts from a thoroughly involving story.

Subtitled "a musical adventure," the actor-director's love letter to some 800 years of Neapolitan expression probes its subject with a wide romantic outlook.

More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, All These Sleepless Nights is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young.

Litwak’s ability to put such a fresh spin on a classic rom-com structure is evidence of both the genre’s enduring adaptability and his bright future as a filmmaker.

For true crime fans, Last Stop Larrimah isn’t an urgent must-see, and I am told that the “Lost in Larrimah” podcast from five years ago is an even sharper recounting of the mysterious events. But the unsettling unsolved nature of the tale remains pungent, and so do the Missing posters throughout the community.

Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is basically what might happen if someone transplanted “Fury Road” into Finland, lost 90 percent of what made that film into an unrepeatable force of nature, and tried to make up the difference by exploding as many Nazis as possible in outrageously violent fashion.

Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

Though the film is all surface, that surface is precisely the point.

If all of Perry’s stories have been hard to stomach, Her Smell takes things to impressive new lows before hitting bottom and tunneling out through the other side. It’s truly one of the most noxious movies ever made, which might help to explain why it’s also Perry’s best.

The film is as incomplete as the city it’s portraying, but manages to say more with what it leaves unsaid than any of its dialogue.