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.

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

Seeing Cruz and Banderas show off their comedic chops is definitely a pleasure, and the farcical final scenes will leave viewers on a high. But this film won’t win many competitions, official or otherwise.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

A four-and-a-half hour period piece littered with interconnected events spread across many years, it moves forward with fits of intrigue, interspersed with casual developments that deaden its momentum and call into question its monumental running time.

The whole experience is one long rant in radiant colors.

Best Summer Ever isn’t the best movie ever, but what it does is continue to show that disability can be fun, unique, and enticing without being dour. It’s the best at what it’s doing and you’ll want to see more.

It’s a veritable snakepit of uneasy decisions that grips you with its novel approach to so-called truth-telling before lapsing into something a little more conventional.

For all the hundreds of thousands of dollars being thrown around, The Gambler is much closer to a friendly game of poker with some loquacious, quick-witted friends than a glimpse at the gambling world’s dark underbelly. Neither is it a preachy moral tale.

Pretty and discardable in equal measures, the movie illustrates ingredients of the filmmaker's appeal while falling short of assembling them into a coherent whole.

There’s no denying that Bill Melendez and his artists were the perfect marriage with Schulz’s delicate vision. The feature also tosses out little “they-didn’t-have-to-do-it-but-they-did-it-anyway” touches throughout.

Lamb takes a low-key minimalist approach to its premise that invites a certain shock-and-awe reaction before doubling back to give it purpose.

Unclenching the Fists turns out to be hardly the neorealist dip into misery that some of the film’s more disconnected camerawork from DP Pavel Fomintsev promises.

As slickly paced as a big-studio espionage movie, it nearly succeeds as a pure adrenaline-rush thriller. In the end, the problem isn't that there's too much plot, but rather a certain dramatic illogic.

Evans, Hall, and Heathcote exhibit major chemistry (in every permutation) possible, but they also don’t wink at the storyline, playing a provocative story totally straight.

Schrader’s direction is unobtrusive but agile, as though she considers it her duty to provide a cinematic soapbox for Zweig and politely exit the spotlight.

Brody's engagement with the material prevents Wrecked from falling apart.

It’s sexy, disturbing, yet cold despite the simmering equatorial heat and hot lava of freely flowing attractions.

A Land Imagined is a film that’s intent on losing its own sense of self, a goal that Yeo fulfills by never allowing it to have one in the first place; he digs a rabbit-hole, and then falls right into it. It’s fascinating to watch Yeo tumble down into the depths, but eventually it starts to feel as though he’ll never hit the bottom.

It's a pretty experiment with no apparent results, but plenty of marketability.

Hartnett is in on the joke, going against the type he was pigeonholed into by Hollywood as a teen matinee idol who won our hearts and other body parts in “The Virgin Suicides” as too-cool boy-next-door Trip Fontaine, or as a self-induced sexual ascetic in “40 Days and 40 Nights.”

Hitchcock largely succeeds at pulling back the veil on his off-camera personality. To a larger degree, it reveals the level of influence of his devoted wife and screenwriter Alma (Helen Mirren) on both his personal life and career.

The Monk and the Gun is a film that understands why we still need to consider tradition — the actual definition of the word, that is — when thinking about complex political issues.

No matter its silliest missteps, Welcome to New York has an impressive engine of ideas in line with the director's other New York stories. [Unrated Version]

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

If the rest of the film does err towards the slightly generic, Howard gives Thelma the Unicorn a great lead that you’ll have no trouble rooting for.

American Selfie is an urgent look at a fractured country and culture.

Every bit as irreverent, smart, and ridiculously entertaining as its predecessors, The LEGO Ninjago Movie proves that these films are now on the brink of becoming a viable brand unto themselves; it cements them as the most consistently delightful franchise in the contemporary world of corporate animation. Nothing else comes close.

Keyhole never comes together, but that's part of Maddin's creed. He makes movies about movies to express his love for movies, which is to say he makes movies about himself.

Even if the execution isn’t always where it needs to be, Katz and screenwriter Simon Barrett still deserve their flowers for conceiving such a purely cinematic idea and swinging for it with so much confidence.

At first glance, Bang Bang seems like a dreadfully cliche-ridden film. Nelson throws everything he has at the eponymous character, but the washed-up fighter archetype who spits poetry about the demons he now battles has been done to death. Yet it becomes clear those cliches are the point.

While Goodman’s feature doesn’t focus our recently inaugurated president, it serves as a blunt reminder of what has happened, and could happen again, when misinformation is spread to dangerous, angry, homegrown radicals.

The experimental approach takes some time to settle in and doesn’t always click, but at its best, The Infiltrators manages to personalize the undocumented struggle by transforming it into an unlikely blend of activism and suspense that makes a compelling case for the abolishment of ICE.

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.

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

A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.

He may not have formulated every aspect his genius in his own words, but the movies he made speak for themselves, and this reverential documentary is another welcome excuse to revisit them.

The White House Effect largely steers clear of overly simplistic narratives about politicians exclusively making decisions to serve whatever special interests whose “pockets” they happen to be in. But it doesn’t shy away from the role that the oil industry played in turning a party that initially seemed interested in fighting climate change into one that has spent nearly half a century adamantly denying it.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

“Superboys” is dedicated to those who devour and admire great movies rather than those who make them — and quickly shows that the line between those two categories can be breached if you’re brave enough.

A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, After Blue is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.

Quad Gods is less effective as a social issues doc than it is as a work of individual portraiture, and while Jacklin’s emphasis on camaraderie prevents her from digging all that deep into any one of her subjects, each of her primary characters proves sufficiently riveting all the same.

From its eureka moment when Barbe-Nicole develops her iconic rose champagne to its final title cards about the company’s ongoing success, Widow Clicquot has all the same beats as the walk-and-talk business movie that you watched on your last flight. It would make perfect in-carriage entertainment for a drowsy Victorian family taking a long trip across the countryside.

A Still Small Voice — much like the residency program that it chronicles — is all the more valuable because it never pretends that being a palliative chaplain is an inherently selfless task.

While the laughs are still easy and frequent, this time around they feel more like the exception than the rule, and the final moments irrevocably tip the scales toward the unironic sobriety the series has been flirting with for so long (a replica of the Trojan horse comes to symbolize how this supposed romp sneaks past your defenses).

Played by Kaitlyn Dever, this Rosaline is very mad indeed (why shouldn’t she be?), but the always-winning actress helps guide a prickly footnote into delightful territory. One part coming-of-age tale, one part literary reconsideration, and all totally fun, Rosaline proves there’s still plenty to mine from the classic canon, with lively twists.

The film’s wild ending will determine whether or not a viewer enjoys the film. But rather than trying to understand exactly what it means, you’re better off appreciating it like one of Alex’s photos.

The idea of them getting justice never feels on the table, but the film instead is a path out of the madness of a system where to simply have what happened to their father admitted would fill some of the void he has left behind.

Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Cynical, sad, increasingly fucked up, and often gloriously mean, Song has turned the genre inside out to show us how shallow these stories can be.

Garry Winogrand hated being called “a street photographer,” even if he was regarded as the most essential of them all. The great success of Sasha Waters Freyer’s straightforward but evocative documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, is how well it explains why someone could have such a strong aversion to a term that was practically invented to describe them.

There's a adrenaline rush even in the problematic finish, an eagerness that drives the filmmaking so that Looper is thrilling to watch even when it falls apart.

Emerald Fennell’s raucous debut, Promising Young Woman, twists its buzzword-laden, spoiler-free synopsis — it’s a #MeToo rape revenge thriller with bite! — into something fresh and totally wild.

Colette is a costume drama for people who have yet to figure out that they love costume dramas. It’s fleet enough after that first act, and the squeezed plotting of its second half ensures the story never gets too long in the tooth.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.

Ferreira is a believable and sympathetic protagonist, bringing a vulnerability to Grace that makes the viewer root for her even as she blows up her life for reasons even she doesn’t seem to understand.

Disobedience is a beautiful, fraught, and emotionally nuanced drama that wrestles with hard questions about the tension between the life we’re born into and the one we choose for ourselves.

Erratic, unpredictable and constantly intriguing, Miles Ahead plays more like one of Davis' compositions than a traditional biopic, stumbling around with flashes of insight and a brilliant central performance.

The movie’s topple into melodramatic excess is fitting for a film set in the 1960s, a time dominated by melodramas. And also like the cinema of the 1960s, there’s a grit and urgency to To the Stars, of something bigger and darker coming along with the changing times.

Combining savage archetypes with spot-on wit, Slack Bay is a fun, peculiar romp with deeper conceits lurking beneath the surface.

Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments, the ones that pushed him into action, add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.

This is no simple story of girl power. In fact, it’s arguably less concerned with feminism than it is with the financial realities that impede it from taking root.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

There’s a tenderness here, not just between the Sasquatches (and even then, not always just tenderness!) but for nature itself.

Mungiu's method creates the feeling of being submerged in a maze of confrontations and chatter, but the build-up gets so tiring that the concluding scenes come as a relief instead of a payoff.

Though Blumberg treats the topic with admirable frankness, the film’s insights would’ve had more impact if he wasn’t so quick to hop to the next storyline whenever matters get especially thorny.

This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws.

For those who know little about the subject matter, Dahomey is a bold and memorable history lesson. But with Diop’s expressive talents as they are, it’s fair to hope that she returns to the world of fiction next time.

In a film that barely has a grasp over its own hare-brained conspiracy and often feels like an extension of the mental breakdown that its protagonist might be suffering . . . Cummings’ performance adds a key measure of consistency.

It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.

How can even the most skilled Comanche warriors battle a massive alien being with a full arsenal of advanced technology? Now that’s how you orient a prequel. How Trachtenberg, Aison, and Midthunder interrogate that very question is a thrill, offering the most unexpected of movie treats: a once-stalled franchise that suddenly seems bursting with delights — and, yes, plenty of blood spatter.

Judging by Johnson's previous feature, "True Adolescence," he's better at crafting characters with credible problems than finding equally credible ways of exploring them. Fortunately, in the case of Skeleton Twins, the actors do the legwork.

Introducing, Selma Blair often feels a bit messy and unfinished by its final act, but that’s also part of its charm (and realism).

However you slice it, Hill’s artifice proves intriguing even as it insists upon itself in ways that distract from Stutz’s lessons (which sound great but speed by in a blur of terminology that means almost nothing without him there to help us apply it to our own lives).

A spectacular noir epic that's equal parts murky, bloated, flashy and triumphantly cinematic. Four years after Nolan's "Batman Begins" sequel "The Dark Knight" rattled audiences with a similar audiovisual overload, the new movie falls into the same rhythm and remains viscerally satisfying even when the story falters.

If King Hamlet has any legacy as a film, it will likely be as a comfort watch for Isaac’s superfans and Shakespeare devotees. It won’t be joining the canon of great nonfiction cinema, but I have no doubt that many viewers will find that watching a shirtless Oscar Isaac play with an adorable baby while quoting Shakespeare is a great use of 89 minutes.

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.

Goat scrutinizes an aspect of American culture often relegated to punchlines and magnifies the darker reality beneath.

The scalding final sequence of Ly’s film is powerful enough to obliterate the occasionally clumsy path by which it gets there.

A sharp and well-made comedy with a better drama glued on the side.

6 Years offers little in the way of new material. Yet Fidell, working with executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass, effectively broadens her range by borrowing the sibling directors' improvisatory style and ceding control to her two leads, whose heartbreaking performances imbue this familiar Austin-set narrative with a fiery edge.

It’s as consistently surprising and deranged a movie as any from his output, even if not for all tastes, which he knows.

Though its final act lacks the sharp focus of the moments leading up to it, Tower is a fascinating blend of suspense and journalistic inquiry.

Hart guides the actions with a sensitive and joyous hand, luxuriating in the palette of Arizona’s arid desert and gaping badlands.

Through the use of different set ups -- such as a shootout seen only through the crack of a door, or a fight inside an elevator seen from way down the hall -- Lynch is able to add suspense to fight scenes that might otherwise seem flat.

Austen fans might balk a bit at how much this one goes off-script into its own territory, but the spirit of Austen runs deep.

It’s a shambling, transportive, and semi-tragic story about a fleeting past where anything seemed possible.

While La Cocina can’t always shake the polemical stiffness of its source material or the political chokehold of its modernized setting, the film’s agit-prop expressionism allows it to push beyond the boundaries of other stories like it.

Viewed as a single experience, Oki's Movie is a curious oddity worthy of multiple viewings and lengthy contemplation, but its tricky formalism makes it less overtly satisfying on an emotional level.

With Bitterbrush, Mahdavian announces herself as a filmmaker with a keen eye for capturing the contradictions and complexities of outsider women’s lives.

"Blackbird" may be a tearjerker, but it’s also a reminder that there’s more to tears than tragedy, even in the midst of personal loss.

Herzog acolytes will find the usual dose of eccentric musings; others may find it alternately perplexing and thoughtful when not hijacked by Herzog's intrusive remarks. But one thing is certain: You've never seen the internet discussed like this.

Taking an observational approach, the film rarely explains the customs and culture it so intimately captures, only addressing an outsider perspective when Sherenté is seen leading educational tours. Instead, viewers are let in on sacred rituals and community gatherings, following Sherenté’s lived experience closely.

At 108 minutes, Staten Island Summer does wear thin around its middle, and it suffers from a conclusion that just never seems to know when to wind down for good, but it's an amusing feature that just might be destined for the kind of cult affection heaped on its ilk.

All I See Is You continues to be fun and involving even when things get truly ridiculous in the third act and Forster starts relying on the sheer momentum the plot in order to speed over its potholes.

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.