Charlène Favier’s Slalom is a familiar story of sexual abuse, but one told with such bracing intensity that it snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air.

At a time when the American government is waging a sustained attack on investigative journalism, and on the very nature of truth itself, to watch Cover-Up is not just to wonder what they might be trying to hide, but also to recognize that we’ve seen it before.

It may not be the best Pixar movie, or the riskiest — it sure as hell isn’t the most ambitious — but Luca is also one of the precious few that feels like it isn’t afraid to be something else.

Slickly paced and carried by mature performances, Flight embodies one of the finer strains of Hollywood filmmaking in recent years.

It’s Riseborough who holds the film fast, rooting its seemingly wild twists and character developments into something haunting and, quite often, eerily understandable.

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.

Blair Witch is shot, constructed and executed just like the original. And the slow-build fright fest will please genre purists — perhaps enough to reinvigorate the potential franchise — even if it feels all too familiar to the rest of us.

Colaizzo’s script weaves in enough detail to explain some of Brittany’s demons, but Bell sells the tough stuff too, doing more with a cautious look in the mirror and a slow smile than other performers can do with an Oscar-ready speech.

This isn’t a film that strives for big laughs — McDonagh seems more interested in putting you in a particular frame of mind, even when doing so requires a fair bit of downtime and dead air — but its constant undercurrent of humor affords the story’s most pressing questions an appropriately ridiculous context, one that speaks to the absurdities of all existence.

Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

It’s a fluffy spin on the recovery genre, but it’s a fresh one, and deGuzman’s hard-won life experience adds veracity and honesty to the snappy narrative. She’s also just plain wonderful to watch, providing a tough character in a tough situation with the maximum of grace.

The Babadook isn't a transcendent horror film. But its ability to handle and manipulate the conventional tropes apparent in so many of its peers makes it a satisfying ride.

While We're Young is a clear-eyed satire of intergenerational tension that derives much of its comedy from a series of moments in which its mid-forties couple attempt to mesh with a younger crowder.

The movie juggles a few too many subplots and not every joke lands, but it’s loaded with capricious details that shimmer with the exuberance of inspired social commentary at hyperspeed.

The tightly crafted story ensures that everyone is running a different race as the characters sprint to the finish line, leading to a deliberately unsatisfying ending that reflects those divergent goals.

DAU. Natasha is haunting and effective, but not always the sum of its parts, and sometimes has a tendency to drag. Even so, the spell lingers long after the credits roll, and the opportunity to consider the many sides of DAU. Natasha is a unique intellectual exercise.

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

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

This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.

Life and Nothing More may be shot with the unblinking attention of Frederick Wiseman’s films — and share their same broad scope of concerns — but it’s always true to the tenderness of its title.

This is a deeply emotional film in high concept clothing, coded to resonate with those of us well-versed in the instinct to betray ourselves in order to be accepted.

Providing many questions and very few answers, Alegría and co-writers Fernanda Urrejole and Manuela Infante make a point to show that life can emerge from death, imploring the audience to stop fixating on the damages done in the past and focus on saving the present and future.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

This is a gentle and joyous film not to be slept on, even as its low-key aura lulls you into a soothed state of mind.

This minuscule but affecting hourlong story is an extension of the “Small Axe” mission to fill a historical gap deserving of greater scrutiny, and achieves that goal by serving as a kind of education itself.

Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.

Faraut is able to conflate the cinema’s quixotic obsession with reality with the athlete’s similarly impossible dream of perfection. In its own playful way, his film celebrates the beautiful folly of both pursuits.

Its atmospheric sophistication holds strong throughout, channeling a wonder for the natural world reminiscent of Terrence Malick with an air of existential dread straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky.

Billy Wilder’s trademark sardonicism lends welcome bite and wit to this twisting, turning murder mystery from Agatha Christie.

Mulan is perhaps the best example of how to marry the original with something fresh. The Ballad of Mulan has always been an epic-scale story about the power of being yourself in a world not ready to accept that, a tale that will likely always have resonance. In Niki Caro’s “Mulan,” that story elegantly and energetically moves forward, a timeless message made for right now.

In the hands of director Josephine Decker, a filmmaker uniquely suited to depicting personal expression on the big screen, the film version of The Sky Is Everywhere makes for a satisfying and special take on a particular sub-genre of YA story.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

What starts as the knotted stuff of violent coincidence soon unravels into something more bittersweet, as Mads Mikkelsen’s first movie after Oscar winner “Another Round” restitches itself into another giddy and unexpectedly poignant modern fable about the search for meaning in a world where everything happens by chance, but nothing is a coincidence.

It’s a project that was made to restore a certain way of seeing; to punch a hole through the screen that separates people from the reality of what’s happening in their world. But in trying to get so close to the truth without touching it, Hassan almost fell into the same gap that he was trying to bridge.

The more that Goddard upends our assumptions about who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s going to live through the night, the more we realize that we’re rooting for all of these fucked-up people to get right with the world. It’s massively didactic, but in a way that encourages us to dwell on how we feel about these characters, and how malleable those feelings are.

Equally a slick political thriller, intelligent period piece and sly Hollywood satire, Ben Affleck's Argo maintains a careful balance between commentary and entertainment value.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a grueling watch that can’t possibly capture the full extent of the traumatic day-to-day of waging this war. But even capturing a slice of it is a triumph of empathetic identification.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

The film, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

A Band Called Death lacks the thrill of mystery but makes up for it with pathos.

A compelling genre thriller that manages to build a world that feels both genuinely new and depressingly realistic if human society goes too far down the wrong path.

With an economy of story elements and set design — where most of the movie takes place in nature’s open expanses — Bentley has crafted a plaintive and affecting film about how every moment holds value.

Fruitvale is largely sustained by Jordan's career-making performance and the way Coogler uses it to analyze his subject...It's a fascinating investigation into the contrast between media perception and intimate truths.

By positioning Shakespeare within a chatty tale of young adulthood — and giving it a feminist slant — Piñeiro proves the vitality of the material without becoming subservient to it.

Abbasi grounds the narrative in an emotional foundation even as it flies off the rails.

With a good deal of zippy snark à la “The Social Network” and a sense of deadpan comedy straight from the “Succession” playbook, BlackBerry is the kind of mid-budget marvel that doesn’t seem to come around often anymore.

DeBoer and Luebbe have further expanded their nutty vision of suburban ennui and the painful consequences of keeping up with the status quo into an unsettling and amusing send-up of human behavior.

Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions.

The overarching plot of Palm Springs isn’t especially novel, but each scene is just sweet, funny, and demented enough to feel like a little surprise.

Though hardly subtle in its metaphoric intent, this story of a rural cult of all women, segregated into “sisters” and “wives,” led by a single powerful man makes for an unnervingly effective thriller dripping with atmosphere and foreshadowing.

Krisha snaps into focus whenever Shults' camera remains trained on his extraordinary lead, whose fierce commitment easily recalls a similar portrait of middle-aged alcoholism in "A Woman Under the Influence" — and, at under 90 minutes, matches its intensity in half the time.

This is undoubtedly one of Almódovar’s breezier and more accessible domestic dramas.

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.

The film’s excess of energy almost never burns out, pummeling you with the bacchanal brewing inside its lead.

One of the most compelling things about Karem Sanga’s raw and emotionally radiant First Girl I Loved is how well it captures the heart-pounding terror of becoming someone, the one-way nausea of committing to yourself.

No sequel is essential, but Frozen 2 makes the argument that, even in the fairy tale land of Disney, they can still be important.

The vivid palette of Liu’s animation conveys a comic book-like exuberance to the proceedings, but the underlying socioeconomic frustration is very real.

Equal parts confounding, challenging, and insanely fun, “Dashcam” is horror at its most inventive.

While Wandel does well to leave some things to the imagination, like what happens beyond the schoolyard, she not-so-subtly nails the point home in the end, showing how all it takes is one person to stop bullying at its source. Still, her film is an arresting, eye-opening look at how violence begins at an early age, and how we can learn to be bystanders, or have the strength to speak out.

There’s an actual pulse and beating heart to Comet; it feels vibrant, alive.

Ultimately, American Fiction is an impressive debut from Jefferson, who has seamlessly made the leap from the small to big screen with a strong comedic voice and characters crafted with empathy and care. While the satire could have been sharper and more complex, the film is mostly saved by its humor.

What sounds, on paper, like a challenging sit is actually a wondrous 97-minute feature, whose director and star are obviously poised for greatness.

Exit 8 is a cinematic captcha, tasking us with finding the difference between one image and the next to prove our humanity.

Not to be missed, Falling Stars reimagines the fantasy tropes of witchcraft through the kind of regional character specificity that indie audiences see more often in films like “Winter’s Bone.”

Baring all and radiating an affability that defines the movie's tone, Hunt delivers her finest performance since "As Good As It Gets."

Indie animation remains one of the toughest niches to find traction in, but here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the film career of an artist who graces us with his whimsy for decades to come.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but Ride or Die retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

Even when that story drags, Moonrise Kingdom could be appreciated on mute.

Make no mistake: Mickle wants to make you jump and scream, but death only arrives in this movie once its world comes to life, which makes each sudden turn all the more intense.

A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays out like a small-scale fairy tale.

Myers brings energy to his first film the way he brought it to his early comedy – a little too much.

Gasoline Rainbow simultaneously succeeds as a nuanced depiction of a generation’s concerns and an ironic look at what young people have yet to learn.

With a PG-rated humor that parents can enjoy too, Secret Headquarters feels like the movie equivalent of the fun uncle who speaks to you like an adult, but also drives a mean Mario Kart.

The film is smartly assembled, making the most of a limited indie budget and building a compelling world to boot.

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

By sprinting through 50 years of features so fast that each of them ultimately feels like a single frame rattling through a projector, they blur De Palma’s body of work into a moving truth that none of his individual films has ever crystallized with such clarity: The movies are real-life; the great filmmakers are the ones who never let you forget that.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

Babyteeth is the kind of soft-hearted tearjerker that does everything in its power to rescue beauty from pain.

A straight line could be plotted through the feature which, despite its imaginative storytelling structure, still manages to hit all of the big moments in Steinem’s life.

Puzzle toes a tough line, managing to stay relentlessly good-hearted and deeply humane, even as Agnes herself plunges into deeper, more dramatic waters. It’s the kind of mid-life crisis story that so rarely centers on a woman and Macdonald shines in the role, riveting even in the quietest of moments.

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

Unfolding as a series of tests in 1958 as NASA prepared for Project Mercury, the experiments on the eponymous 13 women have received far less exposure than the stories surrounding the NASA excursions themselves, but this straightforward, informative documentary provides an efficient historical revision, arguing that the bracing stories of the first men to enter space aren’t complete without an acknowledgement of the women stuck on Earth.

With a solid execution of storytelling, combined with a powerful statement about how we perceive sex offenders, Pervert Park excels as a documentary that explores not only what it takes to be human, but also why psychological evaluations could be crucial in understanding the forces that bring human to commit crimes in the first place.

A rambling magic trick of a movie that reanimates a hazy chapter of American history by unmooring it from the facts of its time, and even perhaps from time itself.

That The Card Counter shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm.

Both effectively terrifying and hilarious.

The raw and resonant Passages is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

We’ve yet to see if Kate McKinnon can lead a movie, but she sure as hell can steal one. She did it in “Ghostbusters,” and she did it again in Rough Night, which is surprisingly funny despite a wild premise riddled with potential pitfalls.

Objects become subjects in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s sweeping yet focused analysis that exposes the truth about the power of images to shape the world’s views of women.

Herzog’s singular vision and Blank’s brilliant capturing of that obsession seem especially worthy of consideration from the adventure film lovers who stay up late.

Bolstered by real events and true emotion, A United Kingdom opts for genuine, hard-won feeling, and the film studiously backs off from cheesy moments or over-the-top revelations.

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.

This is a measured, richly ambiguous work about the subjective process of grief — masquerading as a ghost story — that experiments with the minutiae of film language as only a master of the medium can do.

An alternately wise, melancholic and good-humored look at people surrounded by support but nonetheless alienated by their incapacity to confront their problems.

This is a heckuva stimulating cinematic achievement for a relative newcomer. The Human Surge offers a shrewd commentary on the dissonance of technological connectivity and personal communication.