Marrying the sensitivity of “Spirited Away” to the lushness of “The Legend of Korra” and the narrative coherence of a lucid dream, Big Fish & Begonia is the very rarest of Chinese exports: An animated film that was made for adults.

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.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is at its sharpest and most necessary when Wilkerson interrogates his personal connection to the past, extrapolating his reticence to explore his own family’s violent history into a national epidemic of people who are similarly reluctant to do the same.

God Help the Girl doesn’t quite succeed in convincing the viewer to toss conventional character development out the window, it still has its moments.

At times, [Deutch's] performance is perhaps even too strong for the film that’s cobbled together around it, as the actress so convincingly indicates at Erica’s vibrant and complex inner life that she embarrasses the script’s feeble attempts to diagnose and solve her character.

For all of its low-key revisionism and post-modern flourish (most explicit during a kung-fu style training montage set to Leonard Cohen and a funny “Gladiator” reference that lands at a pivotal moment), Foulkes’ confident and kooky feature debut is less interested in subverting its source material than in continuing the puppet show’s long tradition of keeping with the times.

The Tale of King Crab is an engrossing, if slight riff on 1970s foreign arthouse classics — though not quite as spellbinding as its forebears, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

There’s certainly representational value in the way it brings a conventionally rousing narrative to such unorthodox material. At the same time, it leaves you wondering how much better the whole thing would have held together if it simply let the riders speak for themselves.

Dope provokes a discussion about the dichotomy between societal expectations of the race-defined self, as well as the democratic American right to be who you want to be — but it's an unfocused and tangential one, limited by the trappings of comedy and the flash of the hip-hop aesthetic.

Palmer isn’t exactly high art, but it’s no small feat for something so predictable to avoid feeling dishonest.

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.

A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a road map for how to love adventure abroad, with dashes of Vietnamese trivia and spiritual facts along the way.

It’s smaller, quieter, and it feels true. Not soapy, not silly, not like something ripped out of an airport book buy. That’s the first step.

If The Founder comes up short of providing a satisfactory dramatization of its main storyline, at least it peels back the veil with sufficient intrigue. Yet it still leaves the sour impression that Kroc got the last laugh. Even in this less-than-flattering portrait, he remains its brightest star.

The madeline-like specificity of this memory-driven story is its greatest strength, even if it relies on a rusty structure of nested flashbacks in order to reach the past.

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.

An arresting and visually stunning achievement, Medusa Deluxe breaks the framework on storytelling and sheds the skin of a subculture in the process.

If Silent Night ultimately aces its peculiar tone, it struggles with having anything to say.

For a franchise that’s so frenzied and kinetic in general, “Infinity Castle” effectively sets the tone for what’s to come, promising diehard fans the spectacle they’ve been craving which newcomers will also find enjoyable, if somewhat confusing at times.

Lucy doesn't hold together, but with its flashy innovation, Besson's trying to freshen the formula. It's the kind of freewheeling mess of a movie you wish studios would try out more often.

Butt Boy dares you to give it a shot, and operates on the assumption that most people will write it off from the start. It’s hard to believe this movie even exists, but equally worth recognizing that it’s not entirely full of shit.

Over time, Holland's approach pushes beyond despair and turns into a pure exercise in grim atmosphere, shifting from a story of staying alive to a closeup of a private hell.

Even when Christopher Robin stumbles or steers itself into a corner, it never stops trying to understand what people lose when they let go of the things they love. The movie sells itself by keeping one foot on the ground at all times.

Whenever Lee ventures away from the outrageous particulars of the plot, "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" transforms into a stylish means of exploring contemporary struggles in urban black America by depicting it as a ballet of navigating personal and practical conflicts alike.

The Sun Rises On Us All soon becomes the disheartening but affecting story of a pair of broken people for whom salvation is simply unaffordable in a morally expensive world.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 unleashes a fascinating gamble, blending the grimy aesthetic of a one-note action movie with undercurrents of blue-collar frustration. It doesn’t quite succeed at fusing those two elements, but it’s further proof of a filmmaking sensibility willing to push beyond the presumed barriers of formula.

As a movie, Black Mass often drowns its dramatic potential in a dreary atmosphere and grisly violence used to dubious effect. Depp, however, operates on another level.

Fresh and stale in equal measure, Coco represents the best of what Pixar can be, and the worst of what they’ve become.