Fortunately, the black-and-white debut of writer-director Logan Sandler is just sharp enough to complicate its clichés with strong performances and a mesmerizing tone that pushes the mopey proceedings into psychological thriller territory.

The root of evil in The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t particularly original or deep, but the movie’s twisty plot and eerie atmosphere makes it deeply unsettling anyway.

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.

Whatever philosophical nuggets were lurking amid Oshii’s tangled plotting, they surely merited closer consideration by a filmmaker who wasn’t just trading in gloss, and doesn’t merely regard human beings as elements of design.

It’s all pleasant enough, but falls short of being as genuinely different as Clean Slate claims its films to be. As a romance, Phillauri lacks passion, and as a ghost story, it’s missing some much-needed spirit.

The director never intrudes on his film, but — even through the melancholic veil that Collin drapes over this ghostly portrait of the past — you can still feel his unbridled sense of discovery as he introduces the man who made this movie possible.

Band Aid is a thin but knowing portrait of how marriages stretch, sag, and pull back together.

At its best, Prevenge feels like a hilarious distillation of every conflicted, politically incorrect thought that many pregnant women are too polite to share in public.

Decency, in its raw, instinctive form, is ultimately what earns The Zookeeper’s Wife a place in the self-conflicted canon of Holocaust cinema.

For all of its surprising relevance, Power Rangers feels hopelessly lost in time. There is an audience for this movie, but this movie has no idea who that audience might be.

Life spends its first act building up some big ideas, but eventually unravels into another monster movie in space.

Hirokazu Kore-eda may only make good movies, but After the Storm is one of his best.

Shot over the course of several years, the movie blends an intimate perspective with trenchant investigative chops, uncovering a transitory figure whose romantic ideals give way to a harsh reality check.

Freeland is clearly having fun behind the camera, but broad and superficial performances mean the fun doesn’t always translate.

Mockler transforms the material into a solid thriller with an edgy vision of millennial lunacy, sketching out a psychopath unique to the viral video age.

An emotionally riveting documentary that may very well be the most powerful group therapy ever caught on camera.

By making a satisfactory crowdpleaser that doesn’t overextend itself, Swanberg has delivered his most traditional movie to date — and for this prolific filmmaker, who spent ages defying conventions, that’s nothing short of a radical step forward.

A pulpy slice of pie from deep in the heart of American nowhere, Evan Katz’s Small Crimes is far too convoluted for such an admittedly modest thriller, but the film ties together in such a perfect bow that it’s tempting to forgive all of the knots it took to get there.

The Most Hated Woman in America makes it abundantly clear that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a riveting human being whose story is worth telling in our messed up times, but the film never has the slightest idea of what that story might be about.

Considerably less ambitious or provocative than Boyle’s barnstorming first crack at these characters, T2 Trainspotting (can we please just call it “T2″?) is an enjoyable nostalgia trip about the extraordinary headache of trying to go home again.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

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.

While the entirety of Frantz holds less appeal than its gorgeous ingredients, it’s impossible to deny the sheer narrative sophistication that makes this gentle story much more than your average retread.

Badrinath Ki Dulhania may hit several faulty notes as a flag-bearer for feminism, but as delivered by this endearing duo, it’s bound to touch more than a few hearts.

Oscillating between the relentless energy of “John Wick” and the dense plotting of a John Le Carré novel, Atomic Blonde never quite finds a happy medium between the two. But when Theron goes back to kicking ass, nothing else matters.

From laugh to laugh — and there are many — you might question the target of the jokes, but that’s often because The Disaster Artist rarely works on one level: There’s meta humor, self-referential gags, and human reverence paid to the earnest pursuit of a Hollywood dream. Such are the layered joys of this exuberant — if surprisingly conventional — buddy comedy about the making of the worst movie of all time.

The pervasive elegance makes up for a largely derivate plot. We’ve seen variations on this story before, and Mean Dreams doesn’t do much to shake up expectations — until, that is, a violent finale that punctuates the characters’ psychological development.

The film is never funny, and its attempts to wink at the adults in the room are so lame that you wish they’d been left on the cutting room floor, but the deeper the film delves into Tim’s imagination the less imaginative it becomes.