The absolute immediacy of Lee’s performance allows you to feel every frame of Past Lives on your skin, which is crucial to a film that conveys the brunt of its meaning through sense instead of story; a film that commands its placid rhythms and ethereal fussiness with a confidence that elevates Song’s “people don’t talk like that” dialogue into a decisive plus.

The filmmaker creates a tactile universe of nostalgia and regret, heavier on suggestion than explication.

Directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews' directorial debut (from Matthews' screenplay) centers on a highly unlikable character who has alienated himself from social responsibility -- and forces you to sympathize with him against all odds.

Lowery manages to find entertainment value and genuine intrigue from his outlandish scenario, synthesizing the magical realism of his earlier films with a tighter grasp of tone.

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.

At times, Frances Ha strains from emphasizing the characters' snarkiness and disregarding plot. By routinely going nowhere, however, the movie eventually finds a distinctive voice that carries it through.

A Bigger Splash has neither a clear center nor a clear moral, and it's all the better for it. This is a film about behavior, not plot — and how people are ruled by emotion, and not logic.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.

And if all of this sounds like a tremendous amount to pack into a single film, there’s the rub. In a somewhat disappointing twist, “Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t really a single film, it’s instead one-half of a planned two-film sequel.

Ignore the precise religious context and it stands perfectly well as a restrained look at personal convictions in the face of certain death.

Kazan has fun with a silly premise and smartly plays it straight when the occasion calls for it, while keeping the cutesy, fantastical extremes of the material at bay. It's less fairy tale than shrewd exaggeration on the pratfalls of desire.

The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.

By positioning the Visitor as a racial minority specifically, LaBruce also pushes back against Britain’s colonial past and present while urging us to wrest free of the norms that suppress and oppress our daily lives.

The Planet of the Apes films had always been political, but with Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, things got angry. And it was awesome.

Despite the sound of gunfire off in the distance, Notturno is less a film about life during wartime than the life that subsequently follows it, as those damaged by the violence try to move forward.

As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.

Creed does justice to its roots while trying something new.

It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

By focusing on what binds those on the pitch and those in the bleachers, Nossa Chape doesn’t just wonder if some things are “bigger than the game” — it proves it.

Days becomes such a resonant addition to Tsai’s exhumed body of work because the filmmaker recognizes and embraces that uncharacteristically sentimental undertow; the last 30 minutes of this (relatively short) movie reward viewers who’ve spent the previous 90 minutes searching — reaching — for a souvenir they might be able to take away from it.

Computer Chess excels at conveying the frustrations of feeling trapped by forces beyond one's control, the complexities of humanity irresolvable by any neat code.

Dickinson's hauntingly naturalistic look at disgruntled young adults trapped in the country following an urban disaster plays like "Martha Marcy May Marlene" transported to a post-apocalyptic survival narrative -- with lots of yoga and sex.

Like its central character, Listen Up Philip exudes a kind of highbrow affectation that charms more than it alienates.

Paddington’s ability to positively impact people is so profound that it can’t help but stretch out towards the audience, too. We may know that being kind and polite doesn’t always set the world right, but damn if that little bear doesn’t make you want to try.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

In each tense moment, Miss Bala has a lot to say in a few words.

By combining genuine human drama and an exploration of a mysterious sacred text with a ridiculously entertaining plot about a child-stealing demon, the film serves as a reminder of all the things that horror is uniquely equipped to accomplish.