As Levinson swings wildly for the fences, Assassination Nation yields a modicum of payoff.

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

Repetition grinds Lizzie to a halt, and the film lacks anything resembling energy, cycling through the same beats until something happens only because it has to.

Rather than forge a believable relationship between Grace and Del that stokes our interest in the future, this uneasy two-hander strings us along by raising dull questions about the past.

[A] hypnotic midnight movie, which veers from astonishing, expressionistic exchanges to gory mayhem without an iota of compromise.

In Anthony and Alex’s capable hands, the Susanne Bartsch legacy endures just as brightly as it began.

Despite the specificity of its story and the manner in which its told, the issues at hand remain universal, including David’s struggle to connect with his child and the way paranoia can make even the best friends into the worst enemies.

Welding the flow and logic of a romantic comedy to the faintly ridiculous soul of a melodrama, the film is never clear about whose story its telling, or what it might want for them.

Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s film is not so much the story of a fighter as it is a story that wants to fight you.

Without breaking a lot of new ground, the result is one of the more positive depictions of millennial community-building in recent cinema. None of the group’s fancy flips or grinds top the degree to which “Skate Kitchen” turns its subjects into a fascinating microcosm of American youth.

In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a small movie, far too modest and knowing to surrender to melodrama and apply cosmetic fixes to deep wounds...but it beautifully articulates the need for young people to realize the validity of who they are, and even more beautifully crystalizes the moment when that starts to happen.

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.

A harsh and largely unwelcome change of pace from Japan’s greatest living humanist filmmaker, The Third Murder finds Hirokazu Kore-eda abandoning the warmth of his recent family dramas (“Still Walking,” “After the Storm”) in favor of an ice-cold legal thriller that pedagogically dismantles the death penalty.

Ultimately, the movie belongs to Diggs, a Tony winner for “Hamilton” who comes into his own as a genuine movie star with a fully realized performance that easily outshines the bumpier moments.

At every turn, Fisher is honest and open, relatable to the point that you feel as if you’re actually watching her own life play out.

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.

Three Identical Strangers does a solid job laying out a story that’s both remarkable and repulsive in equal measures.

Leave No Trace sprouts into a modest but extraordinarily graceful film about what people need from each other, and the limits of what they can give of themselves.

The downside to the Zellners’ uncompromising approach is that they sometimes hold an inspired moment for too long. Certain scenes drag, and some banter has an airless quality that causes a few gags to fall flat. But it’s often rescued by nuggets of hilarious dialogue...and the steady realization that the movie always has been one step ahead of audience assumptions.

Writer-director Ari Aster’s first feature culls from a tradition of slick, elegant genre filmmaking, making up what it lacks in originality with an impressive volume of atmospheric dread.

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

American Animals is fiercely entertaining from start to finish, even when its characters are acting so dumb that you start to suspect they still have some more evolving to do.

An immense, brave, and genuinely earth-shaking self-portrait that explores sexual assault with a degree of nuance and humility often missing from the current discourse, The Tale is undeniably primed for the #MeToo movement, but it’s also so much bigger than that.

For a film that chronicles the rise of a creator obsessed with reanimating the dead, Mary Shelley is utterly lifeless. It contains a sparkling and startlingly raw performance by Elle Fanning, but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s disappointing followup to her remarkable “Wadjda” doesn’t push beyond paint-by-numbers biopic posturing

The movie’s conclusion pits religion against personal desire in remarkably visceral terms.

On Chesil Beach offers up so many tricky tonal changes, enough that Cooke eventually gives them over to a single note: limp.

Angels Wear White brings into relief the bureaucratic corruption and class tension that inform the power dynamics of such situations.