A brilliant home-invasion thriller laced with cultural reference points stretching back to the late ’80s, and a smorgasbord of first-rate visceral cinematic scares. Think “Funny Games” collided with Cronenbergian body horror and Hitchockian suspense, and you’re maybe halfway there.

Clocking in at a slim 85 minutes, the whole thing flies by quite pleasingly, a warm and funny feature that reasserts the value of high quality visuals and attention to detail.

Gazer might be inspired by New Hollywood, but its existence is almost reason to believe that a similar filmmaking renaissance could be on the horizon.

Gerwig’s adaptation looks at the eponymous little women through ambitious storytelling techniques that modernize the book’s timeless story in unexpected ways.

Building to the potential of a confrontation with the wedding climax, The Farewell threatens to melt into sentimentalism, but Wang dodges the obvious pathways to a tidy resolution.

Crucially, these characters are so believable that every scene has an internal logic and justifies itself.

Watching the 90-year-old filmmaker pick through the scrapheap of her own memories and fashion the bits into a fresh perspective on the relationship between reality and representation, stillness and movement, life and art, it seems that Varda has become something of a gleaner, herself.

To a Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.

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

Raw and unadorned, Whose Streets? is a documentary in the truest sense of the word; an actual moving document of events fresh in the country’s memory, but never before laid as bare as they are here.

Aided by a dynamite performance from newcomer Laura Galán, Piggy uses the tension of a slasher thriller to weave a painfully relatable tale of adolescent angst gone terribly awry. As body shame and self-loathing morph into a disturbing complicity with violence, Piggy pushes the torments of youth to their naturally wicked ends.

Bigelow’s explosively entertaining real-time thriller, told from multiple perspectives at various levels of government from situation room deputies to POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, does not mince on hopelessness. Here is a movie that will ruin your day. You’re welcome.

Quivoron’s feature debut is so singular, so thrilling, that it will hopefully escape without being sucked into the remake machine.

Wiseman has made a vocation out of filming what is right in front of him, and he applies that schematic to a dead woman whose words are all that remain. Her husband did not see her, but we will.

This documentary is not a dry, academic history of youth culture, but rather a vibrant political statement that shows the powerful force of teenagers and their ability to foment social, cultural, and political change.

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

That Weinstein’s downfall was the product of diligent reporting, dogged persistence, and the resilience of a few brave souls is essential to remember. In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary She Said, we’re reminded of something else that makes for one hell of a movie: It was women who did it.

More than anything else, Diwan seems interested in exploring how, at many points in history, young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's mesmerizing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia plays like "Zodiac" meets "Police, Adjective."

Endlessly charming and sneakily wise, Everybody Wants Some!! epitomizes Linklater's unique ability to magnify human behavior with levity.

One Night in Miami hits so hard because it remains joyfully, often painfully grounded in what makes a person extraordinary, even when the world isn’t ready for them. Here’s hoping this world is ready for what King has to show it.

There and gone with the fleeting nature of its youngest character's attention span, Little Feet ultimately feels more like an insightful sketch than a full-fledged movie, but it nonetheless leaves a major impression.

Questlove and editor Joshua L. Pearson lace together footage of stage performances with history lessons (Motown, gospel music, the evolution of Black style, the concept of a common struggle among Black people worldwide), tying it all together with endearing recollections of the single day in 1969 by those who were there. The result fans the flames of Black consciousness.

There are any number of movies about gay men trying to liberate themselves from the long shadow of heteronormative oppression — a regrettably, enduringly relevant premise — but few have been told with the extraordinary nuance or compassion of Jayro Bustamante’s Tremors.

It is a stirring call to action, and an urgent warning to those who place religion above their child’s survival. Most importantly, however, the film does not judge or speak down to those who most need to hear its message.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is an invitation to a public mourning.

Atmospherically, Spring Breakers is an elegant evocation of noir storytelling, littered with misdeeds with girls and guns at every turn.

The House That Jack Built is an often-horrifying, sadistic dive into a psychotic internal monologue, with intellectual detours about the nature of art in the world today, and puts considerable effort into stimulating discomfort at key moments. If you meet the work on those terms, or at least accept the challenge of wrestling with impeccable filmmaking that dances across moral barriers, it’s also possibly brilliant.