At what point does a story about one failing democracy become a story about all failing democracies? Perhaps there’s no way of knowing until it’s already too late.

A stitched-together combo of outlaw energy and bittersweet romance that gives the impression of Little Rascals in the big city. Like the graffiti art it documents, it's a lovingly handmade affair.

The film’s most telling scene unfortunately marks a steep divide between the fine-tuned first half and a back end that threatens to crumble into cliche.

Whereas "45365" took the form of a scattered collage, with disconnected events and a vast ensemble of characters stitched together to represent a year of activity, Tchoupitalas brings greater clarity to a similarly diffuse canvas by situating it around a trio of innocent observers.

In a world where everyone feels lonely, Amanda might be our most authentic avatar, someone willing to get super weird in the hopes it will lead somewhere great. For Cavalli and “Amanda,” the results speak for themselves: The film, and its titular heroine, are great indeed.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

Lessin, Pildes, and their many subjects eschew cheap emotion in favor of something much more intimate and, ultimately, more honest.

While the storytelling grows frustratingly elliptical, Lelio so desperate to constrain the drama that he resorts to removing helpful pieces of it, the scenes that remain are succinct and evocative.

Like all of Shinkai’s films, the richness of the light coats everything it touches with such an evocative hue of nostalgia that the plot only puts a damper on things (and there’s a lot of plot here).

Melancholia hovers in ambiguity with riveting aesthetic prowess.

Upstream Color is routinely confusing but not oppressively so; its final exquisite moments explain little yet still manage to invite you in.

Possibly the best war movie of the year.

It’s a film that contains multitudes, and only asks for a world willing to do the same.

Come See Me in the Good Light co-mingles the kaleidoscopic themes of genderqueer poetry with the grueling daily management of a deadly illness — and does the vulnerability of its well-chosen subjects remarkable cinematic justice. Through that, White creates a sense of existential wonder and a film bursting with hope for all kinds.

Faya Dayi is a film that invites the mind and soul with its visual grandeur, and keeps the viewer engaged with a tension and mystery that seems to be lurking beneath its surface. It’s familiar yet foreign — a world one must at once surrender to, yet be careful to not completely lose oneself in.

Although it tells of a production gone ostensibly wrong, My First Film is, at its core, a movie not about upheaval but about yearning — and about how, sometimes, giving that yearning up can be a beautiful, generous act of creation all its own.

TransFatty Lives stands out less for its inherently emotional topic than the appealing personality at its center.

Anyone who’s willing to meet this movie on its own terms and roll with the dream logic it requires will be rewarded with a resonantly cathartic saga about the struggle to find beauty in a world that forces us to leave parts of ourselves behind.

Rest assured: Johnson isn’t reinventing the mystery movie with “Glass Onion,” but he is having a hell of a time lightly deconstructing it and reorienting it to suit his whipsmart script and central super detective.

Mackenzie (whose previous credits include "Perfect Sense" and "Young Adam") applies a sharp kitchen sink realism to this haunting setting and directs it toward an ultimately moving family drama that just happens to involve vicious convicts.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if Benediction is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find.

Seimetz has conjured a beguiling narrative so tapped into the current worldwide panic that it might have been made in its aftermath.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

Despite its shortcomings, The World's End glistens with a comedic energy not present in equivalent mainstream blockbusters.

Lane set out to make a documentary about the nature of taste, and she’s accomplished that with panache.

It’s not unusual for such high-concept films to indulge in a thorny and fascinating second act only to find itself grasping for a more defined conflict in the third, and that’s essentially what happens here, as the broad philosophical mysteries take Leyla down a rabbit-hole that might be too deep for her to ever climb out.