He's still cultivating his storytelling abilities, but Wheatley has clearly found his sweet spot: a darkly funny place with serious potential.

Elle doesn't always maintain the clever balance of naughtiness and dramatic confrontations that make it such an appealingly unconventional romp.

It’s a muscular, high-octane story about cops living above the laws they’re paid to enforce, and growing more desperate and dangerous with every threat to their unchecked power.

Brainy and exciting at the same time, Interstellar invalidates the need for mindless Hollywood product. No matter its shortcomings, the movie achieves an impressive balancing act. It turns the mysteries of the universe into a cinematic playground, but for every profound or visually arresting moment, it also encourages you to to think.

Taking an empathetic and respectful approach, the film follows Baker as he weighs the professional benefits to delaying transition against the joy and relief of fully embracing himself.

Armed with eagle-eyed filmmakers and compelling subjects, the film deftly blends the (inextricably linked) personal and professional sides of the journalists’ work, offering up a wide-ranging look at a vital outlet with so many stories to tell.

Spare but poignant, "Monica" is a pensive family drama that’s loaded with the empty space of things left unsaid.

Shaggy and slapped together as it may be, “76 Days” is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight; the film’s value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we’re making alone and together.

Indignation doesn’t break any fresh ground, and at times plays more like a series of engaging moments than a cohesive whole, but its craftsmanship is impeccable.

While The Fallout allows for lightness to occasionally emerge, the film never forgets the experience at its center, one that can never be fully forgotten.

Commissioned as propaganda, Under the Sun instead documents life inside its grip.

The suspense comes and goes, but A Single Shot always maintains a firm grip on its sad, deteriorating environment.

The dancing alone is worth the price of admission, and Naharin is a dynamic if somewhat aloof subject.

Bodied is pure zany fun disguised as a pure provocation, and sometimes vice versa, mainly because any attempt to characterize its narrative as problematic proves its point.

If Jerry Rothwell’s film version of The Reason I Jump is far more effective and self-possessed than most documentary adaptations of “memoirs” tend to be, that’s largely because it sees Higashida’s book as a lens instead of as a subject, and refracts various other people through it in recognition of the rare tale that’s less important than how it’s translated.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow.

The movie has a loose, almost amateurish quality to its production that suggests another rush job from a filmmaker unwilling or unable to slow down. But the movie reveals its deeper layers with time, congealing into a perceptive and often charming bite-sized study of smart women contending with a series of annoying men.

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.

Maple’s love for her neighborhood and her neighbors is obvious, as she paints an unflinching portrait of the struggle and resiliency of the community.

Full of throwaway insights into the micro-climate of a particularly hellish economic landscape, At Work is an engaging story about a man trying to write an engaging story with a diamond of hard-won wisdom at its core.

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.

Savagely assaulting the desperate state of a blue collar family man, the comedic thriller Cheap Thrills establishes a ridiculous premise early on and takes it to various extremes, again and again, until you just have to accept the crazy venture on its own terms or simply give up.

Hewson never sees her as some kind of tarty punchline – neither does Carney, and neither will the audience. You know all that stuff about “strong female characters” who are also “flawed” or “human” or whatever other insane word salad Hollywood is still requiring of its female leads? Here’s a real one.

It’s the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days. And that’s just when it comes to its standout dog star, the Great Dane (emphasis on great) Bing.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

By the film’s end, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair proves its ASMR-like power: It’s impossible to shake, even when it makes you want to do just that.

While Mudbound is rooted in a precise historical moment, it’s also a sobering commentary on timeless struggles.