Equal parts confounding, challenging, and insanely fun, “Dashcam” is horror at its most inventive.

While Wandel does well to leave some things to the imagination, like what happens beyond the schoolyard, she not-so-subtly nails the point home in the end, showing how all it takes is one person to stop bullying at its source. Still, her film is an arresting, eye-opening look at how violence begins at an early age, and how we can learn to be bystanders, or have the strength to speak out.

There’s an actual pulse and beating heart to Comet; it feels vibrant, alive.

Ultimately, American Fiction is an impressive debut from Jefferson, who has seamlessly made the leap from the small to big screen with a strong comedic voice and characters crafted with empathy and care. While the satire could have been sharper and more complex, the film is mostly saved by its humor.

What sounds, on paper, like a challenging sit is actually a wondrous 97-minute feature, whose director and star are obviously poised for greatness.

Exit 8 is a cinematic captcha, tasking us with finding the difference between one image and the next to prove our humanity.

Not to be missed, Falling Stars reimagines the fantasy tropes of witchcraft through the kind of regional character specificity that indie audiences see more often in films like “Winter’s Bone.”

Baring all and radiating an affability that defines the movie's tone, Hunt delivers her finest performance since "As Good As It Gets."

Indie animation remains one of the toughest niches to find traction in, but here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the film career of an artist who graces us with his whimsy for decades to come.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but Ride or Die retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

Even when that story drags, Moonrise Kingdom could be appreciated on mute.

Make no mistake: Mickle wants to make you jump and scream, but death only arrives in this movie once its world comes to life, which makes each sudden turn all the more intense.

A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays out like a small-scale fairy tale.

Myers brings energy to his first film the way he brought it to his early comedy – a little too much.

Gasoline Rainbow simultaneously succeeds as a nuanced depiction of a generation’s concerns and an ironic look at what young people have yet to learn.

With a PG-rated humor that parents can enjoy too, Secret Headquarters feels like the movie equivalent of the fun uncle who speaks to you like an adult, but also drives a mean Mario Kart.

The film is smartly assembled, making the most of a limited indie budget and building a compelling world to boot.

It’s shaggy in places and favors one side of its story above the other, but ultimately makes for a delightful time.

By sprinting through 50 years of features so fast that each of them ultimately feels like a single frame rattling through a projector, they blur De Palma’s body of work into a moving truth that none of his individual films has ever crystallized with such clarity: The movies are real-life; the great filmmakers are the ones who never let you forget that.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

Babyteeth is the kind of soft-hearted tearjerker that does everything in its power to rescue beauty from pain.

A straight line could be plotted through the feature which, despite its imaginative storytelling structure, still manages to hit all of the big moments in Steinem’s life.

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.

Every clip of Buckley performing lifts the film off the ground, highlighting how his talents often felt otherworldly.

Unfolding as a series of tests in 1958 as NASA prepared for Project Mercury, the experiments on the eponymous 13 women have received far less exposure than the stories surrounding the NASA excursions themselves, but this straightforward, informative documentary provides an efficient historical revision, arguing that the bracing stories of the first men to enter space aren’t complete without an acknowledgement of the women stuck on Earth.

With a solid execution of storytelling, combined with a powerful statement about how we perceive sex offenders, Pervert Park excels as a documentary that explores not only what it takes to be human, but also why psychological evaluations could be crucial in understanding the forces that bring human to commit crimes in the first place.

A rambling magic trick of a movie that reanimates a hazy chapter of American history by unmooring it from the facts of its time, and even perhaps from time itself.