A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.

He may not have formulated every aspect his genius in his own words, but the movies he made speak for themselves, and this reverential documentary is another welcome excuse to revisit them.

The White House Effect largely steers clear of overly simplistic narratives about politicians exclusively making decisions to serve whatever special interests whose “pockets” they happen to be in. But it doesn’t shy away from the role that the oil industry played in turning a party that initially seemed interested in fighting climate change into one that has spent nearly half a century adamantly denying it.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

“Superboys” is dedicated to those who devour and admire great movies rather than those who make them — and quickly shows that the line between those two categories can be breached if you’re brave enough.

A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, After Blue is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.

Quad Gods is less effective as a social issues doc than it is as a work of individual portraiture, and while Jacklin’s emphasis on camaraderie prevents her from digging all that deep into any one of her subjects, each of her primary characters proves sufficiently riveting all the same.

From its eureka moment when Barbe-Nicole develops her iconic rose champagne to its final title cards about the company’s ongoing success, Widow Clicquot has all the same beats as the walk-and-talk business movie that you watched on your last flight. It would make perfect in-carriage entertainment for a drowsy Victorian family taking a long trip across the countryside.

A Still Small Voice — much like the residency program that it chronicles — is all the more valuable because it never pretends that being a palliative chaplain is an inherently selfless task.

While the laughs are still easy and frequent, this time around they feel more like the exception than the rule, and the final moments irrevocably tip the scales toward the unironic sobriety the series has been flirting with for so long (a replica of the Trojan horse comes to symbolize how this supposed romp sneaks past your defenses).

Played by Kaitlyn Dever, this Rosaline is very mad indeed (why shouldn’t she be?), but the always-winning actress helps guide a prickly footnote into delightful territory. One part coming-of-age tale, one part literary reconsideration, and all totally fun, Rosaline proves there’s still plenty to mine from the classic canon, with lively twists.

The film’s wild ending will determine whether or not a viewer enjoys the film. But rather than trying to understand exactly what it means, you’re better off appreciating it like one of Alex’s photos.

The idea of them getting justice never feels on the table, but the film instead is a path out of the madness of a system where to simply have what happened to their father admitted would fill some of the void he has left behind.

Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Cynical, sad, increasingly fucked up, and often gloriously mean, Song has turned the genre inside out to show us how shallow these stories can be.

Garry Winogrand hated being called “a street photographer,” even if he was regarded as the most essential of them all. The great success of Sasha Waters Freyer’s straightforward but evocative documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, is how well it explains why someone could have such a strong aversion to a term that was practically invented to describe them.

There's a adrenaline rush even in the problematic finish, an eagerness that drives the filmmaking so that Looper is thrilling to watch even when it falls apart.

Emerald Fennell’s raucous debut, Promising Young Woman, twists its buzzword-laden, spoiler-free synopsis — it’s a #MeToo rape revenge thriller with bite! — into something fresh and totally wild.

Colette is a costume drama for people who have yet to figure out that they love costume dramas. It’s fleet enough after that first act, and the squeezed plotting of its second half ensures the story never gets too long in the tooth.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.

Ferreira is a believable and sympathetic protagonist, bringing a vulnerability to Grace that makes the viewer root for her even as she blows up her life for reasons even she doesn’t seem to understand.

Disobedience is a beautiful, fraught, and emotionally nuanced drama that wrestles with hard questions about the tension between the life we’re born into and the one we choose for ourselves.

Erratic, unpredictable and constantly intriguing, Miles Ahead plays more like one of Davis' compositions than a traditional biopic, stumbling around with flashes of insight and a brilliant central performance.

The movie’s topple into melodramatic excess is fitting for a film set in the 1960s, a time dominated by melodramas. And also like the cinema of the 1960s, there’s a grit and urgency to To the Stars, of something bigger and darker coming along with the changing times.

Combining savage archetypes with spot-on wit, Slack Bay is a fun, peculiar romp with deeper conceits lurking beneath the surface.

Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments, the ones that pushed him into action, add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.