Piponnier dominates every frame, with a mesmerizing screen presence that pushes the drama well beyond its formulaic premise and visible microbudget constraints.

This gory teen comedy blends laughably outrageous carnage with a legitimately scary plot to delightful ends. Throw in a winking fetish for cinephile culture and audiences are sure to go wild for the gutsy film.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

There may not be much to “Pink Wall” that you haven’t seen in a dozen other indies about millennials in crisis, but Cullen’s woozy and ultra-watchable debut plunges straight into the heart of the matter, and leaves you wondering what parts of your own relationship might be just beyond your field of vision.

A film that’s dark and delightful and ripe for rediscovery.

A sugar-addled My Neighbor Totoro ripoff with a beautiful message and a hideous everything else.

Decent enough as a night out but destined to be used as a fundraising tool, the film is galvanized by its push towards a perverse kind of representation; the idea isn’t to make people with cystic fibrosis feel seen, but rather to erase them altogether. And the highest compliment one can pay to Five Feet Apart is that it has the power to play a small, valuable role in that effort.

Much like its subject, the film is beautiful, compelling, hard to watch, and spread too thin to stay with us for long.

While the pace is spotty and not every joke lands, “Good Boys” manages to be adorable and twisted at the same time.

There was more to Bonnie and Clyde than 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but The Highwaymen falls short of making the case that the good guys had the better tale.

This time, Morris has less command over the edgy material, positioning his modern-day Keystone Cops in a series of smarmy vignettes that don’t cut quite as deep. But it still delivers a scathing and often very funny indictment of homeland insecurities.

The best comedy of its kind since "Superbad," Wilde’s slick, unpredictable romp can sometimes feel like several movies at once. This riotous, candy-colored celebration of sisterhood is so dense with anarchic developments it often threatens to collapse into itself, but avoids lingering on any gag long enough to let that happen.

Stearns’ tone involves a tricky negotiation between the melancholy and the macabre. “The Art of Self-Defense” doesn’t always pull that balance off, but it has enough ambition and wacky payoff to make the zany gamble worthwhile.

Marshall-Green is just finding his way, and his debut is very much a first film. ... Modest and unfussy, “Adopt a Highway” fails to ground its fable-esque qualities in a deeper bedrock of emotional truth, but its best moments offer a tender glimpse at what people do with several decades of pent-up resentment.

Long Shot turns its endearing couple into a savvy vessel for exploring America’s fractured times. As Rogen’s shaggy humor finds its match in Theron’s domineering energy, Long Shot is overlong and rough around the edges, but its imperfections speak to an endearing knack for the messiness of modern times.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

The movie’s lightweight plot yields a disposable comedy with a lot on its mind, but its modest ambition is just enough to let Maron push his onscreen appeal in a new direction.

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.

Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while .

A diverting Western that’s almost worth seeing for the unsaddled performances that director Vincent D’Onofrio gets from his cast, The Kid only makes a few small adjustments to the dustiest of American genres, but these errant wrinkles — a far cry from any serious revisionism — provide much of the fun.

Triple Frontier lands a handful of thrilling sequences in a sea of familiar riffs on greed, masculinity, and the lingering traumas of war.

As generic and retrograde as “Black Panther” was specific and revolutionary, Captain Marvel is a frustrating disappointment at a time when every inclusive blockbuster is fought over as though it could be the decisive battle in our never-ending culture wars.

Rather than going out with a bang, however, the final installment in the franchise hinges its loose plot around the marital infidelities of younger, humorless characters so thinly sketched that it is impossible to care about them.

Erlingsson has created a winsome knickknack of a movie that manages to reframe the 21st century’s signature crisis in a way that makes room for real heroism.

In making Water Makes Us Wet, the filmmakers have embarked upon the noble pursuit of moving people to care about climate change as if their lives — and their sex lives — depended on it.

As a spare and sexy thriller, Michael Winterbottom’s “The Wedding Guest” is far too undercooked; there’s little flavor, and even less to chew on. As an audition for its star to be the next James Bond, however, this aimless Dev Patel vehicle is virtually perfect.

A blunt, breathless, and astoundingly unsentimental morality play that’s told with the intensity of a ticking-clock thriller, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx is every bit as ominous as its title suggests, and far less fanciful.

What The Competition considers a deliciously exciting rite of passage, viewers might interpret as a kind of cultural rot. The truth likely falls somewhere in between, as Simone’s documentary is too gripping to be dismissed, and too queasy to be accepted.