As signaled by the hilarious visual gag that opens the story, In My Room is a mysterious and surprising movie about the frustration of the unseen and the poignancy of paths not taken.

Like some of the feature-length spinoffs of old “Saturday Night Live” sketches that proliferated in the ’90s, it feels like a padded version of a bit that was a lot sharper in five-minute increments.

In what’s been a banner year for archival docs that repurpose footage into absorbing, contemplative cinematic experiences (“Amazing Grace,” “Apollo 11,” “They Shall Not Grow Old”), Kapadia reasserts his mastery of the format, especially as a force of perspective from inside and outside a superstar’s orbit.

Berk and Olsen’s script only skims the surface of what is really going on here, and yet Villains remains a delightfully slick dip in the shallow end of the pool. You may leave wanting a longer swim, but enjoy the sick fun while it lasts.

This contemplative film is beautifully shot, set in a stunning landscape surrounded by fog and greenery and ancient stone steps. But it’s Yao’s soulful and stirring performance as a complex woman struggling to understand herself — and life itself — that anchors Send Me to the Clouds, allowing it to truly soar.

Though the narrative could use more structural integrity, Zollo, and her daring lead actress, Duke, create a courageously personal, experimental piece, tapping into a raw emotional state not often rendered on screen with such depth and intelligence.

Bloodline is meant to work on viewers’ nerves. For the most part, it does.

With an all-star cast that includes Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Adam Goldberg and Clifton Collins Jr. — many of whom ham it up in kooky ways — this movie is enjoyably energetic. It almost doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Even with an old pro like Shaye behind the camera, Ambition is too slight.

Poor Demi Moore — playing the self-centered CEO of a failing company — comes off as stiff and shrill, setting the tone for a movie that’s stilted from start to finish.

Even with the short running time, writer-director Matt Kane and cowriter Marc Underhill exhaust most of their ideas early. But Kind is touching throughout, as a man who just needs to feel wanted.

Throughout, Gaffigan is great, eschewing sentimentality as he taps into his frustration and rage — with no jokes in sight.

While part of the film offers the expected, unsparingly violent action tropes typical of the series, there’s another aspect to the story, a surprisingly brooding examination of a warrior in winter, a dark story of a berserker who can’t let go, that’s in its own way bleaker and more despairing than we may be expecting.

McColm and Day show promise as filmmakers, even if not everyone will be into their off-kilter look at the world. Birds Without Feathers hatches fully formed, though the resulting film’s absurdity will have limited appeal beyond its niche art-house audience.

Esrick’s Cracked Up affectingly peels back the years of protective layers trapping the trauma, revealing a man who has found a semblance of peace after a lifetime of battling demons.

The movie works best when it focuses on the senses and the specific connections between hearing, language (both ASL and oral) and music.

It’s a stirring and delicately reflective piece of work.

After seeing every leaf on every bush in so many features, it’s fun to sit back and enjoy a film that pushes its look and palette beyond mere reality to create a fantasy world that could exist only in animation.

On-the-nose in its use of music cues for emotional effect, this showcase of subpar filmmaking unabashedly regurgitates clichés in a story that shows little concern for the history of the location it is exploiting.

It offers a blunt, ruthless evisceration — which is to say, a clear-eyed assessment — of the brilliant legal mind who helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair and made his reputation as Joseph McCarthy’s attack dog.

[A] lethargic, hallucinatory mish-mash with matching dialogue that has all the zing of a Wikipedia entry.

The film can’t quite surmount its fanciful conceit.

Though Fellowes and director Michael Engler have taken pains to make the plot engaging for newcomers, this is a film, as was the case with the Harry Potter series and the Avengers saga, where the emotional connection will be strongest for those who’ve been there from the start.

Like some of the more memorable films at Toronto this year, Ema leaves you wondering what exactly you just saw, and hoping it won’t be too long before you see it again.

Directed with relentless tension and diamond-hard intelligence by Josh and Benny Safdie (who earlier this month won directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle), Uncut Gems is a thriller and a character study, a tragedy and a blast.

Here, it seems to be saying, was an extraordinary human being who, by offering the gift of his time and attention, couldn’t help but profoundly affect those he met. To watch this movie is to encounter him anew — not in the flesh, but in nearly every other way that matters.

“Raise Hell” does more than allow us to bask in Ivins’ trademark attitude and humor; it shows us how she got that way and explores the toll that being the public Molly Ivins took on her personal life.

A killer concept falls frustratingly short of the finish line in Empathy, Inc., a dark morality tale that ambitiously casts contemporary technology in a throwback visual setting.

Despite its audacious premise and style, Riot Girls feels at times underwritten, a few of the performances under-baked. Kwiatkowski and Iseman carry the film, but such a sprawling world is heavy lifting. Nevertheless, Vuckovic ably showcases her fetchingly energetic aesthetic.

The documentary can’t help but feel like a promo piece despite providing some insightful backstage glimpses into its subject’s well-publicized life.

Director Elise Duran brings a background in reality TV to this sub-par rom-com, but there’s little of the real world here.

Seeds might be classified as horror, but its most disturbing element isn’t what audiences expect from the genre.

Scaborough doesn’t try to shock audiences, but its attempt at a surprise is sadly predictable.

Depraved is smart in its commentary on everything from the evils of the pharmaceuticals industry to the terrors of PTSD, but there’s real heart and empathy here too. Skeptics might question whether Adam has a soul or not, but Fessenden’s film clearly possesses one.

The Weekend is as easygoing as its title implies, a loose, lovely complement to Meghie’s more polished studio film “Everything, Everything.”

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

A sincere, sensitive entry in that niche genre of family drama scenarios involving culinary legacy.

A towering filmic achievement, Monos pulsates like an inescapable vivid trance, cosmic and terrestrial at once, fantastical and violently stark, about victims and victimizers. Like all dualities, those in this excursion are two bends that belong to the same river.

Convincingly creepy while also slightly thought-provoking, it warns about deceiving facades, because what hides underneath masks is possibly much worse.

While the result is not flawless, this is a polished, impressive attempt that pays off in the end. It may take awhile to get there, but its themes of loss, longing, heartache and betrayal, not to mention the nature and value of beautiful objects, do ultimately move us.

It’s watchable and intriguing stuff, yet also silly and inconsistent.

A master class in endless narrative inventiveness and an ode to the resourceful and collaborative spirit of hands-on filmmaking, One Cut of the Dead amounts to an explosively hilarious rarity.

This overlong film’s glacial pace and talky, unevenly told narrative undercut its potential power and accessibility.

The Sound of Silence, anchored by a superbly modulated performance by the always intriguing Peter Sarsgaard, is fascinating, original and, yes, deeply resonant.

Anchored by Weixler’s and Pearson’s natural charm, Chained for Life stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

Swezey’s film is a historical record of this short-lived time and this singularly L.A. scene.

As Ramona, a one-woman supernova who reigns over a New York strip club, Lopez gives her most electrifying screen performance since “Out of Sight,” slipping the movie into her nonexistent pocket from the moment she strides out onto a neon-lighted stage in a rhinestone bodysuit.

This is intensely physical filmmaking, drenched in Florida sunshine and magnetized by the beauty of the actors’ faces and bodies. But it is also deeply rooted in its characters’ consciousness, alert to the feelings of dread, shame, rage and despair that threaten to bring these fast-moving lives to a standstill.

The movie is almost exactly what you’d expect: It has stirring speeches, infuriating setbacks and a tendency to overstate the obvious.

There’s something just a bit off about Satanic Panic, a knowing horror-comedy with some wonderfully wild moments, but with pacing too slack and choppy to give its best jokes their proper punch.

Like a lot of recent South American and Central American horror, The Whistler is primarily a mood piece, relying heavily on deep shadow and rich sound design to spook the audience. But it’s a richly imagined film, drawing its eerie power from the depths of male guilt.

The biggest mystery in the serial-killer thriller Night Hunter isn’t the identity of a super-predator, or the location of his abductees. The real question here is how such a preposterous compendium of crime movie clichés could attract a heavyweight cast.

Boy Genius remains frustratingly bland and disjointed throughout — like it was assembled from discarded pieces of family-friendly television pilots.

Huston is outstanding, playing a broken man who pretends he’s fine, even as his rudeness and tics tell a different story.

The stellar cast elevates the schlocky charms of this thriller. It’s well-paced and cut like a nighttime soap, jumping between characters as they explore this puzzling mystery over the course of a couple of days.

Something tells me a documentary on Hancock simply navigating the rigors of Edie, as well as acting it to the fullest, might have been more readily inspiring.

Solemn in tone and indispensable in significance, the latest from an artist with a track record for surveying marginalized Americans is structured like a collage of incendiary and heart-wrenching moments that toe dip into social justice issues without staying long with any one idea.

Like its predecessor, Super Size Me 2 is largely entertaining, with audience enjoyment varying on their appetite for Spurlock’s fun, smug shtick.

It’s hard to imagine a true-life underdog tale more engaging than Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel, a winning David vs. Goliath baseball documentary that covers all the crowd-pleasing bases.

Memories in popular music are notoriously short, and if you’ve forgotten how extraordinary a singer Linda Ronstadt is, how wide a range of material she’s explored and how deep her commitment to the art and craft of music is, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a potent, mind-expanding reminder.

This teen musical comedy is set at a girls performing arts camp, but it never convinces the audience of anyone’s talent.

If you think of second features as pitfalls of either sameness or overreach, Chon’s Ms. Purple is more curious than most in that it feels like an alluring mixture of the two, a family story with artistic ambitions that’s tone-conscious to a fault, but rarely chord-rich.

If Becoming Nobody may dig only as deeply as the filmmaker and/or Alpert chose to go, it remains an inspiring, stirringly meditative portrait of one man’s profound spiritual influence on a world that has surely needed him.

Although deliberately paced and a bit repetitive, the movie contains many lovely subtleties and two superb, swoony lead turns that keep us invested.

A solidly assembled documentary portrait.

From beginning to end, American Skin is a jagged symphony of false notes, each one struck with a sledgehammer. The most charitable thing that can be said about it is that if Parker is attempting to simulate the work of a bad or inexperienced filmmaker, he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.

By selectively whittling down the novel’s interwoven time lines and characters, It Chapter Two refocuses its telling of King’s 1,100-plus-page bestseller into not just a scary clown movie — which it also is, thanks to Bill Skarsgård’s demented return as the trans-dimensional titular monster — but an elegy of memory, trauma and healing, minus the more extreme and controversial elements of the novel.

A villain will rise, as he must, and the inevitability of that spectacle is the source of this movie’s undeniable power as well as its real limitations.

Give Me Liberty is remarkable not just for its authenticity but for the way it serves up that authenticity sans self-congratulation. There are no showboating gestures here, only a bone-deep commitment to showing us the lives of individuals often relegated to the cinematic sidelines, to the extent that the movies even notice them all.

Director Francesco Zippel doesn’t challenge Friedkin, letting him spin his life’s work as he pleases.

Jagged and acrid, yet also slippery and provocative, “The Plagiarists” is a micro-indie talkathon with the edge of something forcibly overheard but fragmented, as if you’d been thrown into a cramped rideshare with many discursive routes and no obvious destination

You leave Ad Astra feeling dazzled and befuddled, moved and frustrated, and perhaps wishing that its maker had cast his own preoccupations aside and taken a deeper, headier plunge into the void.

Grafting familiar Disney and DreamWorks tropes onto a tapestry of traditional Chinese legend and lore (the plot is loosely based on a Ming Dynasty-era shenmo novel), the adventure entertains with a title character who could be the spawn of Chucky and Stitch, from “Lilo & Stitch.”

Director Jaki Bradley can’t quite pull the story’s disparate strands together to form an effective narrative, much less a lucid finale. There’s a potentially nifty gay noir lurking about, but this “Ferry” misses the dock.

Despite the presence of theoretically interesting elements such as dirty cops, amnesia and money-laundering, Killerman is two hours of pure boredom.

Spider in the Web is slow and talky; and though it delivers a few good twists, it’s not really made for adventure-seekers. Mostly, the movie’s a magnificent showcase for Kingsley, who’s always at his best when his characters look like they know something we don’t.

The gothic atmosphere and the disgustingly gooey special effects are the main attraction. The existential dread is just an extra.

It’s probably for the best that The Fanatic is so terrible. If it were made with any actual care, it’d be offensive instead of just dumb.

A terrific cast and a rich sense of atmosphere do a lot to keep the Australian drama Angel of Mine suspenseful, even when the plot’s barely developing.

It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.

The film is content to sluggishly go through its preordained paces without bothering to take any compelling detours.

The time-traveling investigation is indeed optimistic, but in reality and execution, it’s just magical thinking wrapped up in a fussy, overly convoluted plot.

The considerable achievement of “Birth of the Cool” comes from the way it understands those words and places them in the context of American history. You’ll want to listen to Miles’ music after watching the film and, when you do, you might feel it a little deeper.

A model of professionalism and energy, Official Secrets moves along at a brisk clip. It’s paced like a police procedural, but it focuses not on an investigator but rather a moral exemplar who takes a principled stand in defiance of the price that has to be paid.

Kendrick’s film eventually finds its legs in the final stretch, with an emotionally effective conclusion that might persuade even the cynics to its cause. Whether it converts them to running or to Christ will depend on the viewer.

This engaging and enlightening documentary is stuffed with anecdotes, history and information. It makes excellent use of both new interviews and carefully selected archival footage to reveal the building blocks of all this accomplishment.

The resulting film is tenderly provocative and markedly vital.

A singular amalgam of humor, heartache and self-help that won the U.S. dramatic audience award at Sundance, “Brittany” resolutely goes its own way, entertaining us as richly as anything that’s come out in awhile.

Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.

The new Jacob’s Ladder is less strange and scary, and more mindlessly action-packed. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s more like hearing a stranger describe a dream.

Jawline provides an evenhanded examination of celebrity and loneliness in the digital age.

A peculiarly potent story about life’s unexpected little ruptures — those odd coincidences, repetitions and shifts in perspective that can set off aftershocks in the human heart.

The emotion and the horror might have taken still deeper root if the world of the movie felt less hectic and more coherently realized, if the supernatural touches and occasional jump scares welled up organically from within rather than feeling smeared on with a digital trowel.

Evans has made a touchingly honest ode to the inner life of all artists.

The real world is not a just or simple place, this thorough, compelling documentary points out, no matter how deeply we may wish it were.

While the mocking tone mostly undermines any trenchant commentary, the strongest impression Ready or Not leaves, thanks to Weaving’s eye-rolling, primal-screaming, evil-giggling performance, is of the cathartic, transformative female rage at the center of it all.

The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.

The acting’s either overly muted or awkwardly broad (with terrible Southern accents throughout, for no real reason). The slack pacing drains the movie of its urgency. This is a neo-noir that never generates any spark.