What DeBlois has deepened in No. 2, is the film's emotional core. Though there are moments when the tension goes slack, the cast steps up to keep things afloat.

A farce of misunderstanding first, body-count nightmare second and at nearly all times a refreshingly upending horror-comedy bromance.

The storytelling is straightforward, with a classical sheen, even as mischief and hallucination puncture the serene surface.

A rousing example of Bollywood-style pure escapist entertainment.

An effective piece of melodramatic popular entertainment that savvily builds on the foundation established by the first Hunger Games movie.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

By turns sweet and tart, airy and rich and, above all, a thoroughly irresistible confection.

Though it may at times seem like just another Japanese gangster picture, in Outrage, Kitano's sense of pacing is so precise, at once restrained and relentless, that the film becomes a vortex, pulling audiences in deeper and deeper.

Special Treatment is a serious film, but Labrune allows a touch of dark comedy in her depictions of Alice's clients and Xavier's patients.

A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.

The film's maximalist storytelling, both expansive and precise, snatching specific emotions from its torrid swirl, is best exemplified by the fact that the title card doesn't appear until an hour in.

Like all memorable sports documentaries - Undefeated is really an examination not of how games are won and lost but how lives are lived, how young people faced with daunting challenges come to see, often in the most dramatic fashion, what is important going forward and what is not.

At its soulful heart, Pariah is a stinging street-smart story of an African American teen's struggle to come of age and come out - to the father who still calls her "daddy's little girl" and the mother who quotes the Bible and buys her pink frills.

The French have a knack for it. They've been making funny and agreeable movie farces for forever, and seeing The Women on the 6th Floor makes you hope they'll never stop.

With its hefty running time, the film builds an unexpected emotional resonance, though never exactly sympathy, as over the years Ceausescu seems to drift further and further into his fantasy vision of himself, making the film like a loop that repeats endlessly in his head.

This expertly constructed film follows the curious and tragic life of the troubled chess icon as he went from child prodigy to global legend to paranoid recluse.

An unusually intelligent cut at the relationship game.

Despite its pitfalls, this movie musical is a clutch player that delivers an emotional wallop when it counts. You can walk into the theater as an agnostic, but you may just leave singing with the choir.

For how well this finely crafted work captures the pressures of inner-city poverty, single-parent families and abusive relationships, one of its strengths lies in its ability to also gracefully locate the drama in filling out a college application.

Articulate, thoughtful and funny - hearing Vitali talk about getting used to 100 kinds of cheese in the West is a real pleasure - the Klitschkos are a treat to spend conversational time with. Just don't think of joining them in the ring.

The spirited young cast includes the luminous Oksana Akinshina, best known for her title role in Lukas Moodysson's devastating "Lilya 4-Ever," who still lights up the screen like few actresses in the world.

Languid and contemplative, the film is typical of the intimate, paired-down aspect of Fox's style, a documentary in which lives accumulate in small moments.

In doing a little genre bending of romantic schmaltz and horror cheese - some fundamental zombie mythology is turned on its head - the film breathes amusing new life into both.

A smart, involving and strikingly adult drama about Sarkozy's rise to power.

Tomboy stands out as an especially affecting delicacy about the thrills and pitfalls of exploring who one is.

It may not sound like it, but In Heaven, Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery is a playful, poetic and all-around charming documentary, an off-center look at an unusual institution.

In a world where everyone was looking for an angle, hoping to survive the nightmare and maybe even turn other people's misery into a tidy profit, the fact that a fragile humanity survived at all is little short of a miracle.

Remarkably, much of that sizzling sensibility was caught on film and has been stylishly stitched together with her personal history in the scrumptious new documentary, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.

Dzi Croquettes is both a tribute and a terrific entertainment.

What is finally most compelling about this film is the sense it gives of how passionately the citizens of Ghana believe in democracy, how much it means to them.

Blethyn brings tremendous empathy to the introspective, determined Elisabeth, while the tall, gaunt and dreadlocked Ousmane fleshes out his less-dimensional role with a haunting sadness that speaks volumes.

A terrifically entertaining, smartly constructed trip down memory lane with one of the American stage's most legendary troupers.

Artfully put together by writer-director Falardeau, Monsieur Lazhar shows us life in the round, illustrating the way humor, compassion and tragedy can all be elements of experience. Its emotional honesty is heartening, a lesson we are never too old to learn.

It's the offbeat love story at the heart of Liebling's resurrection that provides the film's most powerful - and touching - surprise.

The ambiguity is refreshing. And despite the complicated emotional story at the center of this film, the Dardennes, who wrote and directed, have opted to handle it all with a minimalist narrative style.

The film is an architecture lover's dream.

This is a far more brutal film than Wheatley's first, 2009's "Down Terrace." Though it had crime at its center as well, it was balanced by a dry irony and far less blood. There is no offset in Kill List, with one scene so relentless in its gore that it makes the notorious elevator scene in "Drive" pale in comparison.

This mind-and-fork-bending sci-fi saga comes from the freaky imaginations of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis, who've packed their feature debut with smartness.

Starkly beautiful and exceedingly demanding, The Turin Horse, which Hungarian master Béla Tarr has said will be his last film, is both easy and impossible to define.

Even if you don't fancy raw fish, "Jiro" is a captivating film.

These performers are so young, so serious, so full of dreams and so hard on themselves that it is difficult not to be moved by their striving.

The Swell Season emerges as an incisive cut at fame's effect on the real-life music and romance of Hansard and Irglova. It's an accomplished piece of filmmaking from the trio, who are making their feature-length documentary debut.

An infectious, warm comedy of family and communication and a promising debut as writer-director for Chism. These Peeples are people one should be happy to meet.

Rather than another drearily workaday horror picture, Sinister uses the supernatural to underline its examination of the all-too-human foibles of insecurity and myopic self-centeredness. As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.

Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain Beautiful Creatures? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.

Rueful, funny and wise, The Salt of Life is a comedy not of errors but of the tiniest of missteps. A warm yet melancholy film of quiet yet inescapable charm, it has a feeling for character and personality that couldn't be more delicious.

A look at the annual San Diego convention that is sweetly empathetic where previous Spurlock works have been brash and confrontational. Plus, it's a lot of fun.

Without pounding home its avant-garde cred, this fresh ode to found sound and the music of silence casts an amused gaze at careerism, classical-music reverence and notions of artistic purity and ends with a pitch-perfect change of tune.

Fascinating for what it signifies as much as what it shows, This Is Not a Film illustrates how Panahi is struggling to stay alive creatively and, paradoxically, can't help but demonstrate how much of a natural filmmaker he is.

It is the achievement of Gerhard Richter Painting to shine a light on that hidden, private act as few other films have done.

A visceral story of beat cops that is rare in its sensitivity, rash in its violence and raw in its humor.

Inspired by a documentary, the film is shot with vérité immediacy and beautifully acted by an outstanding ensemble. If not every piece of the puzzle delivers its intended impact, the movie as a whole gets under your skin, and the central characters resonate long after the screen goes dark.

It's a character study about faith in connectedness, with an unforced love for cross-generational companionship that's special indeed.

It is the inventive design of the many creatures that feels so fresh. The detail is so rich, and so dense, that you wish some of the frames would freeze so you had more time for savoring.

A cool documentary that makes the blood boil, it examines how people can be psychologically manipulated into confessing. Not only to crimes they may not have committed but, even worse, to crimes that may never have happened.

There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.

Noah manages to blend the expected with the unexpected and does it with so much gusto and cinematic energy you won't want to divert your eyes from the screen.

The film, which plays like "The Help" minus the safety net of nostalgia, provides a powerful reminder that as we all carry history with us, it is still possible for each of us to change it.

Everything about Robot & Frank is as unlikely as it is irresistible. Charming, playful and sly, it makes us believe that a serene automaton and a snappish human being can be best friends forever.

The Good Dinosaur is antic and unexpected as well as homiletic, rife with subversive elements, wacky critters and some of the most beautiful landscapes ever seen in a computer animated film.

Laudatory but never simplistic, Bill W. is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Wilson, his times and the visionary fellowship that is his legacy.

The immediacy with which it bears witness to injustice is powerful and affecting, as are the images of joy he captures amid the burning olive trees.

The film brings us vividly inside the life - and head - of its determined hero, Bud Clayman, as he depicts the process of what he calls "getting normal."

In a country that embraces cinematic violence with such ease but blushingly prefers to keep sex in the shadows or under the sheets, the grown-up approach of The Sessions is rare.

In Greenfield's canny and compassionate view, their post-collapse reality check is an emblem of consumerism as affliction, and surprisingly relatable.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki squarely lands that punch, creating a tense and chilling horror story for financially fraught times.

I found myself repeatedly on the edge of tears over its course. It is a relatively short but luxurious film.

This is a train wreck you think you see coming, but no matter how prepared you are the nature and extent of the damage will overwhelm you.

Best of all "Daughter" marks a return to old-school French moviemaking, the kind of classically well-made endeavor that unrolls before us like a beloved tapestry. This is the kind of film they don't make anymore, only here it is.

You don't need to be a fan of Wagner, or even opera, to find this a fascinating glimpse of a dauntingly complex human endeavor.

Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.

By far the film's deadliest weapon is McConaughey. The way the actor leans into threats, dropping his voice, wrapping eloquence in sinister tones, is skin-crawling. The muscles in his neck literally seem to tense one by one. And if the eyes are the window to the soul, you really don't want to peer for long into his. It is not an easy performance to watch, but it is unforgettable.

Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family's survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title.

Planet of Snail is simple, direct and magical. The warm, intimate story of a singular couple, it won the top prize at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and it will win you over as well if you give it the chance.

The most compelling aspect of The Green Wave, however, is the extensive footage shot clandestinely by amateurs using cellphones. What they recorded shows us the reality of what went down in a way nothing else can match.

It sounds like a throwback to an earlier, more traditional style of Israeli filmmaking but it instead provides a view of that country that's as satisfyingly eccentric and unexpected as anything we've seen.

A stirring snapshot of America from 1963 to 1968 and the many rock 'n' roll thrills, cultural and political watersheds, and whirling emotions that erupted in between. It's also deviously smart and darkly funny.

A sports film to remember.

You'd have to be a stone not to be moved.

Meier and cinematographer Agnès Godard make potent use of the setting's alternating highs and lows, delivering a jolt of heartbreaking hope in the film's final image.

In Holy Motors Carax insists on our other selves. His daylong ride is a wary celebration, a joyful dirge that's served up in concentrated form by a roving band of accordion players. It's all in a day's work.

Bernal and Furstenberg exist within this meditative space with all the ease and unease of a couple still trying each other on for size. The forces that push and pull them feel so rooted in reality that if not for the layers of meaning it might seem a complete improvisation.

The before and after imagery of Balog's project speaks for itself, with the power and strange beauty of the evolving landscape strong evidence that something is indeed happening, now and fast.

This highly polished costume drama is exceptionally well-made and a model of intelligent restraint, but it is also unapologetically earnest and a bit on the bloodless side.

Minions' all-silliness all-the-time philosophy will put a smile on faces and keep it there, like a fizzy beverage on a hot afternoon.

It's a complex, determined look at one of the most pernicious problems facing organized sports on all levels.

It is a striking and moving study of "what was" versus "what it has become" as the filmmakers try to get at the whys.

Thanks to the residual love and attraction between the pair, this cocktail-fueled reunion never descends into a "Virginia Woolf"-like grudge match but, rather, remains an equitable, tender, sometimes surprising game of hard truth-telling.

A beautifully rendered, lovingly constructed action-comedy that's sure to please kids and adults alike.

The surprisingly adept mixture of tones — naturalism, dysfunctional family satire, winking slasher nostalgia, twisty vengeance thriller — is offbeat enough to keep even hardened connoisseurs of body-count entertainment on their toes.

One of those documentaries that is sad and hopeful in equal measure and exceptional in its storytelling.

Cogent, convincing, determinedly non-ideological, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare tells us that everything we think we know about that incendiary topic might be wrong. And it offers us a way out of the morass.

It projects equal parts fury and despair as it reveals how a particular group of individuals was caught in the unforgiving gears of the criminal justice system.

A two-hour theatrical feature that has the kind of emotional and storytelling reach regularly found these days only in cable TV miniseries. It's a warmly done family and personal drama that seems to cover familiar territory, but only up to a point and very much in its own way.

No definitive answers are possible to the questions The Flat raises, which makes them all the more provocative.

The film has a meditative calm about it — there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue — with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.

It's a wonderful documentary look at an astonishingly successful public-school chess program that manages to be more moving and heartening than you expect. Which is saying a lot.

Playful in unexpected ways and graced with a genuinely off-center sense of humor, Ant-Man (engagingly directed by Peyton Reed) is light on its feet the way the standard-issue Marvel behemoths never are.