A slam-bang action-adventure that will have Dragon Ball fans cheering.

The ostensible college comedy Everybody Wants Some!! is like a stream that looks shallow but once you're in the middle of it reveals an unforeseen depth.

The Second Mother is a satisfying contradiction. It's a soap opera with a social conscience that casually mixes dramatic elements about serious class issues with a crowd-pleasing audience picture sensibility.

An organization that stubbornly resists being pigeonholed, the Black Panther Party emerges from this documentary with its significance enhanced but some of its tactics questioned.

The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.

Its plot is complexity itself, but its "kids save the world" soul is simple and earnest as opposed to earth shattering. With apologies to Bill and Ted, it's an excellent adventure, and let's leave it at that.

Whatever you think of “Barbie,” the mere existence of this smart, funny, conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy speaks to the irreverent wit and meta-critical sensibility of its director.

Packing plenty of visual zip and terrific character faces into its compact running time, De Jong never allows the considerable quirkiness to upstage the storytelling.

By turns opaque, harsh, self-aware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It's never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.

it's Nowar's ability to tell his tale so firmly from the viewpoint of his quickly growing-up protagonist, and to elicit so unforced a performance from Eid, that may be the most impressive achievement of this intimate, well-paced film.

[Guadagnino's] made the rare movie that, for all its delight in its own beautiful surface, turns out to be altogether less shallow than it appears.

Prophet's Prey is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.

For a project that is a showcase for his talents as both actor and director, Bateman never gets too showy on either front, keeping the emotions of the film at something of a restrained simmer.

The writing crackles, and Miller doesn’t waste time getting right at the meat of the story.

With simple storytelling, the film allows its star, Velasquez, to shine, and with her endless reserves of positive energy, eloquent speaking and willingness to be vulnerable, it's no wonder millions of people have already found her inspirational.

The Childhood of a Leader is a chilly — and chilling — political thriller by way of a provocative domestic chamber piece. Strikingly mounted, lighted, shot and scored, this tense, decidedly arty film marks a bravura feature directing debut for young American actor Brady Corbet.

A striking and maddening delivery system for art house creepinesss.

A tightly coiled, beautifully acted relationship study that occasionally swerves in the direction of a gangland thriller.

Rozema has a careful but unflinching eye when it comes to presenting the physical and emotional traumas the sisters experience. Even when some of the events escalate to operatic, nearly mystical levels, the direction feels assured and solidly rooted.

The languid pace and barnyard earthiness won't be to everybody's taste, but it's hard to deny Mascaro's vision. Where some look at a rodeo and see sweat and dirt, he sees a poignant struggle, which he illustrates meticulously.

An unusual work that mixes genres to at times awkward but always powerful effect.

A surprisingly intimate film, a completely involving look inside the life of a gifted and complex woman.

Although the title might suggest cheesy sensationalism, A Monster With a Thousand Heads serves as a sobering, all-too-relatable indictment of the bureaucratic Hydra that is the medical insurance industry.

As can be gleaned from snippets of news footage shown during the end credits, Ding has done an outstanding job re-creating the events and conveying the complexity and prudence of the cops' investigative chess moves.

Winter on Fire never takes its eye off the story's underlying and very dramatic theme, and that would be nothing less than revolution.

Deadpan, determinedly low key and deeply absurd, the films of Corneliu Porumboiu are very much a particular taste, and The Treasure is no different.

This warmly sentimental G-rated film about facing new realities and recapturing lost dreams has, despite its relatively adult story line, a beguilingly effortless feeling to it, as if it had nothing to prove.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a movie of deliberately low stakes and, for that very reason, enormous charm.

Censored Voices is a soul debriefing of sorts. The soldiers' tales of killing the captured and uprooting entire villages lead them to question whether the war was more about expansion than survival.

After so many tentpoles that have insisted on being metaphors for this or that, the abundance of sound and fury here — take a bow, Tom Holkenborg, composer of the majestic synth score — blissfully signifying nothing, qualifies as a colossal, giddily escapist relief.

Zellweger plays Bridget just as charmingly as she always has -- flawed but endearing; just right in her own idiosyncratic way.

The access that Bécue-Renard got, reportedly after five months of being there without a camera, is remarkable.

A richly crafted documentary that serves as an enlightening tribute to the filmmaker who masterfully tapped into the medium's wide-reaching socio-political potential.

The immensely likable Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is a freshly contemporary change-up on the traditional cross-cultural romantic-comedy.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland deftly choreographs the story in her vibrant documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, at once a capsule history of Modernism and a poignant personal portrait.

A rich, occasionally stirring and ultimately plaintive ode to the craft of velvet gloves, iron fists and how to point with either or both.

The filmmakers' approach is inherently positive.

Although the film qualifies as an advocacy documentary, director Fredrik Gertten has put in the time to capture how these cities' unique scenarios unfold to mount a compelling case against the powerful automotive, oil and construction lobbies.

A raucous, weird, occasionally fascinating entry in the genre of disease-documenting, a portrait of raw nerve in the face of deteriorating nerves.

One of the pleasures of Doctor Strange is the way it both wholly embraces and gently mocks the unapologetic geekiness of the enterprise.

These twin tracts of darkness and light, the sordid and the sublime, quite effectively submerge the viewer into a closed world.

The chillingly twisty plotting is dispensed in painstakingly measured increments that allow for maximum dread and, ultimately, well-earned shock value, while his four leads deliver equally subtle performances that sync with the pacing beat for beat.

Instead of sinking into crude, one-night-stand joke territory, Night Owls roots around for the spark of real chemistry and, in the winning turns of Pally and Salazar, finds it.

There’s little that’s not dispiriting about Among the Believers and its measured, direct entrée into a closed world of hopeless boys and girls memorizing the Koran, but forbidden from learning its meanings.

Again and again, Van Dormael delights in finding romantic solutions to existential problems, in forging the kinds of topsy-turvy emotional connections between his characters that enable them to overcome their natural impulses toward suspicion, hostility and even violence.

Rather than stooping to horror-genre antics, Mallhi weaves a tale that is spooky but sensitive and focused on interpersonal relationships between mothers and daughters.

Efficient and effective in Eastwood's experienced hands, Sully has interwoven a crisp and electric retelling of the story of the landing we know with a story we do not.

[A] poignant, funny and well-seasoned portrait of autumnal fervor.

A droll romp through prehistoric times, filtered through Park's beyond antic imagination.

In the new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do an ultra-fine job tracing a born provocateur's commitment to his calling.

Kusama reveals and conceals the geography of the house, parceling out just enough information to understand its logic, while leaving certain dim recesses mysterious.

It's a sweetly funny, charming and poignant depiction of this very specific time in life — at once universal and specific — when anything seems possible. And with killer pop tunes to boot.

As written and directed by Xavier Giannoli, Marguerite is a thoughtful examination of an unusual, deeply eccentric woman.

An intriguing entertainment that’s invigorated by smart filmmaking and potent acting by the virtuosic Weisz and her fine costar, Michael Shannon.

By turns coolly observed and disquietingly compassionate — qualities that also describe Rebecca Hall’s brilliant central performance — the movie drifts alongside its subject, Charon-like, through the hell of her last weeks.

Sutton’s vision is unsettling and immersive, his technical precision immaculate. The sound design alone — long, ambient silences disrupted by a flashbulb-popping hallucination or a sudden scream — is reason enough to see the movie in a theater, whatever unpleasant associations the ending may conjure.

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.

You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.

Much like the father-son bond at its center, the comic drama is warmhearted but never cloying.

Once again, truth proves stranger than fiction in the raucous and provocative documentary Weiner.

Lovesong is a character study of this relationship, casually yet carefully sketched out by Kim in subtle but meaningful gestures and glances. Much is communicated through the eyes, searching for answers in the void of what’s not said, but felt.

A vibrant, affecting piece of filmmaking that’s sure to widen Hesse's following.

This movie has a rhythm. It's exaggerated, loud and consciously vulgar, but the breezy self-assurance carries it along.

A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.

Philadelphia filmmaker Cheryl Dunye has such a light, easy touch both in front and in back of the camera that you're in danger of not noticing how skillful a craftsman she really is or how deftly she raises serious issues of race and sexual orientation in The Watermelon Woman.

As shaped by Villeneuve and his masterful creative team, especially production designer Dennis Gassner and cinematographer Roger Deakins, this film puts you firmly, brilliantly, unassailably in another world of its own devising, and that is no small thing.

The film traces Cernan's career trajectory, going back to his days in San Diego as a hot-shot naval aviator, blending terrific archival footage with contemporary perspectives to quietly poetic effect.

You don't have to be a baseball fanatic or for that matter a historian or a physicist to appreciate Fastball.

It's illuminating to see Huppert and Depardieu in a different mode, and Huppert brings a delicate physical and emotional fragility to her role. These two are fantastic, and they're fantastic together.

An effective, efficient and quite dramatic examination of the events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and injured 264, Patriots Day is a tribute to people who earned it: the investigators and first responders who ensured that a horrible situation did not become even worse.

It's a fitting tribute to the influential journalist-essayist-filmmaker: insightful about the life of a successful writer, engaging about how a smart modern woman navigated the world, but also quizzical about how Ephron was as a daughter, sister, wife and mother.

It’s Cranston’s most accomplished and subtly layered film performance to date.

The way I Went Down, with its lovely score, plays out under Breathnach's gentle, compassionate touch becomes wryly amusing, ironic and entirely satisfying. Its cast is a glory, adept at setting off a sly humor with a touch of pathos, and it brings to the fore Brendan Gleeson, so good in so many supporting parts, as a seriocomic powerhouse in the central role. [1 July 1998, p.F4]

[Alvarez is] a master at orchestrating tension in close quarters, at painting his characters into a corner one minute and dangling them out a window the next.

If we have to work a little harder to invest in Cloro's transporting story, so be it. For serious filmgoers, it will be worth it.

Husson’s film details the consequences of such free love, but it celebrates sex too — the kind based on intimacy and love. Teens and sex: it’s a tale as old as time but this take is surprising, invigorating and sharply frank.

Unlocking the Cage, despite its cameras being on hand for a historic animal rights push, shouldn’t be confused for some hot-button doc ready to slap you into sensibility about its fight. Hegedus/Pennebaker are too smart to get ahead of themselves about something they clearly believe in, when simply hewing to a can-do guy provides enough momentum.

The movie may not have the audacity and emotional grandeur of a new Almodóvar masterpiece, but in every particular — its seamless manipulation of time, its sly infusions of comedy, its expert direction of actors and, yes, its fabulous wallpaper — it confirms his mastery nonetheless.

Languorously paced and literally dressed to kill, the movie is a corrosive attack on beauty — or at least our soulless, corporatized definition of the term — but it is also, above all else, a hypnotically beautiful object.

Skipping deftly between time frames while keeping her camera close to her protagonist — played with tremulous understatement by the remarkable actress Alba Rohrwacher — Bispuri traces a journey of delicate interior shifts and reversals.

No matter which way you come down on the nuclear power issue, watching Indian Point will clarify your thinking.

Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.

Star and first-time director Ewan McGregor, working with screenwriter John Romano, has skillfully reshaped Roth’s tale for more urgent cinematic telling, covering a host of profound themes with disquieting power, reflection and grace.

"In His Own Words" is a deeply involving look at the man's entire life, using archival footage, home movies, private letters but most of all filmed interviews Rabin gave, to let us hear him tell his own story just about from cradle to grave.

Decidedly not for everyone. But for those who like a deep dive art film that caresses the dark and calls to mind the mesmerizing pull of Carl Dreyer, Sivan’s movie offers a powerfully enigmatic experience.

Luckily for Gibson fans, the movie’s a small gem: a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.

The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With Gimme Danger, Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.

The filmmakers cultivate a dynamic portrait of Egypt, with its dense social, political and religious layers.

To describe Endless Poetry as self-indulgent would be entirely accurate and not even remotely insulting.

Risk is first and foremost an impressive cinematic coup, a triumph of access to an elusive and sometimes combative subject. It is also an unsettling and fascinatingly unresolved piece of work, with little of the moment-to-moment suspense and dramatic focus that made “Citizenfour” so riveting.

As you watch Argentina, it truly is about the all-as-one: the music, the dance, the light Saura provides, and the illumination these performers bring themselves.

What makes The Wailing so unusually disturbing is the almost palpable aura of evil it radiates from calm start to sorrowful finish. More disturbing still is the way that evil can seem indistinguishable from compassion.

The young actress Haas is riveting in a performance far beyond her years. Princess takes its time, but patience pays off in this sensitive slow burn of a story.

Its strength lies in the way it continually collapses the distance between people and cultures, forcing its characters to reckon with what they perceive as strange and unfamiliar.

The writer-director invests a tricky narrative juggling act with an intensity of human feeling that is the opposite of skin-deep. He tears through the veil of slick, self-admiring style that has both unlocked and at times obscured his very real merits as an artist.

Although Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf says The President was inspired by the turbulent events of the Arab Spring, there’s also a timeless quality to this absorbing and powerful fable that provides added resonance.

As directed by Morgan Neville, "Strangers" turns out to be as concerned with emotion as with performance, spending much of its time investigating how so much joyous music was able to come out of exploration, disturbance, even pain.

Germans and Jews is too sophisticated to provide a glib answer, but it shows how deeply involving just asking the question can be.