Watching Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is like experiencing a thrilling unfinished symphony: The story is enthralling, but it's not over, and there's no telling where it's going. Which makes what we see on screen all the more involving.

It’s with a gut-wrenching helplessness that we watch the ingredients assemble for what has become our seemingly most preventable modern scourge — someone far gone, armed with what’s all too available.

With a masterful melding of the serious, the comic, the ridiculous and the musical, Woman at War is joyful to experience though difficult to sum up.

The film’s refusal to tie up loose ends has already inspired comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” two of modern cinema’s great cold-case classics. Moll’s movie doesn’t leave behind the same deep, implacable chill of those earlier works, but its lingering rage and sorrow are no less easy to wave aside.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

No filmmaker better understands the revelatory properties of small talk and soju, and few could make the art of repetition seem so rife with possibilities.

A barnburner of a motion picture that mainlines heart-in-mouth excitement and tug-at-the-heart emotion, Ford v Ferrari is made the way Hollywood used to make them, a glorious throwback that combines a smart modern sensibility with the best of traditional storytelling.

With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.

The movie is a powerfully blunt instrument of empathy. Ben Hania’s insistence on close-up melodramatics — faces in anguish, a handheld camera glued to them — sometimes overshadows a thirst for something more analytical. But it’s decidedly a vision, one steeped in roiling pain.

With a colorful blend of biting absurdity and copious dad jokes to offset the commonplace narrative, Rianda and Rowe optimize their dysfunctional family road trip for high-functioning enjoyment.

Not to go all Pauline Kael on you, but Bullitt -- the 1968 crime drama starring a Ford Mustang GT390 and some guy named Steve McQueen -- is a fairly tedious bit of Aquarian cinema: the chicka-chicka-waah soundtrack, the inscrutable plot, the anaerobic dullness of every second that McQueen is off-camera. Bullitt scrabbles to its minor footnote status in film history on two counts. The first: It marks the only time any man ever looked cool in a cardigan -- McQueen should have gotten the academy's knitwear award. The second is the movie's remarkable seven-minute chase scene, with real cars (the Mustang and a black Dodge Charger), real drivers and real stunts, no special effects.

It may feel as if these are loosely structured vignettes, but there’s an accumulation at work — the steady drip of dimensionality that the best movies about people at their jobs know how to turn into a complete picture.

Silver Linings Playbook is rich in life's complications. It will make you laugh, but don't expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent.

Smart and provocative.

Being able to hear this kind of playing is a special moment in time, one we don't want to end and one that we're privileged to experience.

Whatever this woman is saying or doing, you want to be there to hear it and see it, and there's no better formula for an entertaining documentary than that.

The remarkable debut from writer-director Michelle Garza Cervera is as effectively blood-curdling as it is intellectually incisive.

Much of the film is told compellingly and heartbreakingly through the wide-eyed innocence of five children.

It’s worth your time, your discomfort, your possible scorn and your weirdly grudging affection, maybe all at once.

Bleak as it is, it’s remarkably devoid of bitterness or rancor, and even its most despairing passages are flecked with humor and hope. This is personal filmmaking with a diarist’s sense of detail and an artist’s generosity.

The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman.

Though Schwarz’s finished film provides unmissable and infuriating insight, it’s also disappointing that he never mentions the ongoing violence that the Israeli state commits against residents in the current Palestinian territories, including numerous documented human rights violations.

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination.

The images captured by Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger are dazzling all on their own, finding the disorienting psychedelia that is nature at its weirdest.

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.