Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

I just wish Vega and Lelio let us in a little more to see her as an individual, aside from the hostility she encounters.

Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

This engaging, sturdily guided film from director Alison Ellwood (American Jihad, Laurel Canyon) argues forcefully that there is more depth and value to a group that fought and celebrated, broke up and reconciled, burned out and rocked hard for four decades.

I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.

The how of Tillman, Mabry, and Wells’s telling distinguishes their story. The Hate U Give should be an epic, and it is: Yes, it’s a teen melodrama, but it’s also an elegantly constructed piece of world-building, a love story, a family history, a sociological spiderweb of cause and effect of the hate referenced in the Tupac-coined titled. If this is what the next wave of YA adaptation will feel like, we are in a good place.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

I realize that Fosse's dark sizzle might seem a bit dated today, but surely something halfway snazzy could have been devised for this movie. It's toothless.

Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.

It’s a gloriously hand-animated existential fable that manages to be both genuinely sweet and thoroughly twisted.

Glass Onion is bigger and more precisely designed than Knives Out, but what makes it a more satisfying movie is that it sits with its characters more rather than immediately showing off their decay.

Starred Up is an edgy, teeming thriller, brilliantly disorienting, making strange a world we thought we knew, at least from other movies.

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

As the encounters stack up, though, the impact of what Hosoda is starting to do starts to cohere, and it’s pretty effective stuff. The extradimensional travel is an obvious but heart-tuggingly direct way to get at the truth that everyone was a kid once, a fact that is mind-boggling when you’re a kid, and bittersweet when you’re an adult.

Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.

Writer-director Richard Kwietniowski has never made a feature before, but this debut effort is a triumph, a buoyant and elegant achievement -- romantic and ruminative yet always precise, a comedy of longing propelled by a strong current of satirical observation.

To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

She Dies Tomorrow is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

This is by light-years the most entertaining movie of the year. How many apocalyptic sci-fi action extravaganzas leave you feeling as if the world is just beginning?

Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Giannoli knows exactly which buttons to push and for how long. He takes what could have been a fussy adaptation of a dusty tome and turns it into something hugely entertaining.

When Kurzel does penetrate the unkempt veil of Jones’s hair and closes in on his face, it’s to capture how the actor sprints from one emotion to another, alluding to the impetuousness and spontaneity at play within Nitram.

Woman at War takes its tone not from von Trier but deadpan pranksters like the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, whose absurdities have an undercurrent of tragedy. Erlingsson has a magnetic heroine in Geirharðsdóttir, who’s lithe and athletic without being a show off, and underplays as a good soldier would.

Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, The Nest doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.