Brown explores a potentially enraging subject--rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama--but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised.

Westfeldt, now 42, belongs to a generation (and class) of people for whom nothing about having kids is easy. Her intensity feels just right - better than in any film I've seen in years - for How We Breed Now.

In the end, What If belongs to Zoe Kazan. And both she and it are wonderful.

Certain Women turns out to be a study in women’s uncertainties, in the experience of pain that leads not to action but acceptance. It’s a slow go — but you get there.

Weiner is a tabula rasa documentary — one of the most provocative of its kind I’ve seen.

It’s remarkable how engaging and light on its feet the director and cast are able to keep this subject matter, how much permission he gives them to f*ck up and try again.

In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.

Emily moves among immigrants, fellow ex-cons, and people like Youcef who are striving toward some sort of financial legitimacy, even as she moves in the other direction. But she doesn’t show any sense of commonality with them, only fury that she’s been made to join them, which is the film’s most astringent aspect.

They’re great stories, and it’s through them that Jodorowsky’s Dune shows us how the greatest movie never made, in its own crazy little way, somehow still came to be.

Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.

It’s a hyper-aestheticized meditation on the meaning of history, visually astonishing, dramatically stilted. No masterpiece, but quite a feat (and quite effete).

It’s whimsical and bold and also easier to admire in the abstract than to get deeply emotionally invested in, though it features a late-breaking burst of beauty that will soften the hardest of hearts.

Save the Date works best when it's getting under your skin, and it does that when it's capturing the queasy halfway point - part sadistic, part bittersweet - of still loving somebody while trying to move on to someone new. It's a kind of subtlety that movies, especially American movies, rarely do well, but this quietly unassuming, secretly brilliant little charmer nails it.

A sci-fi saga that manages to be at once stirring and screwball, gut-busting and gut-wrenching, and more fun than you had at any bigger-budget movie this past summer.

Reeves loves these dead-end apocalyptic environments, and delights in tales that toy with the moral calculus of typical hero narratives. He has given us a Batman that he himself can believe in, not to mention a Batman that feels right for our times.

By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette's love for the broken Renee--which is the true subject of the film--is awe-inspiring.

[A] haunting, beautiful movie.

Philippe Claudel's direction is both probing and delicate, and Scott Thomas's face, even immobile, keeps you watching, searching for hints of her character's past, unable to blink for fear of missing something vital.

Gloria doesn’t lie about a woman’s dwindling options. It’s rife with disappointment and humiliation. But bleakness does not preclude buoyancy. It still manages to leave you with the urge to dance.

The Korean director im Kwon-Taek has made more than 90 films since his first in 1962, and perhaps this explains why his latest, Chunhyang, seems so effortless and masterly. Based on a highly popular eighteenth-century Korean folktale, it's a movie that, stylistically, mixes the traditional with the avant-garde; the narrative may be ritualistic, but there's a let's-try-it-on-for-size friskiness to the filmmaking.

There's nothing in David Ayer's cop drama End of Watch that you haven't already seen, but the film has moments so riveting that you might not care too much.

My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.

The actors playing parents and spouses (among them Steve Buscemi, Halley Feiffer, Portia, and Kevin Hagan) are stunningly believable. I'm not sure how Morton made sense of her character's ebbs and flows, but I never doubted her. She's a mariner in uncharted seas of emotion.

Here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.

My only serious complaint about Deepwater Horizon is that it’s not quite the muckraker I’d hoped for.

What a mind-bending odyssey ensues--a tale of good old-fashioned American free expression at war with good old-fashioned American capitalism.

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

You can't make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.