All in all, this is probably the best production of the litany of Tolkien pre-Ring stories I’ve seen on the big screen and I’d count The Hobbit in that estimation. There is a part where it drags a little, and some moments that are campy (I blame those on the anime elements), but all in all, this is definitely something that I would recommend seeing on the big screen.

Hovering over Together Together is the expectation that two people who enjoy each other’s company as much as Matt and Anna do will eventually end up together. Beckwith plays with this trope nicely.

In the coming-of-age sub-genre of youthful rebellion and forbidden love, DJ Ahmet from Macedonian writer/director Georgi M. Unkovski is about as mild as they come. But that doesn’t diminish its crowd-pleasing pleasures.

The film adaptation of this treasured novel is absolutely delightful. Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), it’s honest, realistic, heartfelt and captures the emotions of Margaret and her young friends perfectly.

Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

It’s fascinating to watch Join or Die and see how Putnam’s work has affected other areas of research, such as community connections and economic mobility.

What gives Hearts Beat Loud its life is the father-daughter interaction and chemistry between Offerman and Clemons. Their original jam session makes the audience sit up and take notice.

Some movies deal with the settling of the American West as mythic. And then there are films like writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which strips it down to its basics for a more human scale and poetic vision of the Western era.

Ignore the nay-sleighers. Violent Night is the counter-Christmas B-movie that ditches the ho-ho-wholesomeness of the season for a damn good, bad Santa.

On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

Campbell and Johnson – both of whom worked with Radwanski in Anne at 13,000 ft. - make a great team. They've been allowed to improvise some of their dialogue, which adds to a sense that we’re eavesdropping on two people who are responding to a particular moment.

Let’s just say the film — scripted by Bader’s nephew Daniel Stiepelman with the Justice’s blessing — successfully splits the difference between capturing Ginsburg as a contemporary folk hero and as a fiercely ambitious intellectual competing for footing in an era when mixing a killer martini was the very height of wifely prestige. No one will mistake it for a documentary.

Neighborhood Watch has a conventional story motif: the unlikely duo who can barely stand each other, team up and despite their own misgivings, in the end discover something about themselves that surpasses their original goal. It may be formulaic in its composition, but there’s comfort in this predictability.

Blind Ambition doesn’t rewrite any rules about documentary filmmaking, and it stumbles into the hokey at the very end. But if one subscribes to the adage that the story is the thing, then it’s hard to beat.

Ultimately, Bring Her Back is a film of contradictions: intimate and epic, bloody and cerebral, empathetic and terrifying. It’s the kind of horror that might take until long after the credits roll before its full impact lands.

Kristen Stewart makes an impressive directorial debut with her adaptation The Chronology of Water. The film is a raw, emotional primal scream anchored by a career highlight performance by Imogen Poots.

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

This might be a Dune that could even be appreciated by someone unfamiliar with Dune.

As with the series, the movie is a mix of situational comedy and some drama. It touches on politics, personal and national, as well as other issues of class and status, that feel both era-specific and contemporary. And, of course, Maggie Smith as the crusty matriarch Violet Crawley, still gets the best lines.

A hero from an era when we still had heroes, the diminutive Romanian-born, activist and lawyer fairly burns through the screen with passion born of witnessing the worst that humanity can do. And he still tours the world with the impossible dream of ending inhumanity.

Therapy Dogs is fuelled by adolescent angst, fears of mortality, unruly energy, and frustration.

Asteroid City is very Wessy. Maybe the most Wessy ever. And thank goodness for that.

It’s a lovely, intelligent movie that explores relationships, creativity, inspiration and the benefits of wrestling with the blank page.

A sad, poignant, dialogue-driven film destined for successful post-film life as a theatre production, writer/director Fran Kranz’s debut about two sets of parents on opposing sides of a tragedy locates the humanity in the seemingly endless, peculiarly American saga of school shootings. It also celebrates forgiveness.

Intriguingly weird, and only loosely tethered to its own reality, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear is two movies in one - both on the theme of creativity-squeezed-from-pain, and both offering Aubrey Plaza the acting turn of her career.

The President’s Cake remains a lovely tale, with some sweeping, almost touristic views of Baghdad, and a slightly ambiguous downbeat ending.