A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

It is a wild and trippy ride that mixes “reality,” with sequences that dip into the mystical world of the Vikings, and back out again. It’s also meticulously made, with an attention to detail as close to actual 10th century Viking life as is possible.

The movie is both an exercise in self-mockery and a spoof of both Hollywood and the kind of movie Cage might take to pay the bills.

The film is both a love story and a lament for the city where the director grew up.

The narrative arc of Islands, so minimalist it’s really more of a slow bump, is about the gradual breaking down of Joshua’s small shell of comfort, his family and cultural conventions.

The subtle trick of Paris, 13th District, is that it plays like a romantic dramedy, but it really is more like a series of character studies of these young people whose lives just so happen to intersect.

If cute was the selling point of this spin-off series, it’s practically out of stock in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that has traded in its charm (and, for the most part, its fantastic beasts) for an extended Nazi metaphor.

It’s a fact of life that a novel about the right to die can’t be represented in depth in 105 minutes. But a compelling essence remains in this story about two sisters from a Manitoba Mennonite community - one with a mess of a life who nonetheless wants to live, the other, blessed with a seemingly perfect life, who wants the opposite.

Mothering Sunday, which unfolds on one day in the 1920s English countryside, is an exquisite expression of the female gaze that sifts through the memories, reveries, and revelations of a writer and explores—in a story that captures “the whole feeling of life,” as one character puts it— how she became one.

Although the subject matter is serious, Ozon has directed here with a light hand and a cool and distant eye. He’s completely avoided melodrama, focusing on people going through their lives day to day. Thanks to his accomplished cast, and sophisticated approach, the emotions are there, but they don’t overwhelm the story.

With DNA largely spliced from the movie Speed, it’s a carnage-filled action film that is essentially a single extended car chase. Ambulance is a movie that is nothing if not focused.

Cow never makes any case for veganism or any other cause. Rather, the film is a product of the increasing scrutiny of our destructive hierarchical categories, including the unnecessary cruelty of factory farming, the growth in the legal studies of animal rights, and scientific interest in animal consciousness.

Where New Order broadly surveyed and compartmentalized Mexico’s upper and lower classes, Sundown pretty much rests its entire narrative on one man, wealthy British business owner Neil Bennett — played with few words but (oxymoron alert) riveting impassivity by Tim Roth.

It’s a tough slog, this film, partly because it delivers its arguments with a sledgehammer, and partly because we know what it’s saying is true.

The trouble starts with the script, which wobbles between an investigative thriller and a psychological study.

You do get the sense that Swedish director Daniel Espinosa really wanted to make a horror film instead of the usual super-hero origin-story-punctuated-by-carnage.

Ultimately, the edge that Navid is pushing is less to do with a rant against the Israeli government than in creating a cinematic depiction of a tortured psychological state, in both the individual and collective meanings of that word.

Shapeshifting, murder, possession, gender fluidity and the lowly lot of women are all part of the arthouse horror You Won’t Be Alone, the impressive debut feature film by Macedonian-Australian writer/director Goran Stolevski.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi/fantasy/martial arts action movie on steroids: a cuckoo-bananas story about life and love and family and humanity and a bunch of other things… all at once.

The real treat here is the fabulous original music, sometimes in the background, but more often performed.

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is definitely Linklater's most granular film, rich in the small details and moments of daily life that unite to power the biggest stories of our times.

There is no pretension in what The Lost City is or what it’s trying to do, other than entertain an audience for slightly under two hours. It has one job, and it does it well.

Despite Oh’s solid fear-filled performance, Amanda’s inevitable possession seems to take forever in an 87-minute movie, and the inevitable maternal-love-powered dispossession seems rushed.

It’s not wise to dive head first into Deep Water. But if you dip your toe and slide slowly, you might wade neck deep in a cool erotic thriller.

Double Walker’s story is feverishly imaginative, though its internal logic often doesn’t hold up. But the star and co-writer Sylvie Mix is committed to her story, playing a mostly silent, seductive (often nakedly so) phantom who “can only be seen by believers and sinners.”

Moon Manor is in a middle ground, a fiction that claims to be “true-ish”.

It’s ambitious, but not as much fun as it wants to be.

An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.