Exarchopoulos and Seydoux give their characters dimension and spark. Kechiche touches on issues of not only gender, age and sexuality, but also socioeconomic class. And if the movie doesn't quite seem to know when to end, it's because the director can't bear to say goodbye to these fascinating, fully-formed characters.

It’s a harrowing and impressive accomplishment (especially considering potential government censorship), and it shows how, in its mad rush toward modernity, China has become a land of haves and have-nots, where income inequality and lack of opportunity have made a mockery of the nation’s purported ideals. Sound familiar?

Telling Northrup’s story, McQueen gives a grand tour of the institutionalized sadism and astonishing inhumanity ubiquitous in the slave economy.

Nothing tops the discussions of mortality between Leary and Ram Dass, during which both of these battered but unbowed explorers of reality come off as nothing less than enlightened.

Inspired by uprisings in the former Soviet bloc as well as, more pointedly, the Arab Spring, Makhmalbaf serves up a surprisingly tense, sometimes poignant parable. It's good to have him back.

Sorrentino’s storytelling sometimes seems deliberately obscure, and his film can be as indulgent as the society it chronicles. But as this existential odyssey draws to a close, it sews itself up with the aplomb that only a confident, controlled filmmaker can marshal.

German director Christian Petzold's new movie is a testament to the way textured performances and a skillfully woven script can entice a remarkable suspension of disbelief.

An inspirational, and mostly entertaining, saga, Joy is a Horatio Alger story for the 21st century — but who reads those anymore?

The experience of watching Carol is like being pulled into a different place, real and not real, like the best movies, like being in love.

A highly entertaining, informative movie about how the subprime mortgage crisis led to a worldwide financial meltdown in 2007-08. The fact that such a movie is so unusual is one big reason why the meltdown occurred and why it easily could happen again.

It's duck soup for cinephiles.

It feels more like a retreat for all involved, a chance to kick back and bounce some ideas off each other and the surrounding mountains. Several of them stick and give Youth an emotional core that covers the bare spots. Caine and Keitel, old pros on the home stretch, deserve nothing less.

The subject is fascinating, the talent is undeniable, but the humanity that made Lili Elbe so memorable gets lost along the way.

A wonderful documentary.

If Abrams didn't take many chances, he didn't make many mistakes, either. First, Do No Harm became Don't Mess With Success, and it worked. Show Me the Money is sure to follow.

In the Heart of the Sea doesn't trust itself enough to be great.

All Things Must Pass is a labor of love by actor Colin Hanks, a Sacramento native who grew up on the store.

It doesn't all work. The energy and the performances by Cannon, Parris and Hudson can't carry a movie that careens from camp to tragedy to farce without taking a breath. Several scenes could have been cut, particularly a long, dumb take on sex and the Civil War that ends with a horny old goat in Stars-and-Bars skivvies.

What is special about The Good Dinosaur isn't the characters...but the backgrounds.

Creed is no "Raging Bull" -- it's a little too long and throws in an unnecessary disease to gin up the emotional content of the third act -- but it's surprising proof that iconic franchises that started in the 1970s can be revived in all the right ways.

Stick around for the credits, when the real Trumbo talks about the effect of the blacklist on his daughter. It's the real thing.

All involved bring a warm eccentricity that lifts what in lesser hands could be a collection of cliches about the contrasts between the Old World and the New.

Here's a movie that's jam-packed with bizarre sci-fi concepts, political allegory, a fascinating international cast and some truly over the top set pieces. But for just about everything maniacally cool in the movie, there's a flaw, sometimes a near-fatal one.

At times the movie feels like two Very Special Episodes of "Law & Order: SVU" stitched together, but on balance it's a smart, well-cast piece of grown-up entertainment.

William Faulkner's oft-cited quote has rarely been more apt: "The past is never dead. It's not even the past."

What's most endearing about "Taxi," as well as Panahi's earlier films made under repression, is the lack of righteous anger.

A snapshot of what happened at a particular time and place and doesn't try to glamorize its subjects or make any larger points about what it all means. By refusing to do so, by celebrating the process over the outcome and the work over the reward, it becomes a special experience, a movie that matters.

What makes Miss You Already work (when it does work, which is most of the time) is that it shows imperfect characters dealing imperfectly with situations ranging from the maritally frustrating to the existentially overwhelming.

With such actors at work and with locations including a first-time use of the Houses of Parliament, Suffragette should look and be a richer experience than it is.

Not bad, no need to wake Roger Moore from his mid-morning nap and bring him out of retirement, but not special.

Boosted by award-caliber performances and a perfectly struck tone, it becomes one of the more moving dramas of the year and an early, dark-horse award-season contender.

The well-chosen supporting cast — Anthony Edwards as a test subject, Jim Gaffigan as one of Milgram's confederates, and especially Winona Ryder as Milgram's wife — help tremendously to keep The Experimenter humming along as entertainment rather than dry docudrama.

Political machinations, emotional revelations, and a few well-choreographed fight scenes ensue, but Hou focuses less on the satisfactions of plot and action than on crafting, if not quite bringing to life, his auteurist vision of the past (both historical and cinematic).

Director Douglas Tirola threads his way through a minefield of egos and grudges in his interviews and does some interesting stuff with animation in his presentation of some of the magazine pieces.

The real star is Attah, a Ghanaian street kid plucked from obscurity, who imbues Agu with just the right mix of terror, brutality and the last remaining vestiges of boyish innocence.

A movie that underplays its many strengths. You don't realize how good it is until it's over.

It's exhausting, impressionistic, and ultimately hollow, extraordinarily well-acted but not nearly as relevant as "The Social Network."

Uses a deft mix of archival footage and interviews with historians and some very articulate Panther veterans.

The result is an uneasy mix of social-issue realism and escapist excitement that's ultimately disposable.

There's a Gordon Gekko vibe to Shannon's reptilian, charismatic villain. Like Oliver Stone's "Wall Street," 99 Homes understands that people don't sell their souls because they're inherently evil — they do it because being rich is cool.

Freeheld isn't bad -- with that kind of source material and topline acting talent it almost couldn't be -- but it could have been much more than it is.

Historical resonances aside, Coming Home functions well as an impeccably crafted, compellingly acted tale.

Most of the time, Goodnight Mommy creates its air of supreme unease quietly, even subtly, but even hardened horror fans might be shocked by some of what goes down in the movie's second half.

Only in its final moments does Breathe extend its reach beyond experiences that most, if not all, teens (and ex-teens) can relate to. When it does, it might just leave you breathless.

The violence is shocking, effective and soaked into the dry brown landscape.

What makes The Martian work is Damon.

The rare movie that improves as it goes along, shedding its cliches and getting down to what matters.

Like Brad Pitt and Robert Redford, Gere's good looks have made it hard sometimes to recognize his acting ability, but it's on full display here in what is anything but a vanity project.

It's fun to watch The New Girlfriend the way it's fun to drink a glass of Champagne, and about as memorable.

Sleeping with Other People turns out to be more entertaining than it sounds. The movie, that is.

He's good, but Depp can't quite annihilate the self-consciousness that makes some of his more light-hearted work shine. Too often, it feels like he's channeling other actors: here he's Jack Nicholson with Hunter S. Thompson's nose, there he's an Irish-American Ray Liotta.

Grandma is a movie that, for what it's worth, gets an A+ on the Bechdel test. Writer-director Paul Weitz may still be cashing residual checks for the "American Pie" movies, but this is his most heartfelt, successful effort since 2002's "About a Boy."

Makes the case that Fischer's chess prowess and his mental illness were inextricable. The chess fed the paranoia which supported the chess which drove Fischer deeper into madness, and so on.

There have been plenty of mountaineering documentaries over the last few years, and Everest suffers in comparison to them simply by being a dramatization. As realistic as the effects are (and you can occasionally tell when a shot is green-screened), you're still aware on a gut level that Jason Clarke and Josh Brolin were not actually filmed at 29,000 feet above sea level.

Actually an entertaining action-adventure that not only stands on its own, but surpasses the more limited rewards offered by "The Maze Runner."

The performances, especially that of Regina Casé in the lead role, inject potent, lived-in humanity to the movie's flat political allegory.

Rather than explore and embrace the contradictions within Jobs ("he had the focus of a monk but none of the empathy" is the best he can do), Gibney puts the hammer down.

Mistress America is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.

Z for Zachariah has things to say about the tugs-of-war between science and spirituality, thought and action, men and women. It's just not exactly sure what they are.

Sometimes those kinds of movies work (just ask the Duplass brothers) and sometimes they seem like the cast and crew had more fun making them than you do watching them. This one sits somewhere in the middle.

What it doesn't do -- and this is what makes this "Diary" different -- is let what happens define her or ruin her.

At its more abstract moments, it's a treat for the eye and the soul.

Starring in, directing and writing (in collaboration with Michel Marc Bouchard, on whose play it's based) a movie at Dolan's tender age is certainly a Wellesian accomplishment. All three actors are convincing, especially Cardinal as the cruel, manipulative Francis, and their characters' behavior feels authentic even when it's not logical.

The End of the Tour can feel like a down-home deification at times: Like Einstein riding a bike, only it's Wallace going to the Mall of America. It's not sentimental, though, at least not until the very end, and is moving in beautiful, unexpected ways.

It's overlong and sanitized but succeeds in presenting an important part of contemporary American culture to a mainstream audience.

Theron makes Libby a bristling, emotionally crippled live wire, her anger, guilt, and distrust bubbling to the surface with the slightest provocation. She's neither quite as fascinating nor nearly as despicable a character as "Gone Girl"'s Amazing Amy, but director Gilles Paquet-Brenner is no David Fincher.

Laverty gives the scenes between Jimmy and Father Sheridan a sharp edge, and Ward and Norton do the rest. Ryan shot on 35mm and makes the whole movie glow.

A tight little thriller that recalls the good old days of "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," back when suspicious packages appeared on the doorstep, no affair went unpunished, and the family dog was never safe.

Shaun the Sheep Movie delivers exactly what it promises: The cutest, most innocuous entertainment this side of Internet panda videos.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez, whose previous movie was the filmed-in-Oregon "C.O.G.," stages the many torture scenes in a tight, claustrophobic way that works to heighten tension.

This 90-minute exploration of the myriad ways Lego is great suffers from a relentlessly annoying narrator and a punishingly peppy tone. Still, if you're an AFOL—that is, an Adult Fan of Lego — or even a KFOL — you can figure that one out, right?—there's plenty to make it worth your while. If you're not, don't bother.

Most impressively, "Rogue Nation" keeps the body count minimal.

Moving and suspenseful.

In the end, as gay people and other marginalized groups throughout history have shown, the only real solution is to learn not to be agonized or ashamed over differences, but to celebrate them with pride.

Green is onto something with this paper towns metaphor, but it's nothing Rush didn't say better in "Subdivisions."

There will always be plenty of fictional geniuses solving impossible crimes, but Holmes, it turns out, it where the heart is.

What Ruffalo brings is a gravelly voice, soulful eyes, and absolute commitment. He's a little aw-shucksish in a Midwestern way but never corny and with a strong backbone. You like him and wouldn't want to cross him. Frank Capra would love Ruffalo. So would Hitchcock.

Baker's previous films "Take Out" and "Starlet" have focused on populations generally treated with disdain by mainstream society -- illegal immigrants and porn performers, respectively. With Tangerine he continues to prove that by depicting these characters in all their flaws and majesty, movies can inspire awareness of our shared humanity. And make us laugh.

Trainwreck doesn't try to reinvent the wheel so much as rotate the tires of comedy.

Ant-Man wastes the regular-guy appeal of its star, Paul Rudd, on a bland, by-the-numbers story that starts small and keeps on shrinking, a metaphor for the movie itself. Its modest ambitions are admirable and unrealized.

A highlight of Sunshine Superman is archival footage of Boenish attaching a homemade ladder to the side of the cliff, extending it 20 feet out into nothing, climbing out and sitting on a bicycle seat, and facing back toward the cliff with a movie camera.

I'll See You in My Dreams takes its time getting to unexpected places and makes you glad to follow along.

Heaven Knows What is a hard movie to recommend because of its unrelenting intensity and hideously depressing subject. It's a hard movie, period, but it's exceptionally well-made and beautiful in its execution.

That this is a documentary, this family lived in New York for decades in almost complete separation from its neighbors, is astonishing.

Writer-director Patrick Brice is interested only in his male characters; Alex and Kurt work out their issues while their wives serve as support or comic foils. The laughs stop about halfway through, and the 79-minute running time feels about right.

Two Days, One Night is timely and timeless, a social statement about current economic conditions and a parable about individual and community. Cotillard's performance is revelatory, one to be admired and studied for generations.

A movie as bold and deep as a Turner landscape, as sharp as light on water.

Strickland has the courage of his convictions and maintains a tight focus on the proceedings while allowing the occasional feather of humor to float down on the pillow.

The tone -- deadpan, wistful, silly but never stupid -- is just right and puts What We Do in the Shadows next to "This Is Spinal Tap" as a mockumentary that shows its subjects as human -- in this case, inhuman -- in their hopes and fears.

What matters in '71 is the action, and the look on O'Connell's face when he emerges from a shed into the Belfast night.

The music they made is timeless, and Denny Tedesco deserves credit for giving them the credit they deserve and for working through the music rights issues that delayed a theatrical release for seven years.

Without passing moral judgments on either group, Cartel Land provides a vivid illustration of the dangers inherent whenever a government fails to meet its citizens' needs to the extent that they take matters into their own hands.

It's a sad story, and Asif Kapadia's documentary tells it without narration or commentary. Instead there's a brilliantly edited succession of interviews and performances and news footage that glides through her charmed, doomed life.

Me and Earl is smart and appealing, but it spends way too much effort saying "I'm not like that" when it really is.

Although it treads water for the final fifteen or so minutes, the movie is brisk and engaging enough that it still doesn't feel overlong.

Dope has energy and smarts and a heart in all the right places.

Inside Out expands the possibilities of animation. It's also a hilarious ride that delights the eye, the mind and the heart.

Despite the solid performances (Roberta Maxwell as Jude's mother is the exception), the one-note intensity wears you down, until a shocking coda wraps things up. It turns out that being trapped in a bathroom together is nothing compared to being trapped in a marriage, or a nearly two-hour movie, with a crazy person.