Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait Kokomo City is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking.

As the themes, characters and ideas from the first two parts begin to reappear, so too do full-figured women and gorgeous, semi-nude men right out of the earthly kingdoms of Pasolini.

Costner’s uncanny evocation of Gary Cooper masculinity and Gregory Peck compassion in the role of coach Jim White is the glue that holds it together, but the rest of the cast is equally inspired.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and featuring a remarkable lead performance by Dwayne Johnson, the spiky and majestic Black Adam is one of the best DC superhero films to date.

A documentary that plays as cringe comedy. Like that sub-genre, it comes packaged with a star whose irascibility often leads to eye-covering levels of discomfort.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? comes from a place of understanding and love that few other biopics truly dive into, and it makes this difficult character a joy to meet.

The end result is a sturdy and frequently dazzling version of the material that should leave audiences swooning with delight.

Others may find In My Room to be a small gem thanks to Köhler’s eye for small details. He’s a keen image-maker; Armin’s story also resonates thanks to Köhler’s ear for naturalistic dialogue and novelistic detail, both of which serve the movie’s episodic narrative.

Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili’s Tribeca prize-winner, “Brighton 4th,” is a tragicomedy that sneaks up on you stealthily before flooring you with an emotional sucker punch in the final reel.

Gutnik keeps the film’s narrative progression steady and unsettled, positioning his film as a ground-level dispatch from the conflict’s frontlines.

There is nothing ordinary about Tom and Joan, and their story shows us that there is nothing ordinary about love.

Those who don't know anything about the tale going in (a category that included me) might be gobsmacked by what happens. The order of events doesn't stick to any established commercial movie template. What happens feels as random yet eerily inevitable as life itself.

This story has been told several times before—and influenced other similar romances—but Cooper and Gaga find a way to make this feel fresh and new. It’s in their eyes.

Touching on issues of identity, integrity, and grief, “Swan Song” never feels formulaic due to the complex, committed performances of its stars and the thoughtful exploration of the issues it raises.

Whatever your movie plans, you miss Tracks at your aesthetic pleasure peril. It’s a truly outstanding cinema experience.

The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.

The entire thing has the tone of an elegy or memorial throughout, including the hero's voiceover, which has a resigned inevitability. It is also, to its credit, a movie that plays fair with the viewer, establishing very early that it's going to honor its subject matter by being complicated, because almost nobody's life can be interpreted just one way.

It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new frame for the movie. Fifteen minutes later, it does this again, and then again.

Eloquent and moving, The Deepest Breath shows what it's like "down there," why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface.

Cinematographer Drew Xanthopoulos gives the actors very little room to hide, often framing their faces in extreme close-up during bracing moments of emotional nakedness. There are echoes here of Cassavetes’ most agonizing stretches in “A Woman Under the Influence,” as casual pleasantries detonate into a fiery inferno of resentment.

Chasing Trane streamlines the story of the jazz saxophonist, but it does so in a way that doesn’t feel like cheating. Scheinfeld’s approach is to give the viewer the forest, point out a few trees and get out, confident that those trees will inspire the viewer to spend more time in the forest.

In filmmaker Yael Melamede’s biographical film about her mother, pioneering Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede, the two ways of seeing the world and telling a story come together.

The feature filmmaking debut from writer/director/co-editor Lauren Hadaway is an intimate and powerful sensory experience all around, but it’s the sound editing—Hadaway’s first calling, having worked with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Zack Snyder, and Damien Chazelle—that grabs you off the top and envelops you throughout.

After the Storm is one of our best filmmaker’s best films.

Though its generic title may evoke memories of the archaic science videos you fell asleep to in grade school, Schwartzberg’s film quickly proves to be one of the year’s most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs.

This is the most beautiful Batman movie you’ve ever seen—even if it’s not really a Batman movie at all.

While the film loses some of its mesmerizing potency in the climax and subsequent wrap-up, it's still a beautiful and acute rendering of what could be if some of the most implausible lies we tell ourselves were in fact true.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.

The movie is significant as a movie: it's intelligent, sensitive and expertly made. But it's also significant because of its ability to provoke introspection and arguments. In its deceptively modest way, it's as much a Rorschach test as "American Sniper." Everybody who sees it will draw a different picture of the elephant.

Rest assured, finding out whether an on-screen couple have what it takes has rarely felt this cutting, and, ultimately, this rewarding.

However suave the movie itself may be, it's another accomplished piece of work from a filmmaker who is now four for four, and continues to surprise with the range of his interests and output. And it’s a love letter to a cinematic legend, serving as a perfect final film for someone who long ago surpassed mere actor status to become an icon.

Queen of Earth is terrifying because it is so emotionally unmoored—Catherine is a character with little reason to care about anything or anyone, and Perry and Moss convey the danger of that brilliantly.

It’s just over 90 minutes long, but Streetwise still feels like an epic poem, shrunken down and sparingly polished for maximum effect.

As a screenwriter, Kerr has a deep understanding of her characters and the complex dynamics of the relationship between Ben and Beth.

Again and again, I marveled at the humanist depth of the world Haigh creates, one that can only be rendered by a truly great writer and director, working near the top of his game.

The rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost.

In his impressive debut feature, writer/director Jason Yu strikes a fine balance between character-driven and high-concept horror.

It would seem like an impossible feat, but somehow, directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman have breathed thrilling new life into the comic book movie. The way they play with tone, form and texture is constantly inventive and giddily alive.

The one constant of life is change, and our own individual relations to the place we grew up, or came of age, in are invariably complicated not by just the alterations in the landscape but the way our perspectives shift...The Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho understands this feeling just as well as I and maybe you do, and he’s made a lovely, enveloping film about it, called “Pictures of Ghosts.”

Most of all, [Heder] makes us see and believe in our bones that the Rossis are a real family with real chemistry, with real bonds and trials of their own, both unique and universal just like any other family.

Terrence Malick is one of the producers of Almost Holy, and while Hoover doesn’t go for a full interpretation/realization of his style, there are touches that evoke the director’s work, especially in the film’s last sequence.

For all its miscalculations, this is a personal picture, violent and sweet, clever and goofy. It's as obsessive and overbearing as Steven Spielberg's "1941" — and, I'll bet, as likely to be re-evaluated twenty years from now, and described as "misunderstood."

Beautiful, melancholy and intellectually stimulating, “Dahomey” is a documentary that should be seen by all.

Throughout its majestic 188-minute running time, there is a profound sum of self-negotiation in Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree; a slow-burning and unexpectedly humorous character study as reflective and impenetrable as anything in Ceylan’s filmography.

Whatever Jia shows us and wherever he takes us, we’re always aware of being in the hands of one of the contemporary world’s great filmmakers.

Romano’s performance in Paddleton is an incredible work of humor. He creates a character capable of annoying anyone who’s just met him. Many of the movie’s funniest moments allow Romano to play this awkward being to his full, cringe-inducing potential.

A War, as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience.

These moments have a tactile intimacy that’s incredibly powerful, placing these ordinary people in an almost timeless continuum of seemingly ordinary behavior that becomes extraordinary in memory, or through the eyes of a camera.

The film is just as much about politics as it is a family working out the demands of a politically active life with the demands of the home.

It's a rich, raw, heartache of a film, a beautifully composed, soul-stirring drama about love, family, sex, sorrow, faith, and music.

Director Greg Berlanti, who has helmed a string of hit television shows as producer and writer, uses the familiar teenage romance genre to tell an LGBTQ story, and in so doing makes these tropes feel fresh, fun, entertaining.

While Girl Picture isn’t necessarily breaking any new ground, this sensitively rendered dramedy invites viewers into the world of three young Finnish women on the cusp of adulthood with an affection and mellow sense of humor that makes it a more than agreeable cinematic companion.

Williams and director Dito Montiel are in tune with a pervading sense of tenderness, as the movie distinctly ruminates on connection, not love.

It’s a deceptively well-made flick that appears to be Linklater in little more than his “let’s have fun” mode. But it can’t keep one of the smartest filmmakers of his generation from elevating everything that this movie is trying to do with remarkable depth.

What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy wields a power that towers above many other small movies. It may not be the large definition of cinematic, but it is still a true film.

Sound of Falling operates like a ghost story, complete with a haunted house, but the ghosts aren’t supernatural. The ghost is history.

It's a stylish and modern action movie that also features some of the year's most satisfying fight choreography and action filmmaking.

Nina Forever subverts audience expectations at every turn and develops the kind of genuine emotional power that keeps it from being just another gory goof.

It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.

Like her brilliant 2012 debut feature, “Elena,” which recounted the “inconsolable memory” of Costa’s older sister prior to her suicide, the director’s latest work, The Edge of Democracy, is haunted by loss.

In the meantime, this movie means to make us notice the marvelous in the everyday, in much the way that a great James Schuyler poem does.

Blue Film, through its many frank observations, stands as a vulnerable work about one’s past colliding with one’s present, in a bid to make peace with one’s true self.

Babygirl is a high-wire act. It’s a small miracle the film works as well as it does.

Sometimes its meandering approach can feel a bit more detached than in Trier’s best work, but this is ultimately a delicate, complex film that lingers, unpacking itself in your mind. You remember it in the same kind of fragmented images that haunt its characters.

It feels both remarkably simple and complex at the same time, a vision on which we can place our own interpretations of what it all means instead of being force-fed superficial messages.

A small but wonderful gem of a thriller: A film in which complicated people and a very complicated plot come together in a mechanism that leaves us marveling at its ingenuity.

This film succeeds because it knows how to strike the right balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and quiet, effective drama. The clichés are there, but its heart beats loud enough for us to embrace and forgive them.

The best part of Lars von Trier's fascinating, engaging and often didactic Nymphomaniac is that, despite the sometimes-grim tone and bleak color palate, it's an extremely funny film, playful, even.

Beau Is Afraid, an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a film that will reward you for seeking it out.

What comes across most vividly in this movie, ultimately, is the fact that what happened almost half a century ago is a trauma that still weighs heavily on the people of Vietnam. And many Americans.

The fact that it was made by her nephew, actor/filmmaker Griffin Dunne, gives it a warmth and intimacy that might not have graced a more standard documentary.

This cool, unhurried movie is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated performance by Caillee Speeney.

The resulting episodic narrative is light on dialogue and heavy on ambiance; it's precise to an unsettling degree since a number of scenes start and stop whenever Lizzy can feel her way in and out of them.

Pham Thien An’s contemplative drama “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” blurs the line between surrealism and realism, faith and loss in a subdued search for purpose in the wake of a tragedy.

It’s some of the absolute best work of Hopkins’ lengthy and storied career.

It is delicately told, sweet but never sugary.

David Freyne’s charming afterlife comedy “Eternity” takes a simple premise of a person forced to choose between two prospective suitors and elaborates the concept with clever world-building and emotional relationship dynamics.

Santambrogio’s extraordinary cast of non-professional actors convey a lived-in, personal, and impossible to fake connection to the pleasures, struggles and intricacies of life in Cuba.

It's truly refreshing to watch a film where nobody has anything figured out, where life proceeds messily and imperfectly. Saint Frances is unpredictable in a very human way.

One of the intense pleasures of Ruben Brandt, Collector (astonishingly, it is Krstić’s first feature) is how it suggests that theft (i.e. "collecting") is the only way to manage obsession.

While the themes here are, of course, redolent of neorealism, the filmmakers don’t make ostentatious nods to cinema past. Their voice is their own; the camera is mobile when it needs to be, but stands still much of the time, letting the excellent cast build their characters as the events of the film test their endurance.

These movies are not WHOdunits as much as WHYdunits, and it’s everything that’s under the murder and its resolution that makes this sermon so entertaining and so powerful.

Thank You For Your Service, an involving and often wrenching drama about Iraq War veterans adapting to civilian life, is a film that teaches you how to watch it.

The ethereal essay provides a bounty of poetry, in the form of a measured narration by international treasure Tilda Swinton, and an extensively labored assembly of 200 black-and-white film clips.

Swallow draws on how feminine perfection can so often be associated with self-destructive behavior.

Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

Control Freak is a film so raw, messy, and sincere that it seems to have been torn from the bodies of the people who made it.

More than anything else, though, Decade of Fire succeeds as one of the best explanations in recent cinema of what the phrase "systemic racism" means.

Trust me. It was worth the wait. Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch have distilled the mythology-heavy approach of the last couple chapters with the streamlined action of the first film, resulting in a final hour here that stands among the best of the genre.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

One of Us is so strong as-is that its more harrowing sections — particularly Ari's account of his childhood suffering and the details of Rachel's fight for freedom — are so already hard to watch that you might want to turn away.

The most fascinating thing about the film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of fighting it.

Arnold's films elevate the potential of youth, and for this one, it takes a little magic to fulfill it.

Delivering an unforgettable breakthrough performance, Abita is phenomenal in pitching Lyz on the slippery slope between an adult wannabe and a little kid, boldly wearing even the smallest nuances of her character’s rapidly shifting emotional world on her resolute face.

First Date feels like a throwback caper to something you'd find on cable, funny yet full of action with a generous helping of a timeless romance for good measure. It’s the kind of movie you come across and have to see how it ends.

Coexistence, My Ass! bears witness in a powerful way, offering viewers a pause from the noise while galvanizing them to continue the fight for justice and freedom.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is one of the most original American thrillers in years, and one that draws from a deep well of movie history as it develops its characters and sets up its plot twists.