It's worth seeking out no matter how much trouble you have to go to, because it's special: assured but modest, full of surprises. It doesn't go the way you expect it to, and yet in retrospect each move seems inevitable, like the incremental fulfillment of a prophecy.

Too bad it isn't a wickeder, subtler, more imaginative movie.

"Colorful" is not a colorful enough word to describe a fantasy movie musical so maximalist that even the title is overstuffed.

There are times when Beirut really works like the films that clearly inspired it.

There’s no way to enjoy “Cypher” without seeing it as an elaborate and often exasperating joke at viewers’ expense.

Director and co-writer (with Boris Yutsin) Atsuko Hirayanagi has a knack for staging scenes in a way that makes them intriguingly uncomfortable, but that doesn’t succeed in elevating Oh Lucy! from some of its more commonplace features.

What elevates Hide Your Smiling Faces is Carbone's gentle, lyrical touch where other filmmakers would have turned the same thematic concerns into melodrama.

Everything in Dark River feels like it’s designed not with real people in mind but with Serious Independent Cinema in mind. It’s a movie so filled with pregnant pauses and pretentious looks that it never develops an emotional undercurrent at all.

The minute Bill Cunningham starts talking in this charming documentary is the minute you fall in love with him.

Private Violence is extremely sad, but it has a lot of hope.

Like classic military comedies from “Catch-22” to “M*A*S*H,” Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation offers its own appealing blend of irreverence and absurdism.

It’s quite a ride even when the tempo drops ever so slightly towards the end; the kind of stuff fun summer entertainment should be made of.

Uniting with a star-studded trio – his brother John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Danielle Deadwyler – Washington's study of inheritances (trauma, wealth, and history) is a powerful portrayal of Black lineage in America.

The movie is affectionate because it has that sense of animal love that lets entire sequences rest on Togo’s charms, but is by no means letting the dog do all the work. Director Ericson Core (previously of the “Point Break” remake) clearly cares about animals, but filmmaking, too.

The moments of charm and fun are few.

There are times when the familiarity of the urban melodrama hurts Blue Story, particularly in the lack of depth to his characters. (Odubola is a find, but the rest of the cast has some actors who feel a bit amateur.)

The result is a twisty-turny plot that sometimes feels like a family drama, sometimes like a legal thriller, with Bahkshi delivering a bombshell, allowing the film’s characters time to react to it, and then dropping another secret that is even more shocking than the first.

Filmmaker Zeina Durra’s entrancing, languorous Luxor wonders about the allure of the backward gaze and the uncertainty inspired by an unknowable future, and co-stars Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh are practically perfect in this thoughtful romance.

Sweet and earnest, this is the kind of film that’s easy to wrap your arms around because it understands that coming of age is inherently traumatic. It needn’t be overly dramatized.

It’s still undeniably clever, buoyed by a great cast who know what to do with this sharp satire of world politics, but it feels a bit like a lark, a movie that is content with a chuckle instead of really biting its teeth into some of its complex subject matter.

This is a sensitively made film that’s pretty frustrating. In the tradition of some vintage Italian films that got gathered under the rubric of Neo-Realism, it gives you a character to root for and then places her between a rock and a hard place with no cavalry coming to the rescue.

The Trip To Greece, while mostly very laugh out loud funny, is also rather more somber than the prior installments and also has, in Julian Barnes’ phrase, the sense of an ending.

A film with this incendiary of a title needed to have more to say about being LGBT in a hostile environment.

The singing is often splendid. The bits of humor are deftly handled. The pace is relatively swift. And it never feels like a static rendition of a theatrical event dumbed down for a younger demographic.

Tim Roth gives a career-high performance in this meticulous, disturbing film written and directed by Michel Franco.

The filmmakers over-extend themselves to solicit empathy for their doomed protagonists. Youth is so unbearably nice that I eventually wished it were remade by misanthropes.

One thing that comes across so clearly in Finding Yingying is the ripple effect the disappearance of a loved one has on their family and friends. It’s a waking nightmare of uncertainty that stretches for years. A grief that’s always just on the surface waiting to unleash itself once again.

Chomko’s grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and she takes great effort to recreate a sense of that unique kind of pain, where the person’s memories are lost but they are standing in front of you.

A gentle, genuine trip down memory lane that features one of our best actresses in the kind of role she doesn’t get to play that often, and another great turn in the arc of an independent film icon.

Even the slow-motion crumbling of the love triangle between the mentor, his wife and his mentee isn’t that thrilling. Leto had the potential to be so much more lively—this is rock ‘n’ roll in the Soviet Union we’re talking about—that its stylish malaise feels much more disappointing.

Watching Campbell over her shoulder or in a mirror is frustrating because it consistently limits our view of her character. Porterfield's people can't give anything away beyond their immediate aggression, frustration, and sadness. But it's hard to appreciate an intentionally blurry portrait of a family that's so impressionistic that all you can see of its already-withdrawn characters are their shadows.

The 3-D animation is designed and executed in an unrealistic manner, paying loving attention to light and shadow but tossing the laws of physics out of the nearest classroom window.

Hallow Road is an earnest attempt to make a movie no one has seen before, only to end up with one few will want to watch again.

Through Balvín’s plights, Heineman invites us to consider how entertainers have become commodified and disassociated from their humanity in our eyes. That’s not a cry for pity or compassion, but to investigate our expectations of them as people and not solely as distant figures.

As the heart of the story, however, Sarah Snook delivers a knockout performance that calls on her to perform the kind of tricky scenes that could have resulted in bad laughs throughout if handled incorrectly. Not only does she pull off her performance brilliantly throughout—there is not one moment in which she is anything less that utterly convincing and believable.

To be clear: Asako I & II is not a bad movie, just one that doesn't convey much beyond its creators' intentions. There are moments of poetic beauty scattered throughout, like the few scenes that don't push the otherwise cloud-light plot along.

Director Raoul Peck, no stranger to connecting the past to the present as he did with “I Am Not Your Negro,” collaborates with the Orwell estate to retell the story behind the man who gave the world 1984 and Animal Farm and explore the themes Orwell illustrated in those works to current events to show how Orwell’s warnings have gone unheeded through the years. The result, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” is an ambitious work that is provocative but sometimes convoluted.

I was blown away by the film’s use of mostly archival news footage after its premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Upon a second watch I found it even more compelling the way Perkins, and editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira, expertly deploy this footage to tell not a biography of ‘The People’s Princess,’ but rather of the way the media shaped the perception of her public life.

The plot alone of this elegantly shot black-and-white import shares the Woodman’s affection for variations on lusty middle-age man who beds — and tutors — an adoring decades-younger nubile conquest.

You Resemble Me is at its strongest when it tries to humanize its misunderstood central figure in simple, intimate ways.

If Tenet can be a hard movie to engage with emotionally or even comprehend narratively, that doesn't take away from its craftsmanship on a technical level. It’s an impressive film simply to experience, bombarding the viewer with bombastic sound design and gorgeous widescreen cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema.

It draws us in with acutely observed details and relatable characters that portray universal conflicts, all with nuance and good humor.

Watching all of those clips drove home how dance cinematography like this is mostly — and sadly — a lost art.

At 105 minutes, it’s a little overladen, as Selick and Peele over-complicate their storytelling with subplots and even commentary on the prison industrial complex. However, there’s no denying that this is a world that animation fans will just want to explore, to live in, to savor. It’s been too long since we got a window into Henry Selick’s brain and it’s still an amazing view.

A twist that brings together native myths and modern challenges is at first surprising and then surprisingly satisfying. We leave the film feeling like we've found some 'Ohana ourselves.

Unfortunately, Nuclear Nation is slow going, and given the uniqueness of the documentation and the importance of its message, it deserves to be more compelling than it is.

Like many Mel Gibson films, as well as such revenge-driven revisionist Westerns as "Posse" and "Django Unchained," The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing object, passionate and furious and shameless and slick, distorting history in both defensible and problematic ways.

Scheinert smartly does not hammer home these themes, or sum things up with a monologue about what we've all learned. We haven't learned anything except ... if you find yourself in Zeke and Earl's situation, do exactly the opposite, start to finish.

As Cannibal progresses it becomes both more traditional in its narrative and frustrating in its lack of depth.

In fairness, Maron doesn’t provide Feinartz with the raw material to make the kind of movie it seems he wanted to make. We get the feeling that, over the course of participating in the project, Maron realized that he and the filmmaker were not an ideal match.

Huda's Salon does not stop for one second to take a breath, and the subjects revealed have enormous and urgent philosophical reverb.

Somewhere along the road between Montreal and Mongolia, Namibia and Nepal, Egypt and Ecuador, “Blink” achieves a transcendent state of grace.

Suzi Q is a portrait of Quatro's journey and her influence on the generations that came after. Most importantly, it is a history lesson for those who may not be aware of Quatro. As Joan Jett, one of the many people interviewed, says, "[Suzi] really should be one of those people who should be much more discussed, much more in the lexicon of musicians—especially being so early."

Both Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay do a remarkable job wrestling with their character’s inner and outer conflicts, but so much of “Femme” is about the pain of queer life, that it leaves out its joy.

Spider-Man: Far From Home changes the scenery but can’t quite match the inspired heights of its predecessor.

Their tangible shared pain quickly turns an awkward performativeness into a most genuine therapy session, one that is both disarming and uplifting to observe.

This kind of story has been told endlessly in dramatic movies and TV shows, but rarely has a film offered characters like these telling their own stories.

The montage of footage—New York street scenes in the 1950s, 1960s, the press conferences, speeches, footage of the men getting off airplanes, surrounded by a crush of people, or laughing together, talking together, is mesmerizing. Individually and together, both men “shook up the world.” Blood Brothers shows why.

The best part may very well be an actual 1932 silent movie, filmed on Floreana, and shown in its entirety in "Galapagos Affair".

The hero worship of a fictional character in the midst of all of this real-life drama is a mistake.

Fessenden’s prickly sense of humanism makes a considerable difference in Depraved, his engrossing take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and maybe his best movie to date.

Echo in the Canyon appears all too content in banking on our nostalgia for the formidable roster of artists it has assembled, relying solely on our familiarity with their work to keep our attention rapt.

A sleazy and neon-soaked ride that splits the difference between a crafty caper and a guilty pleasure, “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” is the kind of cheeky flick you can’t help but surrender to.

It's an emotionally exhausting film — but a little bit of perspective might have resulted in an even more politically urgent document. As it is, though, The Sentence is the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue.

The film version of the best-selling novel The Fault in Our Stars feels emotionally inert, despite its many moments that are meant to put a lump in our throats.

A humorous if occasionally horrific pitch-black satire.

With fascinating confidence, “See You Then” honors the gradual evolution of a long talk, so much that their literal pacing reads as its only unnatural flourish—they take several minutes to walk about two blocks. But that rhythm, of one step at a time, nearly takes on a hypnotic effect.

The golf cart scene is an excellent example of what Greener Grass is attacking, and it's a sharp and subversive critique: it would be great to live in a more civil world, but too much civility leads to golf carts stalled at a four-way intersection.

A compelling and insightful examination of this strange story, and it utilizes the cooperation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian woman who had been in a long-distance romantic relationship with Amina (even though the two had never met.)

From the moment Selah is shown on her wicker chair throne off-campus, Selah and the Spades is impressively filled with style. Through the lens of cinematographer Jomo Fray, the film is vibrantly colorful yet moody, dripping with teen angst.

Hedges has a gift for bringing us into the lives of characters in even the briefest sketches with the strong support of an outstanding cast.

Blood Relatives isn’t always a great comedy about vampires, or fathers and daughters, but it is a charming road movie.

Written and directed by Giovanni Tortorici, “Diciannove,” which means “nineteen” in Italian, plumbs the depths of young adulthood in that strange transition year, from the dizzying highs of feeling invincible on the dance floor to realizing just how much about the world you still have to learn.

The good news is that it largely breaks the trend of mediocre rock docs through specificity, being at its best when it’s granular in the process of the recording, including some lyrical near-misses, some personality conflicts in the room, and even one participant who liked a bit too much wine.

To his credit, the junior Hanks makes a genuine effort to delve in to Candy’s psychology—to understand what drove him.

Imagine a cross between “Taken” and “Fargo” and you’ll get an idea of the chilly thrills “Dead of Winter” has to offer.

It's as engrossing, thoughtful, heartfelt, angry, hopeful, and altogether valuable as his best work. If it is indeed Loach's farewell, it's one hell of a fine note to go out on.

Thoroughly grisly and mostly entertaining, “The Mortuary Collection” is a satisfying choice for the spooky season.

It’s in exploring the iconography of the hotel that the documentary shines the brightest. Van Elmbt and Duverdier are clearly well-versed in the works that were created on the grounds, or by former residents, and do their best to imbue their film with the same timeless cool that pulses through them.

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.

We cannot help wishing, as we do so often in watching what passes for news these days, that this story was told with more insight, context, and, well, focus.

Sometimes, the suggestive nature of Gregg’s impressionistic mood piece—as well as a characteristically strong lead performance by Riseborough (Possessor, Mandy)—is enough to sustain one’s interest in Here Before. Right up until Gregg lobs an unsettling and only partly satisfying twist at viewers and leaves us to work through our feelings on our own time.

It’s an infectiously goofy film, but also deceptively smart about why we love comic book heroes and the amount of stupidity we’re willing to accept within the genre.

Song's performance makes me wish the rest of A Taxi Driver was as thoughtful.

Watching Harris and Dormer create this event together is why I love going to the movies. In that elegant, horrible townhouse, anything could happen. And anything does.

The Drop is just how I like my Tom Hardy – in nearly every scene.

The flashback scenes are not as compelling as they try to be. The Hopkins scenes are more engaging, not just because we look forward to the re-enactment of the television reveal, but because the film is sharper at addressing the existential issues of purpose and meaning than it is in showing us the difficulties in rescuing the children.

The reason that The Monster works is because of how much Kazan’s performance captures the truth of the moment in which Kathy struggles.

The scattershot approach sometimes works to the detriment of his message, but “Fahrenheit 11/9” is ultimately Moore’s best film in years because its message is really simple and nonpartisan: get mad about something and do something about it.

It’s never a good sign when characters in a film promptly declare: we are aware you are watching and we’re here to teach you a thing or two.

A general lack of urgency are the main things holding Get Duked! back from being as good as it is promising.

While “Jim Henson: Idea Man” may not break any new ground regarding Hensonian research or documentary filmmaking in general, it should prove valuable to younger viewers curious to know more about the man behind so many beloved childhood icons.

What makes Chase Joynt’s first solo outing as a feature director, Framing Agnes, such essential viewing is the extent to which it sheds new light on the legacy of trans Americans from the past century and beyond, whose voices are only just beginning to emerge from the vault of obscurity.

Allowing us to luxuriate within the languid pacing of this slice-of-life story is actually refreshing during these big, noisy summer days.

It’s that assured blending of emotions that makes “LaRoy, Texas” a sturdy tonal journey—a film enamored with those living on the fringes of respectability—that bodes well for whatever freewheeling story Atkinson hopes to tell next.

Movies rarely come as chic as The Outfit, a thrifty, continually unpredictable whodunit, fashioned with the same meticulousness found in the bones of a deceptively simple suit.

Raiff offers some impressive tonal mixtures and narrative surprises along the way, and even though his third act sags a bit, the performances—particularly from an achingly melancholy Dakota Johnson— remain compelling until the end.

Though it's a familiar plot about kids learning discipline and teamwork through sports, The Grizzlies is brought to life through the specifics that make the characters and their sense of place — and of displacement — central to the story.