Megan Leavey is that rare breed: a war movie that actually shows something new about war, a sub-culture within a familiar sub-culture, the world of the military's K-9 units. For that alone, it should be applauded.

Over the years, Trueba has quietly, steadily built one of the most stylistically diverse filmographies in world cinema. This is another terrific entry. Try to see it on a big screen if you can. And if you can't, be sure to play it loud.

All In: The Fight For Democracy is a valuable public service wrapped in an educational, informative and engaging documentary.

Evil Does Not Exist is something different, starting out as a character study cum eco parable and morphing into an enigmatic nightmare.

Inspired by tales of people on the fringe by Mike Leigh, Sean Baker, and the Safdie Brothers, “Urchin” stays committed to presenting Mike’s story without frills, recognizing that it’s just a tragically common one of a man spiraling down the drain of society.

While “A Son” has allegorical parables with the political evolution of not just Tunisia but the whole MENA region, the first rate-acting, the very credible environments, and the straightforward, tight-as-a-drum direction make it hum with a directness that few social problem movies can muster.

When Michell is on his game, as he definitely is with Le Week-End, he unearths small, invaluable and even profound truths about the human condition that are often as inspiring as they are devastating.

The Outside Story is barely 85 minutes long, but Henry's performance is rich enough to make this small film feel rather epic.

This Much I Know to Be True is masterfully directed, an example of when a filmmaker and a musician are working in unison creatively instead of just going through the motions.

This is a powerful movie, but perhaps its greatest triumph is that for a brief time it resurrects Kitty Genovese, and lets us see her as a person.

The Mad Women's Ball is part psychodrama and part melodrama, and it wears those mantles proudly and confidently. Each scene throbs with urgency and emotion. Nothing is unimportant. At the same time, the film is highly controlled, with a taut assured script.

Antibirth is novel, mysterious, and sometimes even dangerous enough to suck you in if you surrender to its confrontational, avant garde style.

Overall, the film is superbly acted and a lot of fun to watch, which I suppose is not enough hardcore critical substance to hang three and a half stars on, but there you go.

Provides a rich, extraordinarily fascinating account that’s sure to have many viewers’ minds constantly shuttling between then and now, noting how different certain things about politics and media were in that distant era, yet marveling at how directly those archaic realities led to many of our own.

Gosling and Stone get these characters, finding grace in their movement but emotional depth in their arcs; Stone has never been better.

When it comes to broad comedies and unabashed melodramas, I’m usually not satisfied unless the moviemakers commit to exhausting whatever genre movie clichés or tropes that they’re futzing about with. The Greatest of All Time comes close enough to that ideal and on a fairly consistent basis.

Ma is more about its visuals than anything else.

Murina is a slow burn of a movie, one that doesn’t end in a detonation but with an enigma. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more coherent and satisfying narrative releases of the year.

Given its loose-knit narrative, the film doesn’t have anything like a conventional structure. Yet it’s steadily engrossing due to Boorman’s surpassing skills as both a storyteller and a director.

No, what's most disquieting about It Follows is the way it presents sex as neither abnormal, nor beneficial.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

Maybe Dick Johnson is Dead is the filmmaking equivalent of the band on the deck of the Titanic playing their hearts out while the water rises. If so, the movie is aware that it might be that thing, and seems content to be that thing. That's every movie, every story. When the end is preordained, you might as well make music.

With the screams and roars of the crowd, the energy of the games, and the bullish presence of the legendary Nolan Ryan, director Jackson makes you truly understand what it is like to be a fan.

Familiar Touch is a gorgeous drama with an open, aching heart.

If the film is a touch more emotionally muted than one would expect, that is because Jones spends the vast majority of the film holding it together.

The film’s embrace of compassion and forgiveness for everyone is heartwarmingly spacious. It shimmers with grace.

This is a very good movie and perfect summer counterprogramming.

Most of all, Rebel Ridge is just a reminder of how thrilling it can be to see a genre piece with this level of artistry.

Whether one looks at it as a summation statement from an artist taking stock of their life and work at the end of their career or as another one of the brief cinematic diversions that he has taken on in between his feature projects, “It’s Not Me” is a reminder that Leos Carax is one of the most fascinating and formally interesting filmmakers working in the world today.

Gibney crams as much material as possible into a quick two hours (he really knows how to edit and pace a piece like this one as it feels much shorter) and yet, to be fair, there’s still an angle missing just by virtue of the fact that he couldn’t get anyone from the Church of Scientology today on camera.

Stern, herself deaf, crafts an intimate and moving documentary that takes us through the legendary life of Marlee Matlin, uncovering a legacy of advocacy, activism, and perseverance.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable, even if most of us are not married to or dating secret millionaires. And though the film may feel overstuffed, it all works in service of its story.

This is an honest, real movie about people living big lives during tumultuous times, and coming through damaged but wiser.

Anyone But You, from director Will Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert, has the charm, wit, swoony romance, and, most importantly, star chemistry that has been solely missing from recent lackluster entries in the genre.

You may think you know where it is going. And maybe you're right. But how the film gets there is a very different matter.

An effective and creepy-surreal film.

What interactions are “real” and what is imagined or symbolic is left to us to sort through, or just to decide it does not matter. Each moment is presented to us with vibrance and wit.

But with his sophomore feature Limbo, a humanistic, tenderly deadpan plunge into the psyche of a Syrian refugee, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock sidesteps potential hazards like a patronizing tone and cultural insensitivity with deft, delivering something insightful, genuine, and universally relatable.

An unexpected anomaly — a sequel that both is better than and fixes the problems of its predecessor. It's a chilling and genuinely frightening horror film, driven by some solid performances and Roberts' command of atmosphere, location, and relentless pacing.

The Cold Lands is less a story than an experience, and that, as such, anything one might say about it could be considered a spoiler.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

The alchemical collision of the actors, the style, and the real-life settings result in a film so attentive to fluctuations in the characters’ emotions that watching them exist is exciting. You never know what these people will feel next or how they’ll express it, and the camera’s always in the perfect place to catch it.

Lucky indulges in all of the horror movie "tropes" but it does so with a purpose.

At times, Blood, feels like a slightly-filled-out television police procedural with better cinematography, but the performances have an almost Shakespearean grandeur.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

The plot loses its way in some of the later moments, as when Caan suddenly turns from a smoothie into a sinister, uptight threat (maybe it would have been funnier if he had simply continued to be a nice guy, to Cage's mounting frustration). But by then the movie has already inspired enough laughter to pay its way, and that's with the skydiving Elvis impersonators still to come.

7 Boxes is both a tense and frightening crime film as well as a sometimes-dreamy evocation of life in the sprawling underclass, its hallucinatory aspects, its chaos and violence, its fantasies.

The wisdom of this meticulously crafted film is in its genuine irony, which amplifies steadily throughout until culminating in a moment of real heartbreak that, ironically enough, only sets the stage for a cycle of deceit to begin again.

While the results will obviously not come close to resonating with the public in the manner of “Walk the Line,” My Darling Vivian does an admirable job of recounting the story of a woman who was ultimately far more than just a footnote in someone else’s life.

The movie has an organic intelligence and a sense that it, too, exists outside of linear time. It seems to be creating itself as you watch it.

An engrossing and often thrilling spy drama, and a tribute to this courageous and diverse group of women.

Amid the trauma that the co-leads undergo, Wang examines the rips and repairs in the connecting tissue between us and the people who, through their action or inaction, mold us into who we are.

Even after everything that Alexei Navalny exposed, he’s still behind bars, where it feels he will spend the rest of his life. "Navalny" is a film that can’t find justice for its subject. But it can expose the truth.

Finley has created a film that feels original and alive.

Resembling Maude Apatow in her youth, Rachel is a richly fascinating figure in her own right, and though she originally hadn’t planned on putting herself in the film, she wisely chose to have her face on camera (a la Bing Liu in “Minding the Gap”) when interviewing Josh, which heightens the emotional impact of their scenes together considerably.

This Netflix documentary will undoubtedly help more people understand how transgender people have seen themselves represented in Hollywood — it brings everyone together with its critical eye.

Directed by Rod Blackhurst from a script by David Ebeltoft, it tells you what kind of movie it is from its gruesome opening image and continues in that mode for another hour and forty-five minutes. It's anchored to a lead performance by Scoot McNairy that ranks with the best of classic neo-noir.

Ahed's Knee is a fascinating movie that evades most complaints of not having anything to say by showcasing its characters struggling to explain free-floating anxieties that have to do with a lot of things. It's also stylish as hell.

These documentarians masterfully construct their vision to elevate and serve their subject. The result is more low-key than one might expect from a movie about rap. It is also more powerful, bypassing the expected artist braggadocio to stand on the rarely visited street corner of sociology and hip-hop music.

The Duke is not his all-time-best picture, but it’s a very strong one, and it showcases his varied strengths as a filmmaker rather nicely.

The film is true to Gibson’s persona, which is marked by everything you expect from a poet: thoughtfulness, tenderness, and thorough self-awareness.

A very good jazz movie and a very good heroin movie, if indeed there's much practical difference between the two modes—and perhaps there isn't.

Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis, Aida? is a razor-sharp incrimination of failed foreign policies from around the world embedded in a deeply humanist and moving character study of the kind of person that these policies leave behind.

The film is not one for any viewer who’s never heard of Assange. Indeed, it’s best suited to audiences who are familiar with the basic Wikileaks saga and thus prepared for Poitras’ much more intimate and nuanced view of events and personalities that the mainstream media tend to present in more reductive terms.

Minhal Baig’s “We Grown Now” is a film masterfully tied to the emotive potential of place.

There’s so much beauty in this West Side Story. It merges things that have truly shaped pop culture from the graceful precision of Spielberg—who has always had a musical director’s eye in terms of how he choreographs his scenes—to the masterful songwriting of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein to the brilliant writing of Tony Kushner to the immigrant experience in this country. It grabs you from the very beginning and takes you there. Somehow, someday, somewhere.

Unlike American movies, where our identification with one character or another would likely be imposed from the outset, Force Majeure stands back from its couple, allowing us to inspect the characters from a discreet distance and draw our own conclusions.

Dunham displays a remarkable skill when it comes to using limited space, trapping his characters in a warehouse on a life-changing night and watching the insecurities that they have shrouded in macho masculinity come bubbling to the surface.

My hunch is that most viewers, whatever their previous views on this fraught subject, will come away not only fascinated but largely convinced by Murmelstein.

Most of all, this film is a tribute to the imagination and dedication that goes into the innumerable tiny decisions that make the difference between the beautifully drawn but listless "Black Cauldron," and the timeless, heartwarming appeal of the Ashman-era films.

Luca Guadagnino directs Challengers, a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley.

The muddled story-telling, a reflection of Jane's perception of the world, may frustrate some viewers. But those who can appreciate it as pointillist rather than linear will be able to appreciate fully Roberts' control of mood and the exceptional depth of the performances.

Bisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people.

Lisa Cortés uses the Big Bang as a visual motif throughout, with stars and galaxies exploding, hurtling out into the darkness. It is an apt analogy.

For those who are open to its challenges, it is a meditation on time, loss, and connection, and almost a century later, those themes are just as vital as they were when Eliot wrote them.

It's less concerned with covering the totality of his life than evoking his life force, which is good-humored, earthy and inspiring.

What it really is is a screwball comedy with a black-hearted center, an energy extremely difficult to capture and maintain, but Healy—as actor and as director—manages to do so.

Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, is an extreme movie, violent and pitiless and funny, but the space it provides for not just tenderness but contemplation makes it an "extremely" thought-provoking film as well.

As in Almodóvar’s films, the heightened use of color and settings is stunning, and the filmmakers are not afraid to express passionate emotion. That creates movie magic.

Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere" — which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love — yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.

Reality is a brutal film, with a short run-time and a story arc so strong it obliterates the memory of self-important complex films, weighted down with a "message," straining for relevance. Satter's film doesn't need to push. Reality wears its relevance on its fluorescent-lit short sleeves.

Director George Clooney understands the strength of this classic underdog story, and he knows how to tell it, with gorgeous visuals and heartfelt performances.

Oakley’s care and McEwen’s intense performance make Blue Jean one of this year’s most impressive movies. It deals with so much heartbreak without as many words; its pain is communicated through its somberly beautiful palette and performances.

As Sergio and Chucho share the names of the teachers who inspired them, we see Chucho begin to reconnect with what led him to become an educator. If we are lucky, we have at least one teacher in our past who showed us what we are capable of. If not, Sergio can help remind us that it is never too late.

McQueen doesn’t aim to achieve an arresting horror or to explain one person's grief. This urban interrogation is a frank interplay between survival and oblivion, selflessness and selfishness, continuity and demolition.

A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure, a film that derives its power from the universality of its final destination and the relatability of the pain, love, and regret that pave the guiding road.

She Came to Me is beautifully performed and directed with great charm, unexpected wisdom, and sweetness.

After the story of the Tulsa Massacre entered the national consciousness because of Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” and Misha Green’s “Lovecraft Country,” Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street this Memorial Day feels like the first time that the voices of the victims have finally been heard.

By virtue of its subject, Always in Season is going to be a very hard sit for many, but this film should be seen. It is an unflinching look at how the racial sins of the past remain flowing through the arteries of the present day.

Mister Organ gives good reason to think that Farrier has never encountered such a narcissist before, which makes this film significant as a ruthless cautionary portrait, however much it may be a visceral flashback for others. If you know anyone with Michael's aura, if someone makes you feel like this unforgettable movie does, this is your sign to run.

It is sweet without being sugary, colorful, and very charming, with terrific voice talent and a lot of music. It’s the best of the three.

28 Years Later is a deeply earnest film, a picture whose sincerity is initially off putting until it’s endearing.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

Loud, smart and ferociously committed to its premise, and it leaves an intriguingly bitter aftertaste.

Starred Up is HEAVY with slang and accents. You won’t understand a third of it. But there’s so much going on in between the lines of dialogue that you won’t care.

Its lessons about how kindness and inclusion benefit both the giver and the receiver are welcome, but its gentle reminder to view even the oldest and best-known story with fresh attention and connection may be even more meaningful.

One of the strongest aspects of The Student is that, while its view of Venya’s beliefs is decidedly skeptical, it doesn’t ridicule him or suggest that others are immune to his Biblical zealotry.

While it does profile the work of brilliant dancer, the film also contains two complex and moving love stories as well an account of a physically devastating tragedy followed by an extraordinary tale of struggle and survival.