The Year of the Everlasting Storm is definitely a noteworthy achievement in anti-escapism, which the current cinema could certainly always use more of.

It is a compelling story, and the film is a combination of spectacular scenery, arduous exertion, inspiring pep talks, adolescent rebellion, emotional confrontations, and lessons learned by both the teenagers and their leader.

My own taste runs to different modes of poetic cinema, but I credit The Girl and the Spider for the seemingly paradoxical clarity of its mysterious vision.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

Directing and starring as the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Cooper has crafted a film that’s technically dazzling but emotionally frustrating.

A simultaneously deeply personal and sometimes-opaque cinematic experience that often feels like walking through memories—messy, malleable—in search of an intrinsic inner truth.

If anything, there’s something more to the “peace” that these men repeatedly say they found on the water. Peace may be harder to find this summer than we could have ever imagined, but it’s still a primal human need.

It's as much an anthropological pseudo-documentary as it is a drama, one that sometimes evokes the Terrence Malick philosophy of "The Thin Red Line," which began by insisting that humans are a part of nature and that when humans war with other humans, it is nature warring with itself.

It’s certainly a portrait of matrimony and pregnancy, though one that should never, ever be screened in a Lamaze class.

Most of all, Magic Mike's Last Dance is about fit, graceful bodies moving through space.

As it turns out, "Norte" is not quite the epochal work of cinema greatness that some have suggested but it is hardly a miss either. There are moments of staggering beauty and power on display here and yet there are also moments when it seems to be ambling around with no clear idea of where it wants to go.

The Fallen Sun is a natural continuation for fans but also presents a way in for series newcomers, even sending the character off in a new direction that playfully acknowledges Elba’s Bond bona fides while asserting, not unconvincingly, that Luther’s world is quite enough.

Ride is a film overstuffed with themes, ideas, and characters, but it works because it's made with the kind of urgency that comes from a filmmaker who has to tell this story and get it out on celluloid right now, or they'll bust.

The Innocent is quirky, touching, and well-played fun.

Both scrupulous and fittingly hazy, Gyllenhaal captures her character’s outsider-ly state-of-mind with astonishing depth, through the subtlest of details in the way she carries herself.

The Graduates is a reflective movie, an emotional story without telling you how to feel, only that for many people across the country, learning to live with grief can be just as important as planning for the future.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

Mija weaves a more nuanced emotional tapestry than is typically seen in immigration stories like this one. Yes, sadness and fear are present. But gratitude, resentment, guilt, stress, hope, and excitement are also essential to Doris’ story, her family’s story, and the Mexican-American community at large.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

“Snow always lands on top” is the longtime credo for Coriolanus and his family. The question of how it falls, and whether it sticks, makes “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” a surprisingly suspenseful prequel.

A compilation of quick clips at the end is not entirely persuasive about O’Connor’s impact, but her story and her voice are impact enough.

Owing some of its charms to other sex comedies from that decade, this Sundance 2016 title (now playing on Netflix) proves to be more layered than its promises of shenanigans may expect, especially as this is the rare sex comedy that doesn’t glorify the male gaze.

A bleak, brutal film; at times, its monotony can be draining.

Still the Water knows what it is and what it's doing, and even if it doesn't quite come together in the end, it's a mistake to think that there's no point or plan just because the movie doesn't regularly announce its intentions.

This decidedly dark and super-violent South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su tells a tale so jam-packed with betrayals, double-crosses and alleged authority figures that even the most dedicated of genre buffs may find it too unrelentingly grim and cynical for their tastes.

Gold is one of the few disabled people, and the first wheelchair-using woman, in the Directors Guild of America and her film has two obvious aims: to look to the past, and provide an overview of 120 years of portrayals of disability onscreen, and to look to the future and discuss how they can be improved. It succeeds in both.

White plays it straight, and deftly untangles the different webs of meaning and implication, political, social and otherwise, to draw us into Siti and Doan's worlds, to understand how the girls were tricked and used as pawns in a deadly North Korean family feud.

Most importantly, this is not a film to be “solved.” It is a mood piece made by someone constantly playing with structure, but never in a way that calls overt attention to itself.