Veteran French director Anne Fontaine approaches a spiritually and emotionally complex real-life slice of history with deftness and understated drama in The Innocents.

Dupieux’s latest will either annoy or charm you depending on how much you appreciate being led around by the nose by a filmmaker and a cast of characters who seem pretty committed to jerking you around.

Before You Know It shifts seamlessly from quirky to sad to mysterious to wacky to surreal within just the space of a few days, so much so that you’d never know it’s director Hannah Pearl Utt’s feature filmmaking debut.

If smart dumb comedies hold a place in your heart, you'll like Masterminds. The main characters are masterminds only in their own heads, and the thoughts that tumble out of their mouths are as nonsensical as they are sincere.

To tell you the truth, The Better Angels, as pictorially beautiful and emotionally evocative as it is, is so bereft of conventional narrative momentum that you have to consider it a miracle it got made.

I often rolled my eyes at the kitschy, broad humor that Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalzez (who co-wrote the film with Cristiano Mangione) sometimes used to characterize his sexually active queer characters.

Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches.

The true measure of a good tale is in the telling, and writer-director Noah Buschel spins his yarn in an unexpected, ultimately satisfying fashion.

A furious and often terrifying documentary about the militarization of US police.

Draper wrote, directed, and co-stars as their mother and the lovely score was composed by their musician father, Michael Wolff.

As a showcase for young American talent, it’s tough to beat. At its best, it reminded me of a rougher, more glassy-eyed 21st-century version of the kinds of movies Whit Stillman—and later, Noah Baumbach—have made.

Just because we already sense or know a lot of what is in this film does not mean we won't benefit from hearing it in such urgent and compelling fashion.

Despondent and gloomy even while it’s against a backdrop of bucolic beauty, director Yûta Shimotsu’s debut feature “Best Wishes to All” is the type of unsettling, high-concept horror film that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with unforgiving verve.

This is very evidently a personal story for the people who made it, a heartfelt note of thanks for the fresh start they found in their new home, and for all fresh starts and the people with the courage to find them.

Farrant’s confidence as a storyteller — along with Rapace’s full-bodied performance — enrich the story and guide it toward its delicately bonkers premise.

Since Thunberg is one of the most gifted and arresting speakers alive today, I Am Greta is inherently compelling as a behind-the-scenes document of the vulnerabilities masked by her forceful persona.

Ralph Breaks the Internet dares to encourage kids to not only be themselves but allow their friends to be true to their wants and needs as well. Your friend doesn’t have to be exactly like you to be your friend. It’s a message that’s very well-threaded through an entertaining, clever ride.

Greene’s film is deceptively profound in that it’s about a specific woman with a specific kind of life, yet it has universal resonance as a reflection of the struggle so many women endure—the desire to be all things to all people and inevitably failing someone, the yearning to balance career and parenthood and never finding enough time to do either completely right.

Obsession’s biggest blind spot is its inability to reckon with the sexual and psychological violence being inflicted on Nikki during her possession: By telling the story from the perspective of someone who sees her more as a prize to be won than a full human being, the film itself risks sidelining her ordeal. Navarrette’s powerhouse performance helps mitigate this by puncturing Nikki’s bipolar outbursts with moments of heartbreaking clarity, reminding us of the human being trapped inside of this misogynistic caricature.

A consistently intelligent (or at least bright), coherently constructed comedy that is on occasion a rather pointed critique of the American education system in the early 21st century. Don’t let that keep you away, though. It’s more often than not really funny.

For all its ferocious focus, this is a relatively quiet movie that embraces its smallness.

Happy Gilmore makes par through the strength of its sheer stupid energy and the game efforts of Sandler and his 50 or so co-stars.

See it with someone you love, and then just try to feel smug about the security of your own relationship afterward.

I didn’t laugh a whole lot while watching Adam, but I was never less than wholly engaged, and by the end, I felt grateful for having seen it.

Goofy, over-earnest, and just good enough where it counts, Kalki 2898 AD outdistances its competition simply by digging deeper than expected into its patchy lore’s rich melodramatic turf.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

Nearly every scene in Sophie Jones is either meditative or combative in some way, and Barr nails the flickering, shifting, visceral emotions of adolescence.

It is also the post-punk writer/director Sion Sono's most accessible film: a middle-aged filmmaker's tribute to the kind of epic-sized gangster-romance he used to fantasize about making.