The result is a film that often feels like Zahler’s most assured to date. Self-indulgent? Oh yeah. A provocation? You bet. But it’s difficult to ignore the craftsmanship and performances in Dragged Across Concrete simply because you don’t like some of its darker themes or feel like it’s too long.

Baskin does what many horror films try and fail to do: it makes you feel like you're a passive prisoner/spectator, watching as an especially vivid nightmare unfolds.

To this viewer, it develops into a pretty nifty piece of genre work, a thriller that’s expertly made even if it doesn’t quite hum like the best Park films. The fact that a good, well-made thriller feels almost like a disappointment given this creator’s pedigree is just a testament to the work he’s produced before.

The results are uneven — how could they not be? — but the sheer weirdness of the whole enterprise has a charm to it and it certainly is never boring. Bewildering, maybe, but never boring.

While the film works as a primer for viewers who are curious about Lear but don’t know the details of his life and work, it’s more interesting as a movie about age and memory.

The film’s boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day.

This is first and foremost Eastwood’s movie and if he wants to feature his incongruous tinkling piano-bar jazz on the soundtrack, that is his prerogative.

This documentary is about resilience and advocacy, but most of all it is a love story.

It has a solid story to tell, and tells it with no winks and few, if any, frills. It’s involving and ultimately exciting.

Much like the way that Stubby was often underestimated before he found his calling, I came into this film not expecting how much I would appreciate a more thoughtful use of animation to tell an engaging story.

This movie shows how Fitzmaurice was able to direct the picture — scheduling the shot so that he could efficiently marshal his energy was a big part of the process, as of course was the “eye gaze” computer.

The Heat is violent, with some pretty gruesome moments and some questionable police work. That's part of the fun. Cagney and Lacey these two ain't. When they finally join forces, they go rogue with a gusto that is refreshing.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.

Unfortunately, The Public Enemy isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically.

This is Mesén's debut feature film, and it's a powerful and intuitive piece of work.

She Will isn't exactly a horror movie. It has its creepy moments, particularly in the visual collages and Clint Mansell's unnerving score, but it's more thought-provoking than scary.

In depicting one woman’s fight for justice, Kaufman’s indelible documentary becomes an empowering three-dimensional story of resistance and courage.

Worth seems to get it, all of it, in a way that films of this type rarely do, which makes it all the more irritating when it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it's telling its complex narrative.

This is an engaging and watchable activist documentary that does make way for optimism in its last minutes, but doesn’t, um, sugarcoat its envoi about changing our eating ways: “Not only can we do it, we have to.”

It’s a movie that only begins as a commentary on doping in sports and becomes something greater about the dangers of being a whistleblower, especially when the whistle blows on Russia.

While it’s ultimately a bit too self-conscious to provoke the existential dread and true terror of the best films like it, it’s still an impressive accomplishment thanks to Eggers’ fearlessness and a pair of completely committed performances.

Without being explicit, without being overtly angry, Kabakov's installations are a critique of the entire system, a critique leavened with irony, wit, and fantasy. It's powerful stuff. You go into Kabakov's labyrinths of associations and you don't come out.

Johnson keeps it all moving at a decent clip, though, with the help of Michael Penn’s score. And she photographs Powley and her mesmerizing blue eyes so lovingly that it’s hard not to find her adorable—even when she’s being awful.

By respecting the spiritual journeys of his subjects, Karslake affirms that he is more concerned with reaching across the aisle than preaching to the choir.

The result is something deeply reflective about femininity, culture, commerce, friendship, sexuality and the various souls who dwell in the impossible intersection of it all.

Magid essentially casts herself as the lead of this documentary, which has a wild way of questioning ownership when it comes to an artist that so many people love.

Beckerman intersperses the footage with static, loud and jagged, and the couple of "effects" included are quick and dirty. If you're going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. Beckerman has.

Some of the symbolism has the feeling of being laid on top of the narrative. It feels imposed, especially when it goes from subtext to text. You can see it coming from a mile away. But Ms. Purple works because of Chu's performance.