True to Lee’s reputation of playing with the chemistry of storytelling, Pass Over has the air of an experiment and the clarity of poetry, as inspired by the news and told by artistry beyond far beyond Lee’s. In the grand scheme of his filmography it’s one of his smaller projects, but it is by no means a minor work.

So while Cheatin' does have a narrative spine, it's most entertaining when it's hardest to pin down.

The bloody fingerprints of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers — among other violence-prone auteurs — are smeared all over his tidy and tautly-told Blue Ruin.

The Summer Book is a haiku of a movie, conveying profound thoughts about time, memory, loss, and nature through a simplified, meditative, cinematic language of exquisite images and gentle music.

It’s delightful and almost miraculous the way this movie manages to work as a comic heist picture on a huge scale, and with a comic science-fiction picture blended into it…while managing to cohere to the whole, you know, Marvel thing.

A modestly scaled character comedy-drama that winds up exerting an almost shockingly strong emotional force by the end.

These caretakers are all too human. The movie somehow turns that into a reason to admire them all the more.

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.

This is a remarkably assured movie, through and through. Walsh and cinematographer Guy Godfree have taken care to make every individual shot a thing of beauty. But the artfulness always acts in service of the emotions, which in the end become both inspiring and heartbreaking.

Rodin is no plain biopic, and it certainly doesn’t require knowledge of his work to get hooked on the film. It’s in fact best when it does away with historical details and feels like a film about an artist and their art form, who just happened to exist.

Dune: Part Two is a robust piece of filmmaking, a reminder that this kind of broad-scale blockbuster can be done with artistry and flair.

Nocturne isn’t just the best entry in the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series, it’s one of the best Blumhouse movies in years.

Based on the autobiographical book Everything Went Well by the late Emmanuèle Bernheim (a frequent Ozon collaborator), Everything Went Fine is an emotional and complex portrait of a family in crisis, the father's stroke exposing underlying cracks, old pains, new anxieties.

Shia LaBeouf wrote the script, and based it on his own childhood. This means he is, in essence, playing his own father. The performance is so good, so in-the-trenches, it feels like it's an act of channeling rather than mimicry or even imitation.

It's worth seeking out for the way it observes psychologically complex small-town characters struggling to endure present-day hardships and past traumas.

It is a great pleasure to see actors who know how to use every bit of their real, unfixed faces to show the subtlest details of thought and emotion.

Maiden excels as a suspenseful sports tale and a record of a historic first, but its biggest strength is in its warts-and-all character study of the Maiden crew. One can’t help but feel seen, moved and empowered once the credits roll.

In the end, Locke is a cinematic stunt that engrosses as it unspools, and pays dividends after it’s been accomplished.

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, The Eight Mountains works slowly and patiently. It doesn't rush. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.

All Shall Be Well is a picture of cruel realities. It’s a deliberate, nimble drama, one about major slights, class imbalance, and rampant homophobia.

I Used to Be Funny works through its themes in a thought-provoking way, structuring the story more like a mystery to be solved for its main character to move forward and touching on issues of consent and relationships along the way.

The film avoids hagiography, and in doing so, brings out the undeniable humanity of its subjects.

Mungiu doesn’t traffic in easy hero and villain narratives. He’s more interested in revealing how easily anyone can be both.

Herself is excellent with how difficult and shameful it can be to ask for help. Shame is such a terrible experience people will do literally anything to avoid it, and Sandra's battle with that shame spiral is the most insightful aspect of the film. It's profound on a deeper level than seeing a group coming together to build something.

In this version, she is not the helpless girl driven to madness and likely suicide by a lover’s rejection. Played by “Star Wars” heroine Daisy Ridley, she has courage, intelligence, integrity, and agency. In this story, neither she nor the Danish prince she loves waste time worrying about whether to be or not to be. She is fully alive in every moment and ready to act to protect herself or those she loves.

In this flavorful milieu of genres, Manzoor emerges with a sensibility that’s uniquely hers and a thrill to watch. Kansara, also making her feature debut, brings an energetic presence to the screen, matching Manzoor’s irreverent humor and sharp dialogue with pitch-perfect delivery.

What “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” lacks in subtlety, it more than compensates for in its range of feeling and the surprising depth of its feel-good reassurances.

It offers up a deep and often fascinating dive into his oeuvre, utilizing a central conceit so nervy that most viewers will either marvel or recoil at its sheer audacity.