Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is as spry and light on its feet as its titular feline.

The Grandmaster is a drunken love letter to experience, which helps us survive, and wisdom, which helps us face aging, loss and, ultimately, the abyss. Wong, who was called the coolest director in the world when he was much younger, is now 57. This film is about a man like him, who has proven himself in the world and enters mid-life exuding a new, sage kind of cool.

If you feel like you know where it’s headed, you are probably correct. But while Chen’s refusal to subvert commonplace elements is disappointing, there’s a sharp note of sorrowful, aching understanding running through the protagonists’ shared ordeal.

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.

The Killer may be based on a graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, but it feels like Fincher's most personal film to date.

It does what all good documentaries do: it made me want to read up and be educated more on its subject. And what a great and inspiring subject Pauli Murray is.

The entire documentary is unnerving. Focusing on four separate rape cases with eerie similarities, Audrie & Daisy is a stark portrait of a problem which is not in any way local, aberrant, or random. The problem is systemic.

The resulting feeling of outrage will spur viewers into action.

Ocean Waves is worth watching to see just how much a company like Ghibli can bring to a relatively simple tale.

Anyone who has ever circulated, even peripherally, in any comedy club scene, will recognize all of it. It's a quick-flash study of both frenzied activity and crushing ennui.

Billed as “an unromantic comedy,” Covino’s is a film that recalls comedies of the ‘70s in its willingness to allow its quartet of lead characters to be horny, problematic, and generally idiotic.

Folktales suggests that finding the threads connecting us to our collective past is work of great healing and rejuvenation.

This family isn’t picture perfect, but the way De Filippis tells their story is pretty flawless.

Results is not entirely successful but it does have a charm and a style that works. In its own weird way, it is quite romantic, while acknowledging that romance is sometimes unpleasant, always messy, and hooking up with someone represents the beginning of a lifetime of getting into messes and digging oneself out. That quality alone makes Results a really refreshing film.

Appropriate Behavior, even with its reliance on familiar types and tropes, feels like a unique vision of life seen through unique eyes.

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

They hold our attention with skillful use of animation and other visuals, touches of wry humor, and brisk pacing, but it is the heroine at the heart of the film who gives us hope and perhaps inspiration to try some town halls, petitions, and lawsuits of our own to protect the voting rights that are essential for a just and trustworthy government.

Witching and Bitching is accordingly overlong, and conceptually thin. But like most of de la Iglesia's films, it's also freakishly energetic, and often hysterical.

Best of all, they haven't sacrificed emotional impact. Mouthpiece is a deeply moving piece of work.

[Almodóvar] may share Catholic roots with Hitchcock and Bresson, but this film’s concern with guilt, transference, fate, mystery and (more obliquely) faith connects intricately with his native culture as well as the ideas expressed in his previous films. Building on his previous work while also charting a new course, it is suffused with the casual confidence of an established master.

Without making it blatant, this is a film that is obviously building to disaster, a story of a man who is the human iteration of one of his high-speed vehicles, just hoping not to crash.

Yes, it’s relatively predictable and arguably a little thin in terms of ambition, but it’s also refined and nuanced in ways that these films often aren’t. Everyone here is at the top of their craft from the character actors who populate the ensemble to the two leads at its center to everyone behind the camera, and you can feel that from first frame to last.

Good Boy could easily devolve into merely being a gimmick. But Alex Cannon and Leonberg’s dialogue-light script is aiming for more than DTV silliness. They’re making a movie about heart, loyalty, and friendship.

Does Girl work as a film? No. It does not.

This is not a terribly plot-driven movie; indeed, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s rather a ramble.

Horror ultimately gives way to irritation as the film veers into violent shock tactics and misplaced blame. What begins as a righteous indictment devolves into an unnecessary vendetta.

Dibbs does a fine job bringing a nuanced, realistic visual style to this venerable tale of war’s cruel and colossal wastes, and his actors are all first-rate, with Bettany a special stand-out.

Both Sides of the Blade is a romance, a love triangle, a marriage drama, an infidelity narrative, all familiar ground, but Denis' approach is her own.