I, Tonya is funny as hell, but the pain is just as real. You'll laugh till it hurts.

An absolute stunner of a movie.

Nunez finds a striking lyricism in simple lives that inspires an uncommonly fine cast and ranks him as a world-class filmmaker.

It's a haunting, hypnotic film that exerts an escalating grip on the heart and the conscience.

By stooping low without selling out, this babes-and-bullets tour de force gets you high on movies again.

Maestro is every bit Felicia’s story as it is Bernstein’s, and all the better for it. Through her, we see how convivial, how magnetic, how cold he could be.

The film’s title doubles as its own description. And the fact that they damn near pull it off is enough to make you feel you’ve also been awakened from a long, deep sleep in which you were forced to settle for large, loud, cine-extravaganzas that forgot there’s supposed to be a human factor in any of it. Rise and shine, folks. You’ve got something to actually see here.

Relic marks an auspicious debut for Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, who wants her slow-building thriller to seep into your bones rather than pound you with cheap scares.

If Alex Wheatle proves less powerful than the other films in this series, that’s in large part because of the strengths of the series. Every entry in Small Axe is a study in expansive miniatures. None of these films flexes its muscle by way of length. They burrow. Alex Wheatle’s primary imperfection is that it almost doesn’t burrow enough. The intricacies of Wheatle’s inner life feel almost rushed through or limited in their illustration. I wanted to know more about this young man — which is also a sign that the film is doing something right.

Nunez is a major filmmaker who thrives working in a minor key. He makes Ruby a romantic fable with a tough core of intelligence and wit. It’s a real beauty.

Here's Spike Lee at his ballsiest. Who else would take Aristophanes' Lysistrata, set in ancient Greece, and prop it up in present-day Englewood, Chicago, where violence is so prevalent the locals call it Chi-Raq, a mash-up of "Chicago" and "Iraq."

You won’t see the title character engage in Krav Maga with a gang of thugs or sprint across rooftops in Marrakesh (we’re assuming they’re saving that for the sequel). But you will witness Squibb step into the spotlight of leading what is technically an action movie and totally own it.

Roaring into the microphone with all the passion he can't put into his life, Slater gives this movie what it otherwise so desperately lacks: a reason for being.

Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t have time for a slow burn. It’s a movie that comes in hot and leaves in a molten blaze of glory.

Like the young women who we spend nearly two hours with, we also emerge feeling both tinges of empowerment and a palpable sense of deflation.

Coppola is a virtuoso of image and sound. but don't mistake her delicate touch for weakness. The Beguiled is a hothouse flower of startling power and intimacy. You can't shake it.

Red herrings, rabbit holes and oddball detours lurk around every corner. It’s a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference. Even by 1979 standards, it’s a seriously warped film.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

Wilson is flat-out hilarious, playing this cowboy like a surfer dude zapped back in time.

It's Dench, showing how faith and hellraising can reside in the same woman, who makes Philomena moving and memorable.

Funny, touching and acutely observed film.

What sounds like undiluted melodrama with the hounds forever nipping at Ewa's heels is transformed by Gray into a mesmerizing meditation on the broken American promise.

Sam Peckinpah lives! The rampaging spirit of the late filmmaker, known as Bloody Sam for films such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," is all over this blistering modern Western from first-time director Tommy Lee Jones.

August keeps a discreet distance from the harsher realities, making The Best Intentions must viewing only if you find diluted Bergman better than no Bergman at all.

It's a hardcore masterpiece that digs into our violent past to hold up a dark mirror to the systemic racism that still rages in the here and now.

If nothing else, The Edge of Seventeen should make Steinfeld a shoo-in for the teen movie young-restless-and-hilarious Hall of Fame. At the very least, the humanity she gives this young woman on the verge helps the movie teeter on the edge of being an instant classic.

If Jackman and Stewart are serious about this being their mutual X-Men swan song, they could not have crafted a more heartfelt valedictory.

Kelson ushers in a more meditative tone for this entry, which reveals that it is, among other things, a coming-of-age story. Yet this swerve into more emotional territory doesn’t dampen the tension or the terror that Boyle remains an expert at conjuring up; if anything, it acts as a countermelody to the genre aspects.

These melancholy Danes create something sweetly sexy, funny and touching.

Aims for pure joy and achieves it.

Of course, such Sixties films as Goodbye, Columbus and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice have trampled over similar terrain. But few can boast Roemer’s light touch, brisk pacing and anarchic comic spirit. The passing of time has given The Plot Against Harry a lost-and-found quality that is both innocent and seductive.

Close plays this ignored, pushed-aside woman like a gathering storm, drawing us into the mind and heart of a heroine who’s not going to take it any more. The actress has received six acting nominations without ever winning an Oscar. The Wife, a funny and fierce showcase for her prodigious talents, might just end the drought. You can’t take your eyes off her.

It's thrilling, a soaring blend of 3D animation and spectacular storytelling that swerves daringly to honor the healing chaos of family, human and dragon.

As a director, Franco succeeds beautifully at bringing coherence to chaos, a word that accurately describes the making of this modern midnight-movie phenomenon. Do you need to see "The Room" to appreciate The Disaster Artist? Not really.

In a genre that runs the gamut from A Hard Day’s Night to Can’t Stop the Music, filmmaker Rich Peppiatt’s gonzo take on the band’s story — titled, simply, Kneecap — falls somewhere between those two markers of quality; the group may be groundbreaking, but this recounting of their struggle to achieve fame, glory, and inhuman levels of intoxication sticks to an extremely familiar template.

Cruz exudes a sensual aura of mystery that holds you spellbound. And Almodóvar, a true poet of cinema, creates images -- horrifying and healing -- that live inside your head like a waking dream. You want to miss a movie like that? I didn’t think so.

You won't forget this film -- it's devastating.

Blue Caprice is a cinematic punch to the gut, a mind-bending meditation on how to mold a killer, and one of the most potent and provocative true-crime movies ever made.

Without pushing or showing off, Miller creates a breezy comedy that pulls you up short. Buoyed by faultless actors who mesh beautifully, Maggie's Plan tickles you with laughs that can — suddenly or even days later — choke you up with emotion.

Adventureland throws a lot at us, but not enough of it sticks.

A thrilling combination of documentary and musical dazzler.

Harington and Vikander provide the spark the film needs to get us through the tribulations and tragedies that pile on with numbing regularity. You leave Testament of Youth feeling some of the impact that Brittain’s book must have had at the time.

What makes the film a classic is the skill with which the leads are so believable as heroin addicts, pivoting from intense love to hatred and dope sickness, all while maintaining the couple's signature snarl.

Even when Oldroyd loses his directorial grip, Pugh is there to make things right. Not many young actress have that sort of power to command the screen as if by divine right. She dives deep into this terrifically twisted, erotic thriller and makes it matter.

The suspense crackles, the acting sizzles and the script, by promising first-timer Russell Gewirtz, keeps tossing surprises like grenades.

Though the formulaic result comes up short as cinema, it’ll make you laugh you ass off. There are worse trade-offs.

Guardians of the Galaxy does the impossible. Through dazzle and dumb luck, it turns the clichés of comic-book films on their idiot heads and hits you like an exhilarating blast of fun-fun-fun. It's insanely, shamelessly silly – just one reason to love it.

Even as the story builds to a final mano a mano, the movie is less invested in a win-or-lose outcome than in taking you along for the ride.

It is a gorgeous film, and one that deserves to be seen on a giant screen as much as that other only-in-theaters release this weekend, F9. And even when I Carry You With Me becomes so lost in its aesthetic that you worry it’s losing focus, this impressionistic approach doesn’t take away from what is an intimate, extremely personal story of two men fighting to build a life with each other.

A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.

A mesmerizing film spinning from hilarity to heartbreak.

An emotional wipeout.

Corsage is not a great movie, but it’s good at detailing one woman’s circumstances. It doesn’t browbeat us with meaning, which it had every right to do, but instead attempts something humbler.

A bright burst of action and comedy with a cast that makes for rousing good company.

The movie may want you to see the best of us in the dingiest of places. But you’re as delusional as Mikey Saber if you think it will avert its eyes from showing us the worst of us as well.

Maybe this redo didn’t need so many bells and whistles, but Mangold brings it home.

Fukunaga, son of a Japanese father and a Swedish mother, is a filmmaker to watch. He has reanimated a classic for a new generation, letting Jane Eyre resonate with terror and tenderness.

Duncan zips through five decades and dozens of characters without reducing the participants to cliches or slogans. A remarkable cast helps him to keep focused on the core of the piece.

Evocative, mysterious and shot through with bruising humor and heartbreak, A Monster Calls gets you where you live and where there's no place to hide. There's magic in it.

Blast of fright and fun.

Bahrani’s take on Balram’s present-day circumstances is eventually so restricted to the beginning and end of the film that it begins to feel like a foregone conclusion, rather than like the curiosity that it is.

Takes off with the lightning speed of a thriller, the gonzo force of frontline journalism and the emotional wallop of a drama that puts a human face on shocking statistics.

The Stroll is a vital work of recent urban history. Even if you wouldn’t want to have lived there, you won’t regret visiting.

Not since Lawrence of Arabia has there been a serious historical movie of this sweep, complexity and intelligence.

This baby dazzles like nothing else anywhere.

Winter’s impressive doc admittedly works better as a preaching-to-the-choir portrait than a work of advocacy or conversion. But it is one hell of chronicle of Frank the Walking Contradiction: He was a rock star and a symphonic composer.

You might bitch that Flight levels off after its shocking, soaring start. But you'd be missing the point of an exceptional entertainment that Zemeckis shades into something quietly devastating – not an addiction drama, but the deeper spectacle of a man facing the truth about himself.

Before it goes off the rails in the final stretch, 99 Homes is a riveting rabble-rouser that thinks it can make a difference. In these days when Hollywood typically dulls our wits, Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes has a fire in its belly. It's spoiling to be heard.

Citizen K, Alex Gibney’s surprisingly strong documentary on the rise and fall and rebranding of Khodorkovsky, does a good job of charting the contours of this controversial figure’s story; that the filmmaker was able to get the subject himself to tell so much of it in his own words feels like a coup.

Mixing comedy and corn with surprising savvy, Dave is the first political fable of the Clinton era. It’s a winner.

This you-are-there spellbinder is a master director shining his light on the best rock band on the planet.

Nothing the Hughes brothers have done in their videos for Tone Loc, Tupac Shakur and others prepares you for the controlled intensity and maturity they bring to their stunning feature debut.

One of the year's best and most provocative films.

Bruckner is an amazement, piercing the heart without begging for sympathy. This small gem of a movie is the perfect setting for her breakthrough performance.

An emotional powerhouse.

While the movie also offers a much-needed context of the “Satanic panic” of the ’80s and ’90s — backwards messages and heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, oh my! — as well as vintage afternoon-TV handwringing and glimpses of organizational in-fighting, it’s these scenes of folks engaging in real political showdowns by any ridiculous means necessary that give the movie its sense of currency.

What The Whistlers lacks in terms of the rigor associated with its creator’s back catalog, it makes up for as a deadpan genre piece with a sly jab. It’s a serious work of pulp friction.

Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story.

As a horror movie, Talk is cheap thrills, done cleverly and with an abundance of voltage. As a proof-of-concept for what these gents can do, given some time and a couple extra gallons of Karo syrup, this is a hell of an introduction. Hands down.

Go with it. Let Nichols turn your head around. He sure as hell will. One caveat: Nichols drops you into the action, no backstory road map. What you see is what you get. Luckily, what you get is extraordinary.

The film itself, energetically directed and written by Michael Hoffman, can't always rise to the level of its two dynamo stars.

It's hellish good fun. Stevens is mesmerizing as the avenger, helping director Adam Wingard turn The Guest into a blast of wicked mirth and malice.

Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in.

In his third feature, following 2009's "Impolex" and 2011's "The Color Wheel," Perry, 30, offers a stinging portrait of writing as one of the bleeding arts. And he's bloody funny about it in the bargain.

This eerie riff on The Shining feels as if the Irish writer-director has a better grasp on both the catch-and-release tension that the genre needs and the balancing of sharp shocks and slow-simmering dread.

The star is unstoppable and spectacular to see in motion. Watch her fly.

Ultimately, Something in the Dirt doesn’t quite convince as a genuine mystery — and it doesn’t seem to be meant to. Having fun with the artifice of it all — the loose “documentary” format, the well-played and visibly signaled “clues” scattered throughout — seems far more to the point.

A different kind of love story: an honest one that takes a piece out of you.

Performance artist Miranda July hits a grand slam as the writer, director and star of her first film. It's a moonbeam romance laced with startling wit and gravity.

Scott and Davis could not be better. You're in for something special.

You could gripe about the excess of carnage and lack of philosophical substance. But surviving nature is Iñárritu's subject, and he delivers with magisterial brilliance.

It’s a documentary that starts as a nonfiction portrait and ends as a horror movie.

Williams and Bernal aren’t focused on making a dramatized ESPN-friendly narrative or a melodrama about a gay man suffering the slings and arrows of intolerance. They’re far more interested in what resides in the thin middle of that Venn diagram, in which a luchador finds his authentic self in the most outrageous, over-the-top way possible, and revolutionizes a sport in the process.

It’s a thrill ride from a director who, recently prone to intriguing, one-off experiments, knows we didn’t exactly need reminding that he’s still got it, but reminds us anyway — flaunting what he has because, well, he can.

Based on the bestseller by Bauman and Bret Witter and blessed with a nuanced script by John Pollono, the film makes sure that tears, when they come, are fully earned.

Beach and Adams give remarkable performances that grow in feeling and intensity.

As the director puts it: “This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist.”

Obvious Child is a romcom with a sting in its tail. And Slate is a dynamo, nailing every laugh while showing a true actor's gift for nuance.