There's something elemental about The Exorcist, even with the new hopeful ending that betrays the bleak original. [2000 re-release]

Thanks to Jacobs’ extraordinary ear for how people use words to wound and mask, and a holy trinity that knows not only how to speak those words but how to complement one another’s disparate performing styles, His Three Daughters ends up being nothing less than the single best movie you’ll likely see this year.

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

Fighter shapes up as one of the great documentaries of this year, or any other.

This rip-roaring Irish comedy is the freshest surprise of the season.

It's a big story, and in this landmark film Miyazaki is up to every demand. Sit back and behold.

An adventure in pure imagination that plays to the smart kid in all of us.

Laugh you will, loud and often. In the Loop deserves to be a sleeper hit. The whole cast is stellar. And it proves that smart and funny can exist in the same movie, even in summer.

So call Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a documentary, or a docufiction, or an ecstatic-truth improvisation — just don’t let it miss last call.

There are many elaborate lessons on life and how to live it in Soul, though its best may ironically be its simplest: Look. Listen. Learn. Enjoy. You may not turn the film off with an answer to what a soul is. But you may find yourself wondering if you’re forgetting to occasionally connect with your own.

A prison drama less interested in crime and punishment than in catharsis and the creative power of theater, director Greg Kwedar’s chronicle of how the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program affects its participants wants you to focus on the humanity on display over everything else.

20 Days in Mariupol gives you a sense of life during wartime that isn’t an abstraction, some distant thing happening to people thousands of miles away. The intimate feeling of what it’s like to have your country invaded, your living spaces demolished, and your closest family members killed before your eyes is palpable, and also gut-wrenching.

Turning Red is definitely a persuasive manifesto for “releasing the Red Panda” to be added to that list of menstruation euphemisms, but that’s not all it is. It is also a bright, moving, funny, happy film about adolescent angst, that doesn’t condescend but also doesn’t overload. It is, perhaps most remarkably, a movie about 13-year-olds that 13-year-olds might actually enjoy.

Writer-director Peter Sollett takes the familiar and turns it into hot, heartfelt movie magic.

Demange's film, spiked by an outstanding, all-stops-out O'Connell, makes politics unnervingly personal. Too much? What else do you expect of a cinematic knockout punch that sends you reeling?

Forget "The Conjuring," Blackfish may be the scariest movie around.

The Guilty is many things, not all of which work 100-percent of the time. But it does succeed as one hell of a radio play with benefits, letting a literal call-and-response crime procedural play out in real time.

It's warped and wonderfully effervescent. Ditto the songs by Danny Elfman, who sings the role of Bonejangles, the frontman for a skeleton jazz band at a swinging underworld club. Best of all is the love story.

Full Time works because of, not despite, its cutting thrills. The anxiety we feel as we watch is very much the point. Julie is living on the edge. The movie marvels at her ability to keep her balance. And it laments the fact that her survival should depend on it.

You’d have to search hard to find a movie this hypnotic and haunting.

A sequel of twisted thrills and sly surprises.

All credit to O’Sullivan, Thompson and a tone-perfect cast for creating a film that moves to the rhythms of life as its lived rather than fantasized. Saint Frances retains its rough edges to that last. And that’s some kind of miracle.

It’s the sort of movie that likes its volume dial to be permanently stuck at 11, its references to be hidden in plain sight and/or deafeningly trumpeted and its freak flag flying very, very high.

Sometimes it's racism; sometimes bum luck; sometimes it's producer Phil Spector putting Love's voice in another singer's mouth. You watch. You hear the gospel spoken in the voices of these women. And you marvel.

Tone-deaf but thunderously exciting.

Despite its grandiose title, 20th Century Women unfolds as series of small moments – some hilarious and heartfelt, other silly and sorrowful – that help define the characters and their time.

Writer-director David Michôd catches you in a vise and squeezes - hard.

Scorsese builds Hugo in the Méliès manner, creating a complete, ravishing Parisian world on a soundstage in England and reveling in the sheer transporting joy of it. Hugo will take your breath away.