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.