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.

Director Richard Eyre has struck gold. Twice. Dench and Winslet are a riveting matchup.

A stimulating detective story that holds you in thrall.

Nil By Mouth is a shockingly intimate portrait of entrapment that may leave you wincing. It’s Oldman’s Raging Bull.

The Secret of NIMH folds a commentary on the evils of animal experimentation and a salute to the bravery of single moms into a smart, gripping action-adventure framework, becoming an underappreciated touchstone for sensitive Eighties kids.

Despite its well-worn triumphant narrative, King Richard proves convincing at giving credence to the idea of Williams as a fact already stranger than fiction — the kind of man you can’t help but feel is a real character, in the everyday-life sense of that phrase: a one-of-a-kind guy, hard to reproduce.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

Shot with a surrealist's eye for madness and destruction by the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Mother! always seems on the verge of exploding. Your head will feel the same way. And I mean that as a compliment.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

Here's a vampire movie for people who don’t like vampire movies. What We Do in the Shadows is packed with laughs, almost all of them are intentional.

10 Cloverfield Lane comes loaded with everything a psychological thriller needs to shatter your nerves — and then kicks it up a notch.

The actors give it their all, especially Knightley, whose jaw- jutting, heavily accented and unfairly criticized portrayal gives the film its fighting spirit.

Nicole Kidman is just astonishing in Rabbit Hole - subtle, fierce, brutally funny, tender when you least expect it, and battered by the feelings that hit her when she forgets to duck.

The last days of guilt-free glitz had consequences for more than two white chicks and their boyfriends, and Stillman shows how with delicious malice and unexpected compassion.

Call it the black "Scarface" or "the Harlem Godfather" or just one hell of an exciting movie.

A delicate gem.

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.

In the hands of Nichols, Mud emerges as a thing of bruised beauty. There's magic in it.

Nightcrawler curves and hisses its way into your head with demonic skill. When the laughs come, they stick in your throat. This is a deliciously twisted piece of work. And Gyllenhaal, coiled and ready to spring, is scarily brilliant. He truly is a monster for our time.

An Afrocentric historical epic designed to be screened as big as possible, made by a Black female filmmaker, starring a Black woman of a certain age as an action hero, telling a story that’s left out of world-history books, vying for a mass audience in the age of I.P. imperialism — these are not just qualifiers for The Woman King. They are the sounds of ceilings being shattered and, hopefully, left to rot as piles of splintered glass on the ground.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call what Brügger delivers here a documentary, exactly — it’s a “true” crime story with an emphasis on the quotes.