You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

The Promised Land is, if nothing else, a nod to both its nation’s and the movies’ past. The feudal warring over unclaimed Jutland territory may be strictly Danish, but the excitement, romance, and awe-inspiring visual spectacle of this melodrama is vintage Hollywood.

The whole thing is a blast, which doesn’t mean you don’t sense that the stakes are high or that the tension between this threesome isn’t threatening to smother a great creative collaboration in the crib.

Colman brings Ferrante’s creation to life with all the withering pathos she deserves. Gyllenhaal catches it handsomely, awe-struck, as if even she didn’t know how painfully real this woman Leda could seem or, in Colman’s hands, be.

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

Lit with a poet’s eye by Deschanel and given dramatic heft by von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away lunges at the primitive forces that define our lives. Even when it trips up, it’s never less than exhilarating.

Searching is a technical marvel with a beating heart at its core, which makes all the difference.

It's rare that a a movie leaves you pinned to your seat, wanting to see it again -- right now, this minute -- to work out the pieces of the puzzle. Unbreakable is one of those movies.

At two-and-a-half hours, Monrovia, Indiana often feels static and low-key to a fault. As always, Wiseman is working hard at being fair, refusing to condemn or even condescend to what his camera sees.

A fun ride, spiked with touching gravity, is not a shabby way to end the movie summer. Thanks to Jillian Bell, a comic force of nature with real dramatic chops, that’s what you get in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

In this funny, touching and haunting film, Patel cuts through stereotypes to show the hard truths of straddling two cultures.

It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.

It's a real charmer from a director who feels that a knockabout romantic farce doesn't have to be mindless -- take that, "America's Sweethearts."

Come for the most impressive, lustrous car that a gajillion-dollar budget can buy. The reason to stay, however, is the driver.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

Springs surprises that entertain and provoke.

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.

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

The movie isn’t just a paean to a pioneer spirit. It’s equally a testament to the actor playing her.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

It’s these life-or-death stakes that Happening puts front and center, as it forces viewers to not just confront the stigma associated with abortion — a word, by the way, that’s never uttered in the film — but to immerse themselves in the same dread and paranoia that Anne feels.

In this painfully funny and touching look at the vanities and insecurities that a mother (Brenda Blethyn) can pass on to her daughters in the name of love, writer-director Nicole Holofcener ("Walking and Talking") does a chick flick right.

The World to Come is full of inversions, deviations from the usual themes, complicated as it is by interlocking contrasts, unexpected emphases. This is a movie in which love springs in winter, whereas spring beckons devastation.

Sure it’s cornball, but Chadha revels in it. You will, too, as the movie becomes an irresistible blast of pure feeling.

The list goes on with moments historic and hilarious from the likes of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Arlene Dahl, Ann Miller, Jimmy Durante and even Elvis. That’s more than entertainment, that’s pure gold.

In a beautifully nuanced directing debut, actor Paul Dano mines the smallest details in Richard Ford’s acclaimed 1990 novel — he and his partner Zoe Kazan wrote the emotionally-attuned script — to create a portrait of a woman who can’t quite catch up with the frustration and feminist stirrings she feels inside.

Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream.

Melissa McCarthy is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?