The Tragedy of Macbeth is Joel’s first outing on his own but, in this regard, he’s made a movie that suits the broader world of his work. That he’s done so most cogently through a character most other approaches to this play have barely noticed only makes it that much more thrilling.

A hilarious hodgepodge, in which De Niro gives his best comic performance to date.

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.

The fighting spirit of this female quartet blazes through every frame of this galvanizing film. “We did this without knowing shit,” says Vilela. That’s just a beginning. Way before the movie ends, you’ll feel their fire.

Scores a solid hit.

Allenphiles will have a field day mining the film for inside dope. Are the clips from Shanghai and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — movies in which men are set up for a fall by dangerous women — a sly dig at Farrow? Better to see Manhattan Murder Mystery for what it is: Annie Hall replayed in a minor key by a filmmaker who sees the comedy, tragedy and transience of love and can’t stop playing the game. Allen’s readiness to step on a laugh in favor of feeling may cost him at the box office. But in this time of private hell and public scorn, it will help him endure.

A shockingly intimate and deeply affecting film about the roots of sexual role playing.

Hollywood retreads of foreign films are rarely a good idea (did you see Miss Bala?), but Gloria Bell is a playful, pleasure-giving exception.

It’s a testament to Yamazaki’s work as both director and screenwriter that Minus One feels like a wartime character drama first, kaiju film second.

Egoyan is an acquired taste, but once in, you’re hooked. Exotica is Egoyan’s most accomplished and seductive film to date — even tackling acute psychic distress, Egoyan’s deadpan comic eye never flinches.

The antique charms of the story can still seduce us when done well, and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who freely adapted the play with Jean-Claude Carrière, knows how to fashion a sumptuously beautiful, hugely entertaining spectacle that also stays alert to the cadences of the heart.

In crafting a fierce, fragmented, downbeat film about a character who makes the wrong decision as a man by being right as a cop, Penn flies in the face of what sells in Hollywood. Godspeed.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent creates a woman’s revenge tale fueled by a righteous anger at the evil men do. There’s not a whit of audience coddling. You’ve been warned.

Disney delivers an uneven but sensationally entertaining sequel to the Oscar winner that pulls out all the stops.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

For all of its curated channeling of past midnight-movie programming, In Fabric doesn’t feel like it’s cut from the same cloth as anything else. It’s a singular trip into a singularly warped mind.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

This comedy is packed with p---- jokes, the cruder the better.

Keeps the pulse pounding without sacrificing laughs or logic.

One the feats of McQueen’s movie is that, by the end, the ability to read — proof of having been educated — is all the more powerful for seeming exceptional.

The doc’s goal: Don’t think of the Go-Go’s as a bit of Reagan-era nostalgia, the musical equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. Think of them as a first-tier, kick-ass rock group, period, full stop, the end. Mission accomplished.

The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyone’s hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe it’s time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.

It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig.

The talented Mr. Minghella has made an imperfect movie but not an impersonal one. His morality tale means to get under the skin, and does.

A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “greed is good” go-go Eighties.

What Will & Harper is, at its heart, is a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do. That alone makes it worth the trip.

Mira Nair’s lush, heartfelt romance glows with humanity and desire; it puts the “passion” back in “compassion.”

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.