Do I Sound Gay? gets into the mysteries of homosexual attraction and eroticism, and suggests that if Thorpe wants the kind of long-term relationship that Takei, Sedaris, and Savage have, he’ll have to get over his fetishization of the macho and learn to accept himself. That’s a poignant, powerful conclusion, all from asking one question.

Everything about the way this story is rendered makes it feel much bigger than the characters and their limited travails can make it.

The film lacks the narrative tightness, stark beauty, and gripping intensity of Granik’s feature-film work. But it has much of the nuance, and the emotional impact.

Though Cartel Land isn’t interested in making fact-filled statements about the drug war, Heineman’s ingenious conceit gets at the difficulty ordinary people have in doing something about it.

She was, the documentary argues, a complex artist, one of awe-inspiring talent and many frustrating contradictions, and one who deserved better than to become just another punchline on her way to the grave. Kapadia provides a heartbreaking reminder of what we lost when we lost her.

After spending time with all nine of these sometimes-gutsy, sometimes-conflicted women and men, it’s impossible not to feel a deeper appreciation for their struggle to feel like the skin they live in is genuinely their home.

A Poem Is A Naked Person is littered with striking moments that fit casually into Blank’s study of fame and aspiration.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.

The director’s observant approach to the material helps pave over the frustrations.

Batkid’s story is fun in part because it’s so joyously frivolous. He’s cute because he’s a tiny version of a big thing. Trying to blow him up into something bigger than he is spoils some of what makes him special.

Most of the time, the way to hit the big target is to aim as precisely as possible at the small one. That’s what Noah Buschel does so well in his new film Glass Chin.

A prime example of how to deliver a film on an urgent topic that doesn’t feel like medicine.

Vikander is the main event here, and if Testament Of Youth is a testament to anything, it’s to her ability to embody great women with grace and battle-ready precision.

Culkin’s terrifically effective performance and Howe’s pitch-perfect writing and directing make Gabriel the kind of insightful, empathetic project that makes cineastes feel good about feeling bad.

It’s easier to tell the story of a smashing success or an utter failure, because there’s drama inherent to either scenario, but what Hansen-Løve accomplishes with Eden is trickier, a feeling of being adrift in a scene where people are already invited to lose themselves to dance.

The movie’s only real drawback is that its singleminded approach sometimes omits crucial information.

Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.

If there’s anything worth extrapolating from The Tribe, it isn’t the deaf experience so much as recognizing our own tendencies to conform to certain unspoken laws. The more insular a society, the more severe the consequences of rebellion.

It’s an unusual but surprisingly effective mix of outrageousness and sincerity, in which the four anxious revelers somehow function both as broad caricatures and as real, complex human beings.

For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

For a film so slight, Doomsdays makes a strong impression.

Charlie’s Country is sincere at the expense of nuance, and tragic at the expense of variety: It tends to hit its points over and over, with blunt, on-the-nose sincerity. But Gulpilil’s performance keeps it from crossing too far into hand-wringing preachiness.

With The Nightmare, Ascher abandons the strictures of a conventional documentary to frolic in the terrifying netherworlds of human consciousness. It’s not enough for Ascher, a sufferer himself, to tell his audience about sleep paralysis—they have to feel it, too.

The first-time feature director still has some growing up to do—the glaring genuflections to his influences betray his rookie status—but Patch Town has just enough laughs, imagination, and sincerity to follow through on its naked bids for cult adoration.

Spy never lets its genre conceit get in the way of its comedy, which delivers more laugh-out-loud moments than any other mainstream comedy so far this year.

An earnest attempt to convey the essential truth of Wilson’s extraordinary career and difficult life animates both halves of the film, and both performances.

Despite a too-neat resolution, the characters in Results haven’t figured themselves out, much less their relationships, and Bujalski is perfectly comfortable sorting through their confusion.

It’s hard to build a story entirely on grace notes, but Lafleur comes close.

Heaven Knows What isn’t interested in merely exploring the world of New York City addicts. It wants to make their experiences felt, with the dissonant, amp-cracking roar of a punk anthem.

While far from perfect, I Believe In Unicorns is unusually attuned to how it feels for a teenager to have her first intense, quasi-mature relationship, and how it feels for her to use that love affair as an escape from some serious problems at home.

It’s a quiet film of modest narrative ambitions and simple shifts. But its technical and visual ambitions couldn’t be higher. It’s as if Ghibli is still trying to raise its own bar, so that even if it’s going out, it’s reminding viewers what they’d be missing.

Sunshine Superman, a portrait of BASE jumping founding father Carl Boenish, effectively captures the irrepressible energy of a man who never tired of taking flying leaps. But it also does something even rarer for the documentary genre: It demands to be shown on an IMAX screen.

The title does a real disservice to the film, a romantic comedy made with both visual and narrative intelligence, centered by great performances from Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.

Güeros is a vivid illustration of factionalism’s brute outcome, which has people choosing up sides and tossing bombs at people, while dismissing their victims’ complicated lives and problems.

The film’s deft, improbable balance of tone makes its success feel well-deserved. Not many directors could have pulled off the blend of somber reflection and gallows humor that Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon manage here.

The grace notes in Dujardin’s performance are an important booster for The Connection, which conspicuously lacks the grit and flavor of William Friedkin’s tangentially related The French Connection, and at worst unfolds like Scorsese-lite.

Slow West often feels like the Coen brothers’ rendition of True Grit, if they’d brought Wes Anderson in as a collaborator. It’s a shaggy-dog story full of colorful characters and aimless but diverting narrative byways, all delivered with Andersonian solemnity, against a backdrop of deeply saturated colors and meticulously dressed sets.

Anyone with an interest in the intersection between film history and world history, or in the psychological powers of narrative cinema, should see Forbidden Films.

If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind.

What’s best about the film is its willingness to go deep, its strange yet effective fluidity between serious scenes and dance numbers, and Duran’s grace with weighty subjects.

These characters are so richly drawn, and inhabit such a precise milieu, that they deserved a less perfunctory, anticlimactic fate. The truth will allegedly set us free, but it often puts filmmakers in chains.

Director Tiller Russell doesn’t spin this gripping tale out of cinematic bravado like Scorsese—just extensive interviews with all the people involved, footage of a commission hearing after the fact, and a wealth of stock material on Brooklyn’s East Side. But he paints a vivid picture all the same.

I Am Big Bird breezes by a couple of opportunities to dig deeper into thornier subject matter, but those minor oversights don’t hurt the film in any significant way.

Whedon’s handling of the personal material is what makes Age Of Ultron extraordinary. Remarkably for a film so overstuffed, no character gets neglected.

Welcome To Me never develops much momentum, doesn’t always know what to do with supporting players like Leigh, and builds toward a finale that plays as a bit too neat. Yet even this doesn’t betray the character’s cracked integrity.

It’s refreshing to see a prestige costume drama so interested in its heroine that it treats “happily ever after” as an afterthought.

The new ending Oelhoffen has dreamed up is unsatisfying—Camus’ version was sharper, nastier, more credible—and the film never strays far from genre convention, but it’s refreshing to see a sincere paean to nobility, honor, and courage, especially one that periodically elevates the pulse with expertly mounted standoffs.

Iris isn’t groundbreaking doc filmmaking, but it’s amiable and jovial in a way rarely seen in the field, which tends more toward drama, trauma, and forwarding big causes. Maysles doesn’t seem to have an agenda, beyond capturing Apfel as she is in this moment, as a complete, highly specific, and thoroughly charming character.

George Hencken’s Spandau Ballet documentary Soul Boys Of The Western World effectively serves two audiences: hardcore fans hoping for rare footage and in-depth interviews, and those who really only know the song “True,” and would be surprised to learn just how popular Spandau Ballet used to be.

Morgen isn’t interested in rehashing the facts and highlights of Cobain’s life and career, or in providing chin-scratching insights via music scholars and other talking heads. He’s made an impression of Cobain, which is a much more intuitive and vital enterprise.

Like its main character, Age Of Adaline is a movie out of time, mannered and unconcerned with current trends, and hopelessly unhip. But it’s also beautiful and refreshing in its own earnest, straightforward way. For as ridiculous as Age Of Adaline appears on the surface, it’s surprisingly refined and poised in its execution.

As illuminating as that article may have been, though, Emptying The Skies, a documentary based on Franzen’s story that borrows its headline as its title, ultimately makes a more searing imprint on the psyche.

Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten could stand to be a tighter, punchier assemblage of music and talking heads, but Pirozzi has gathered an impressive array of surviving musicians and family members willing to talk about the targeting of artists for propaganda and death.

Everything Monkey Kingdom lacks in scientific rigor, it makes up for in pure entertainment value—and then some.

Photographed in muted interiors and under perpetually cloudy skies, Félix And Meira has the somber tone of a romance couched in painful sacrifice, but there’s also sweetness and joy in Meira slowly emerging from her shell.

Desert Dancer is blessed by a powerful sincerity. The filmmakers clearly believe the bromides offered about the life-affirming power of dance and artistic expression. The conviction that this story matters and deserves to be taken seriously gets the film over its occasional rough patches.

None of Ex Machina’s broad strokes are surprising: The story falls out so predictably at every stage that it can be frustrating. It’s the details that are surprising, and purposefully alarming.

These guys are so fascinating, in fact, that it feels like In Country could and should have gone longer than 80 minutes so that the movie could delve more deeply into their psyches and provide more context behind how these reenactments were born.

Though Rebels Of The Neon God is missing the austerity and discipline that would make Tsai’s master-shot style so effective—and funny—its relatively conventional approach (including a recurring musical theme!) doesn’t obscure the beautiful, enigmatic tone that’s long set him apart.

For all its grand statements about artistry and identity, Dior And I is most effective as a study of the hard work, both physical and emotional, that goes into creating something new.

Clouds Of Sils Maria is a great midlife crisis film, in other words, and, like Irma Vep, it’s also a great meta-commentary on contemporary moviemaking, with Assayas making keen observations about modern celebrity, screen-devouring blockbusters, Internet gossip culture, and the next generation of actresses, represented here by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

It’s a richly imagined drama that gives everyone involved a specific and understandable set of motives for acting the way they do.

The beginning of the film is purposefully surprising in many little ways, but the rest of the film is a gorgeously shot, heart-in-throat wait to see whether the payoff can dodge expectations nearly as well. The journey is more important than the destination, but Wladyka makes enough daring choices to make both worthwhile.

What makes Furious 7 a serious contender for the title of Fast franchise highlight—challenged only by 2011’s Fast Five and its unmatched vault-heist sequence—is the way it embraces the series’ most basic pleasures while amplifying everything tenfold.

By building the documentary around an ensemble cast, Lears and Blotnick demonstrate, in terms of content as well as filmmaking, that the voices of a few can galvanize the voices of many.

Plympton manages to keep it lively with one stunningly kinetic setpiece after another, many of which could easily be airlifted out of the picture to function as stand-alone shorts.

It’s the choice to put the voices of the main players front and center that saves Lambert & Stamp from taking the rise-and-fall shape so familiar from Behind The Music and similar projects.

In some moments, White God is a fast-moving thriller... At other times, it’s a standard-issue slasher movie... But when Mundruczó pushes the camera in close on Lili or Hagen, it just becomes a family drama, and a portrait of longing—for freedom, for emotional reciprocity, for comfort.

Showing the best of humanity and the worst of humanity doesn’t mean denying one in favor of the other; taken together, Salgado’s photographs have the scope and perspective of someone who can genuinely say he’s seen it all.

The fun comes not from the pink neon frosting, but from seeing how Fox and co-writer Eli Bijaoui use it to decorate their familiar themes of authenticity, kitsch, and what it means to have progressive pride within a changing country.

With Depardieu’s intensely physical performance at its core, Welcome To New York achieves a level of intimacy that’s rare for films about public figures—and, in this case, exposes Strauss-Kahn for all to see.

While Driver and Seyfried are both quite good, there’s nothing specific enough about their characters to avoid making the film feel like a blanket condemnation of a whole generation and their new ways of doing things.

Locking into the film’s rhythms requires patience and an abandonment of preconceptions, but it’s nonetheless Alonso’s most accessible work to date, buoyed by spare but lush photography and Viggo Mortensen’s magnetic presence in the lead role. It takes a special kind of charisma to bring viewers along on a journey to nowhere.

[A] solid, well-executed testament to the horrors of the great outdoors.

Spring’s overall balance suggests that Benson and Moorhead are students of Italian genre cinema and of human behavior; the film has insight and style to burn.

The Zellners are tapping into the allure of movies, that fundamental desire we have to escape our humdrum lives and give ourselves over to the more exciting ones playing out onscreen.

Alternating interviews, observational passages, and conversations with past students, Hawke’s low-key film never pushes too hard for effect and lets any drama emerge slowly.

The Wrecking Crew is a provocative look back at an art form in transition, reflecting on the moment when it started to matter whether Mickey Dolenz was actually playing drums on The Monkees’ albums, and the moment when, according to Dolenz, people started to “take the rock ’n’ roll very seriously.”

Mitchell’s deft handling of the relationships in It Follows gets threaded into an ingenious and exceedingly skillful creepshow.

As Marty continues to run scams, the laughs continue unabated, but the dread only deepens, because we realize he’s a creature of need, capable of anything but empathy. And he’s been pushed to the precipice.

Stearns directs with a slow-burning intensity that becomes more unsettling the deeper Ansel goes into his task, and the more it becomes apparent he doesn’t have an easy way out.

Shooting on 35mm, Jody Lee Lipes makes the harshness look beautiful and unforgiving, and in a film filled with strong performances, Morton’s work stands out.

A master class in structure, a meticulously constructed period piece, a powerful anti-war film, and rarest of all, a thriller whose tension and suspense feel genuinely earned.

Smith and Robbie have great chemistry together, and neither of them try too hard to complicate their fun, sexy partnership.

It’s a welcome throwback, moving at a brisk clip and allowing its impressive cast to embody some cherished archetypes.

The disconnect between Wild Canaries’ two modes is sometimes too wide, making the movie come across either as a sloppy mystery or a scatterbrained melodrama. More often, the mix keeps the film lively and unpredictable.

Some of the gags Bruce Wagner’s script lands about the business of Hollywood and the insanity it breeds call out for rimshots that Cronenberg never supplies. The silence can be awkward, but it’s just as often fascinating.

There’s a good deal of the sick-and-twisted element of The ABCs Of Death here, but managed with better pacing, more maturity, and more room to build each segment.

Much of the observational brilliance of Approaching The Elephant comes from how closely form relates to content: Out of chaos comes order, both at Teddy McArdle and in the film, which brings the personalities and conflicts into sharper focus as it goes along.

What Queen And Country has going for it that admirers of the original will appreciate—and that total novices can enjoy just as much—is how skillfully Boorman takes major historical events and filters them through small, personal moments.

The Elkabetzes don’t need the audience to have any firsthand experience of what Viviane and Elisha are actually like at home. Gett works better if the viewer has to puzzle out the truth from testimony, asides, and outbursts.

Unless this is an unusually great year for comedy, there will be few funnier or more quotable movies than What We Do In The Shadows.

It’s a ready-made cult movie, complicated and weird and grotesque and distinctly silly, and best when not taken remotely seriously.

To her credit, Hamilton lays out their story cleanly and with no small amount of tension, all while drawing strong connections to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Edward Snowden case.

Josue shows perhaps too much restraint, as if she’s not ready to deal with her lingering grief and can’t acknowledge it. This is a difficult criticism to make about a documentary this personal. So perhaps it’s interesting that the film’s shortcomings, then, are also simultaneously one of the more fascinating things about it, revealing the inevitable difficulty of filming grief, no matter the distance.

A documentary that’s both impressionistic and informative—admiring the magic of dance even in its formative stages, while also turning the making of art into a kind of procedural.

Starr and Shihabi, a charming newcomer, play off each other beautifully, and even when the film becomes a little too heavy-handed...their relationship keeps it grounded.