Evans is a revelation here, delivering a haunted performance that his previous work has only suggested he had in him. He gives the film a solid center, allowing others in the cast to explore the extreme.

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.

It’s so high on the thrill of discovery that it might even win over people who can’t stand the guy.

It seems like a departure, but soon turns into a Bruno Dumont film—and one of his most rigorous and powerful at that.

Level Five doesn’t achieve the poetic heights of Sans Soleil, but that might be because its project is more desultory; where the earlier work merely hints at the difficulty of looking at history without a filter, this sister film all but gives up the ghost.

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.

Beyond its genre roots and its deeper meanings, Southern Comfort is a well-honed study of characters and setting.

Make no mistake: Rich Hill is a social document, and conclusions can and should be drawn from its beautiful, empathetic portrait of life on the fringes. But Tragos and Palermo content themselves with shining a light and leaving it at that.

The ultimate value of the famed filmmaker’s latest documentary—a subject National Gallery turns into a reflexive concern—is not that Wiseman makes it possible for a broader audience to see these priceless works of art, but that the scope of his project invites all audiences to look at them through an illuminating new lens.

Little about [Östlund’s] work is simple-minded or cut-and-dried. His films marinate in viewer discomfort.

It’s simultaneously tricky and profound—a documentary about something small that gradually grows to cover so much more.

For a movie that’s so photo-realistic in its backgrounds and detailed in its character design, Ghost In The Shell is just as effective when it goes minimal, suggesting presence through absence.

Do the undeniably Malick-derived qualities of The Better Angels work against it, or is the film all the more special for being, essentially, a bonus Malick picture? To be fair to Edwards, a lot about The Better Angels sets it apart from Malick.

Despite some mawkish moments, this portrait of where espionage and domesticity collide is a unique take on typical John le Carré turf.

Maddin mixes personal reminiscences with elaborate fantasies of Masonic rituals and collectivist brothels, to construct a vision of Winnipeg as a city of sleepwalkers, roaming through mazes of snowbanks. In the end, it’s the “my” that matters more than the “Winnipeg.”

Going strictly by plot description, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox sounds a little like an Indian knock-off of a Nicholas Sparks movie, but it plays out more like Brief Encounter.

Here’s a seemingly twee movie that ultimately, surprisingly argues that some music isn’t for everybody, some people are too broken to fix, and some would-be artists are better off in the audience.

Darkman is funny, but it’s no joke; it’s the work of a man who underlines the conventions of adventure stories and horror because he enjoys them, and knows that even when rendered tongue-in-cheek, they’re timeless.

So far, Nymphomaniac looks like a major work from a major director: a compendium of all von Trier’s career-long preoccupations with gender roles, authoritarianism, religion, obsessive behavior, and lust.

With his thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, disquietingly symmetrical face, Mikkelsen is nearly as good a prop as he is an actor. That impassive but selectively expressive mug is what makes Age Of Uprising’s climax shocking and memorable, but not at all in the way viewers will be conditioned to expect.

What makes Informant so effective is that while its focus is on Darby, the story has a larger scope.

What ultimately makes Tootsie linger past the giggles is its immense affection toward everyone on the screen.

No stranger to sneaking left-wing politics into his genre films, Corman emphasizes the struggle between the callous haves and the suffering have-nots, while Price’s performance teases out the story’s seediest elements.

As much as any documentary since Errol Morris’ A Brief History Of Time, Particle Fever excels at expressing advanced scientific theory through graphics that are simple, attractive, and utterly approachable.

Though it’s a good movie in and of itself, The Little Mermaid is even more fascinating as a Rosetta Stone of Disney history, representing the classic animation techniques that the studio revived for this film, the cheap shortcuts that had prevailed for much of the previous two decades, and the sophisticated modern storytelling that soon became the standard.

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

Swanberg isn’t doing anything new with Happy Christmas, but sticking to the same non-formula formula this time around yields unprecedentedly inspired results.

Vessel is much more than a documentary about abortion rights; it’s about the conviction, creativity, and sacrifice that goes into creating a movement.

Eastwood didn’t overreach with Play Misty For Me. It’s a tense thriller that’s inside his comfort zone in more ways than one. But he does overdeliver in the best way. Co-star Jessica Walter plays an obsessed fan, and Eastwood wrings every ounce of tension from a scenario in which a casual affair turns into a life-threatening mistake, and the film executes a potentially trashy scenario with respect for its audience.

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

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.

Despite its attention-grabbing logline and gleeful embrace of raunchy, frequently scatological humor, Obvious Child is at heart a well-realized, straight-ahead rom-com, one with the potential to reinvigorate a genre that’s been flagging for decades.

The film plays like a companion piece to Usher, but one eager to push beyond its limits, particularly in its tinted flashback sequences. It also lets Price begin the film as a delicate gentleman and end it as a madman.

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.

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.

Lane approaches New York’s unbalanced, inhumane economy the same way he approaches filmmaking: by putting a new frame around familiar sights, and forcing the audience to reconsider them.

Code Black doesn’t suggest ways to improve health care in America, but it at least documents one of the most noble and necessary professions with insight and humility.

The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.

The film’s aversion toward clichés and hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Like The Daily Show, Rosewater makes uncomfortable political realities into wry but uproarious jokes.

It’s a funny, bittersweet film that opens as a cautionary tale about growing up too fast, but deepens into a movie about the unplumbable gulf between childhood and adulthood, and what it feels like to stand on either side, wishing for a way over.

The film, like its source, is filled with pessimistic fatalism, but it spares no pity for the instruments of fate, painting Alec as an irredeemable villain. What, if anything, this meant to Polanski remains unknowable.

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.

The New Black is unabashedly pro-gay marriage, but it treats the other side respectfully. Opponents of gay marriage in the community are given their say.

Walker edits with an eye for poeticism, and at times her choices are unbearably painful.

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.

As reticent as Nathan is to cast explicit judgment, the film shows the tragic impasse between a street culture that’s reckless and provocative, and a police force that exacerbates the problem with heavy-handed tactics.

A Touch Of Sin stumbles in the coda, which makes the themes embedded in its title too explicit, but it’s a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.

Kirikou is a wonder because it’s such a familiar kind of story, told in such an unusual way.

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.

Poitras fashions Citizenfour into a spy thriller whose intrigues bleed into everyday life. She doesn’t want the audience to feel like Snowden’s revelations are limited to him and potential enemies of the state—or even to activist journalists like her and Greenwald. She makes the threat feel as pervasive as they believe it to be.

Both Kennedy and Lewis turn in colorful performances, but it’s Eastwood and Bridges’ film, and their ill-defined, tender friendship makes the movie.

Timbuktu’s delicate tone is totally unexpected and specific to Sissako, who keeps finding notes of vulnerability.

Every scene of The Killing Fields (and every participant in its making) is in service of showing how abruptly a seemingly safe and vital individual can have everything essential stripped away.

Sleeping Beauty is the most beautiful movie the Disney’s feature animation department has ever made.

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.

The film’s symbolism is never subtle, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

While it’s less playful and less giddily, enjoyably excessive than The Guard, it explores similar ground, as a good-hearted man largely abandoned by his community attempts to do the right thing as he sees it. But it brings in much more complicated matters of religion and morality, asking what it means to be a man of faith in an age of doubt.

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 formulaic story that takes full advantage of these broad, familiar formulas to win viewers, but finds enough unique detail to retain its own identity.

The trifecta of Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman is the movie’s driving force, from both a plot and performance perspective. Together, they imbue Mockingjay with a sense of gravity and significance befitting its tough themes.

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.

With Mysterious Skin, Araki burrowed into the hearts and minds of his audience, looking to provide his viewers with Neil and Brian’s deeper understanding of how to piece together a fractured life, then go looking for the fragments that are still buried deep.

In form, Phase IV isn’t that different from monster movies of old, though the ants never grow to monstrous size. In execution, it’s much more striking, offering a study in contrasts between ants and humans, and one that doesn’t always reflect favorably on the humans.

What makes Like Father, Like Son so quietly powerful is that for the most part, it doesn’t traffic in stereotypes.

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.

Cutie And The Boxer chronicles a marriage that’s extraordinary in many ways, and ordinary in one—it’s a constant work in progress.

Bad Milo! gets nasty laughs out of putting its overmatched hero through a gauntlet of comic humiliations, but it works just as well as a dark allegory about the way we handle our demons.

The material about the modern-day Peggy and Joe is incredibly sweet... But A Life In Dirty Movies is also fascinating just as a document of changing cultural mores.

Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

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.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

Muscle Shoals’ story has needed telling, and Camalier packs that telling with memorable stories and music—though the film sometimes substitutes admiration for investigation, paving over conflicts and moving on to the next amazing piece of music to get recorded in town.

Matti’s primary order of business is regularly serving up tense, stylish action sequences, and he proves more adept choreographing those than sorting out the convolutions of his parallel plotlines.

The film retains much of what worked about the first film, and it brings a similarly smart, patient, visually striking approach to the gags.

Willow Creek does everything a little bit better than others of its kind. It’s a little wittier, a little more insightful, a little more imaginative, a little scarier.

Don Jon is a continuously entertaining and fitfully provocative first-time effort from the longtime actor.

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.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

Zero Motivation never stops being sharply funny, and there’s scarcely a hint of didacticism in its depiction of female soldiers who are essentially treated as a secretarial pool, so bored that they have to invent tasks to perform and create melodrama from scratch.

It isn’t a terribly intimate portrait of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, or Nixon, but it is revealing in its own right, as a fascinatingly warped and aged Polaroid of an epic life that’s grown more compelling with the passage of time.

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 original musical holds up well, and Marshall and Condon’s adaption doesn’t wreck it.

It’s all flawed, and distracted, and conceptually messy, prioritizing color over common sense and energy over consistency. But as an afternoon’s diversion for a handful of misbehaving kids—both within the movie, and within the movie theater—it’s authentically winning.

The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

Interstellar often seems afraid to let any development go unpacked and uncommented upon, except for a handful of points that dive into the action and expect viewers to catch up. The film is at its best in these moments, when it’s unafraid of challenging storytelling, particularly since Interstellar never has trouble finding visuals to match its heady concepts.

Even with Boris Karloff providing a lighthearted introduction and sign-off, Black Sabbath is fraught with fatalism.

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

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.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.

Paddington is a charmer, portrayed as a little guy whose unflagging goodness makes it easy to forgive his clumsiness. That’s the one detail from Bond’s book any adaptation has to get right, and this one nails it.

Neeson’s latest effort, A Walk Among The Tombstones, is slightly more subdued than his average shoot-’em-up, but no less gruffly satisfying.

It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.

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

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.