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.

Plotnick’s mix of straight-faced absurdity and unexpected poignance doesn’t always gel, but it also makes the film more resonant than a straightforward spoof could ever be, and adds another layer to the film’s central joke: You can take to the stars, but the past will always travel with you.

It’s compelling throughout, and profoundly moving at times, even when it rings false, which is often. It’s a divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

Chandor’s film suggests more than it can explore, and a contrived climax makes the film seem like less than the sum of what’s preceded it.

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

At its best, though, it breaks a little more new ground for Disney, escaping the yet-another-princess mode and finding new kinds of family dynamics to explore, and new ways to step outside its long-established boundaries.

The film executes its bad-taste gags with such delicacy and unexpected emotional truth that they don’t even seem like jokes. This is attributable largely to Hollyman’s fearless, convincing lead performance, which grounds the movie in a believable reality, no matter how crazy things become.

While Lenny Cooke’s considerable social and emotional resonance still doesn’t measure up to Hoop Dreams’, the Safdies beautifully evoke the other side of the professional game, the many basketball casualties who don’t get movies made about them.

As vibrant and ingratiating as We Are The Best! is, the movie lacks the more satisfying fullness of Moodysson’s Together and Lilya 4-Ever.

What’s missing from The Punk Singer is real friction or ambiguity.

Wyatt is a supremely confident filmmaker. His style is multitudes sleeker than Reisz’s original, but his eclectic taste, particularly in the soundtrack, reveals a true connection to the earlier era.

It looks like no other movie, Marvel or otherwise, and it’s populated by characters compelling enough to support a more complex, richer story than this one.

Revenge Of The Mekons has none of the raggedness of the band’s best songs, and the movie only occasionally gets to that very Mekons place that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes in the film, where despair and rage over the world’s pervasive injustice resolves into something blackly humorous, and even triumphant. But Angio hasn’t made a glancing, broadly outlined fan-doc, either.

A big reason why The Kentucky Fried Movie worked so well (and became a substantial cult hit) is that in the 1970s, subversion thrived after prime time, on late-night TV and at midnight movies.

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.

At times, it’s hard to imagine how a real, physical visit to a Kabakov exhibit could improve upon Wallach’s film, which plays like the world’s trippiest docent.

Night Of The Comet borrows freely from everything from The Omega Man to Romero’s zombie films to Repo Man, but it never borrows so heavily as to feel like a rip-off of anything.

Not content simply to make a finely tuned undersea action film, Macdonald reaches for something more significant and comes up short, trapping his own treasures under a tidal wave of thwarted ambition.

Because the actors are uniformly strong, though, and because the neighborhood itself provides such a credible context, Slattery manages to create the impression of an immense backstory that informs every interaction, making any sketchiness seem like naturalism rather than a failure of imagination.

While Gloria lacks impact, urgency, or any sense of rising and falling action, it’s beautifully rendered through Benjamín Echazarreta’s warm lens and García’s subtle performance.

Along with producer Laurie David (who was also behind Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig, Couric has made an unabashed muckraking documentary that ends with a call to action that’s half inspirational, half grating. It’s propaganda, to be sure, but effective propaganda.

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.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

If nothing else, this film makes the case that the Cold War—however Fetisov or Polsky respectively choose to define it—robbed American sports fans of the chance to watch and appreciate one of the greatest collections of athletes ever assembled.

Decker’s style is experimental, but not abrasive, and Butter demonstrates her ability to retain an audience’s attention even when refusing to give them a clear story told in a traditional manner.

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

At 144 minutes, Five Armies is the shortest and the least bloated and discursive of the Hobbit films. It’s also the one that relies least on filler material and extra character business, and the one that most earns its moments of outsized, dire drama.

While the film has some clunky exposition, and a couple of predictable moments, it creates a real sense of a group of friends who have known one another since high school, who don’t stand on ceremony, and who all, in various ways, struggle with nostalgia.

Psycho II doesn’t live up to the original, but doesn’t dishonor it either, even though its allegiances are clearly with Hitchcock’s film rather than Robert Bloch’s words. Psycho II isn’t perfect or brilliant. But it was good enough to successfully bring a beloved cinematic fixture back into action after an extended hibernation, and savvy and soulful enough to realize that what makes Norman Bates such an icon isn’t his monstrousness, but his trembling, eminently relatable humanity.

The entire film vibrates with understated tension, but almost never raises its voice above a hissed threat or a discomfited mutter. For a film with so many life-or-death choices on the line, it’s almost perversely passive.

It’s a magnificently acrid showcase for two idiosyncratic actors who seem uncannily in tune with each other, even as their characters are out of sync.

In keeping with the S&M theme, Matsumoto keeps changing R100’s direction, defying the audience in hopes of providing a more perverse kick. Often, the results are astonishing.

After watching Bettie Page Reveals All, even longtime devotees may not be able to look at one of her pictures again without hearing her voice, remembering her story, and appreciating her joy all the more.

McCarthy’s voice comes through strongly enough to excuse the film’s excesses and cast its more generic plot elements in a new light.

But while it’s first and foremost a terrific showcase for some imaginative designers, Invaders From Mars also holds together fairly well as a movie—or at least better than the choppy Lifeforce does.

What Mickle really gets right, and what makes this far and away a more artful and effective work of skin-crawly horror than its predecessor, is atmosphere.

There’s a boldness in Eggleston and De Roche’s choice to let almost the entire last half-hour of Long Weekend play out without dialogue, and in the clever ways they illustrate Peter and Marcia’s dangerous callousness.

With Hitchcock halfway out the door, Jamaica Inn could have come across as strictly a work-for-hire gig, but it displays enough Hitchcockery to show he wasn’t as disengaged from the material as he would later claim he was.

The question of whether Maier, a recluse, would have ever wanted someone like Maloof to bring her into the light is troubling, and perhaps impossible to resolve, but Maloof’s passion for her work and his boundless curiosity about her history certainly make for a riveting documentary.

For every element that doesn’t work...there’s a moment that crackles with electricity and conviction.

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.

As director Dominique Benicheti invites the audience to contemplate this way of life—and that’s all the film seeks to accomplish, which is plenty—he reveals the virtues of simplicity, routine, and quietly communing with the natural world.

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

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.

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

Every part of Wojtowicz’s story is touched by madness, though The Dog doesn’t miss the depression and tragedy that lingers around it.

The movie is one long game of misdirection, playing tricks on viewers from scene to scene, and showing how easy it is to steer a crowd into missing something important. That’s the real De Palma touch, even more than the operatic overtones and excess.

It catches, in the most authentic and democratic way possible, a collection of people who’ve developed a strong taste for revolution, but are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

Mistaken For Strangers, which covers Tom’s time with the band and his subsequent attempts to piece together a movie about that time, is a sweet, funny, and sad film, but also an exceedingly odd one.

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.

When I Walk makes it very clear that Jason isn’t all alone despite his support system. Rather, his support system, including his mom, makes him who he is, even more than his malfunctioning legs and hands.

For those able to overlook the obviousness, The Painting is both beautiful and affecting.

Bad Turn Worse takes its best shot at the slow-motion apocalypse that was Thompson’s specialty, and most of the film is beautifully claustrophobic.

Kormákur lets his stars balance the buddy-movie levity with just enough dramatic weight to keep it grounded, and his directing style seems like a conscious corrective to the disorienting cutting and obvious CGI effects that have come to dominate Hollywood action films.

Though essentially a straight-faced horror film, You’re Next also taps into a rich vein of black comedy.

It’s a little frustrating at first to realize that Huber isn’t going to get much explanation of anything from Stanton. But she ends up making a virtue of the actor’s Zen calm.

Even in its rougher patches, The Spectacular Now has a disarming earnestness that keeps it on the level, helped along by two superb lead performances that add up to more than their sum.

As is so often the case with Crowe, what mostly stands out about Singles is how sensitively and honestly it tries to capture the way people with deep convictions are inevitably headed for heartbreak.

Ozon tosses an abundance of twisted psychology into the stew, but he leaves the audience to sort it out for themselves. Young & Beautiful has the detached air of other Ozon productions, and Vacth gives so little away as Isabelle that she’s eternally an unsolved problem.

Seidl could not be clearer in his associations between religion and sex, but in Paradise: Faith, he’s slightly less successful in mining them for greater insights.

As the rare overlap between music doc and advocacy piece, Musicwood is hopeful about a relatively unsung issue without necessarily being naïve.

Its ongoing reveal of interconnected, rough-edged characters, as well as a tone that’s a twangy, noirish brew of the Coen brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, and Winter’s Bone, are ultimately what make the movie unsettling and absorbing.

A perceptive, low-stakes exploration of when to move on and when to come back.

The story’s overall trajectory is familiar, and sometimes clichéd, but it still has the power to surprise and startle from moment to moment, which is what really counts.

The constant in The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch’s terrific performance as Turing, which has much in common with his delightfully mercurial Sherlock Holmes, but with an underpinning of repressed emotion and quiet despair.

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.

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.

The Big House is an MGM film, and while it takes on the problem of prison overcrowding, at times it’s more like a window into a secret society, with its own codes and concerns. It’s an outsized, abstracted version of everyday life circa 1930.

An inspired-by-real-events drama that finds honor, decency, and sacrifice in the legal profession, The Attorney is a rousing old-Hollywood tale of one man risking everything for a just cause.

Whether Edwards intended it or not—and his inclusion of hippies in the third act points to yes—The Party seems keyed into the spirit of ’68, with the house representing the upending of old money and hidebound tradition.

John Sayles’ Go For Sisters is his best film in more than a decade, and feels like one he could’ve made in the 1980s. It’s a small picture, simply presented, and exists outside of current trends—which isn’t always to its benefit.

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 hypnotic, clicky soundtrack, Bergès-Frisbey’s playful yet sad performance, and a few significant script moments laying out the film’s philosophy all aim toward a sleepy trance that helps put the biggest flaws into soft focus.

Though it’s tempting to resent every moment not given over to her singing, the documentary succeeds in conveying not just the bare facts of her life, but something of her magic, both to longtime fans and to those less familiar with her work.

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.

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.

The mimicry is so pronounced that it’s hard to locate a distinct, original sensibility beyond the film’s apparent influences. But talented young directors often need time to develop into singular ones, and there’s value in Coppola’s sensual, always-sympathetic feel for lost adolescents.

Title aside, what distinguishes The Fluffy Movie from a standard stand-up special is its willingness, even eagerness, to dive into some seriously heavy shit. It’s funny, to be sure, but also unexpectedly substantive.

A Most Wanted Man is a cold film that examines its characters from a clinical distance, but its iciness gives way to raw emotion in a powerful final sequence.

The Trials Of Muhammad Ali’s real value is in showing—not just talking about—the time and place in which Ali lived.

Goldberg sneaks in some whispers of spirituality, but Refuge’s true effectiveness lies in Ritter’s distinctively non-angelic performance. It’s the work of a woman who knows she’s been dealt a bad hand, but can’t bring herself to leave the game.

The filmmakers behind Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton benefit and suffer from an excess of fascinating subject material.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

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.

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.

While Creep has the limited scope of DIY filmmaking at its most rudimentary, that contributes to a tone that’s unusually playful and entertaining without coming off as a lark.

The film is memorable for its action scenes—from an opening raid that erupts on an eerily quiet day through a Sam Peckinpah-inspired finale—but also for the reflective moments from which those action scenes are born.

Convoy has one huge advantage over the song that inspired it: It’s one thing to hear about a mighty convoy, but it’s quite another to see it. There’s a certain tacky, truck-stop grandeur to witnessing so many huge vehicles traveling together like a pack of steel, gasoline-fueled animals.

The lack of anything resembling a narrative at times makes Pavilion feel more like a demo-reel than a movie, but the fleeting moments Sutton has captured are so vibrant that they accumulate into something that hums.

The Fly is a study in how the boldness of new discoveries is compromised by science’s need for precision, but it’s also a nightmarish tale of a comfortable little family, and a nagging little buzz.

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.

At its best, Days Of Future Past feels not just like an X-Men comic book, but like an X-Men comic-book crossover... Like Days Of Future Past, crossovers in comics tend to be light on character development. But when they’re good, the huge stakes and epic scale of the action make them hard to put down.

Though it has the dramatic apparatus of fiction, the film unfolds with a documentary-like openness to the world around it.

When veterans as talented as Dance and Griffiths decide to chew the scenery, they do so with their chompers bared.

The Sure Thing is queasily old-fashioned, a raunchy road trip without the raunch that nonetheless trades on sex-comedy stereotypes: party animals in Hawaiian shirts, tea-sipping no-fun-niks in neutral-colored sweaters, and a compliant blonde sex doll that is, in fact, a sure thing. The film takes baby steps to something better.

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.

While Cat People feels like an early Bruckheimer production, it’s also permeated with the themes that personify Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and filmmaker: obsession, sex, the strange permutations of destiny, and man’s bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.