Northy’s script sometimes ventures too far into cartoon territory, but its best aspect is the way it turns high-school groupthink on its head.

Edwards’ film doesn’t care much about metaphorical resonance, and cares even less about its human characters, many of which get forgotten for long stretches of the film. But Godzilla has a way with a disaster setpiece, and it cares a lot about providing awesome monster-on-monster action on a mammoth scale.

While The Hunt skillfully puts viewers through the wringer, it’s often for no higher purpose than pushing buttons and generating outrage.

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

It’s a credit to Stockwell’s engrossing (though slightly schizophrenic) movie that it engenders sufficient curiosity to inspire viewers into seeking out non-fictional accounts of the story.

The autobiography and the politics don’t always fit together perfectly. Vargas has been extremely successful in his profession by any standard, and that success can tend to push him into the foreground to such an extent that the collective issues he’s talking about get erased. Vargas is aware of this, and works against it to some degree.

A sobering story kept at street level.

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

A beautiful, mysterious, beguiling cinematic doodle, and an absolute master class in mise-en-scène, unfolding in odd, fragmented frames and precisely choreographed movement within those frames.

Manakamana is both calming and imagination-sparking, forcing viewers to look at human faces for 10-minute stretches, whether those faces are talking excitedly or quietly looking around.

What makes Baby Peggy: The Elephant In The Room so valuable, though, is that it isn’t just a 58-minute wallow in the misery of one long-forgotten, largely misunderstood American celebrity.

Need For Speed modifies its outlaw antihero with all sorts of unnecessary pain and backstory, and the film is slow to leave the starting gate because of it. But once it does, Need For Speed becomes a much fleeter vehicle, powered by impressive practical stuntwork, eye-popping cross-country landscapes, and the sparking chemistry between Paul and Poots.

While it’s occasionally distasteful, it’s an engaging hangout film from beginning to end, thanks to its game performances and smart direction.

As a film, it’s ramshackle, with none of the narrative drive of Leone’s best work. But it’s held together by Fonda and Hill’s terrific odd-couple teaming, remarkable action scenes, and one of Ennio Morricone’s best, strangest scores.

A smart, sardonic, unpredictable morality play that gets the little things right.

Even as Cold In July’s overall arc approaches something of a dead-end, the individual scenes and performances are remarkable.

It’s light and loose in ways that Almodóvar hasn’t let himself be in decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun, a relentlessly entertaining lark that, like its setting, soars into the clouds, then discovers it doesn’t really have a way to get down.

The film lets audiences be third parties in Coogan and Brydon’s dinner conversation. For lovers of words, comedy, and conversation, that’s an awfully hard proposition to pass up.

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.

As a buddy-cop movie, The Heat seems almost deliberately generic, with boilerplate plotting carried across with zero panache. It wagers that McCarthy and Bullock’s comic energy will make all the difference—a smart bet, as it happens.

As a tightly constructed look at the more serious symptoms of Peter Pan syndrome, The Almost Man mostly works. The fact that it departs from the usual vehicles for good-natured, non-threatening Vince Vaughn jackassery is refreshing, albeit in an often jarring, disturbing way.

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.

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.

Daniel Dencik’s unusual documentary Expedition To The End Of The World sounds like a grand seafaring adventure, as expeditions to untraversed Arctic territory tend to be, but its tone is much more philosophical.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

Part of what makes The Parallax View so unnerving is that it also offers no explanation.

Through it all, Gheorghiu finds the perfect pitch between a mother’s love for her child and a kind of pathology.

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.