Melodrama is defined by exaggerated characters and events, as well as overt appeals to emotion, and Beyond The Lights fits that mold ably and comfortably. But beneath the shiny surface of music-video imagery and true-loveisms lie some provocative ideas and deep truths about how people relate on a private level vs. a public one.

10 has the rare and wonderful quality of being simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.

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 film is a poetic and lulling mediation on humanity as some kind of ancient alien race, which Reggio means to isolate and examine, as though he’s never encountered them before.

The dark, surreal animation unearths the personal side of the story: its nightmarish aspect and traumas. It elevates the film into a portrait of an unspeakable tragedy.

So is JFK a good movie? Actually, it’s a great movie that looks better with each passing year. Even aside from what it’s saying, and even with the many, many forced moments, JFK has a mad genius about it.

It’s tempting to characterize Cooley High as the inner-city answer to American Graffiti—trading out Modesto’s hot rods for Chicago’s elevated trains—but there’s a specificity to screenwriter (and Good Times co-creator) Eric Monte’s memories of growing up on the Near North Side in the early 1960s that transcends mere imitation.

It’s a carnivalesque lark whose brevity and gravity are both attributable to the remarkable, pitch-perfect performance of O’Toole.

What’s most notable is how Eastwood holds fast to the rebel spirit of the spaghetti Westerns and revisionist New Hollywood Westerns of the previous decade, but packages it in a film that’s slicker and more mainstream-friendly. 

The film pinballs from one setpiece to the next with almost no concern for plot, characters, pacing, or stakes. At times, laughing at all the jokes actually gets a little exhausting.

Seidl has made an insightful film that’s more about the trials of a young woman’s coming of age than about being overweight.

There’s a fair amount of Hollywood magic in the way director James Frawley and Henson’s Muppeteers stick Kermit and friends into scenarios in which he’s riding a bike, rowing a boat, and walking in cowboy boots. But the less showy effects always defined the Muppets.

Il Futuro is a playful, soulful movie, affecting because it’s populated by lost children who can somehow sense they’re in a movie, and that in a movie, the only future is The End.

The film is an appropriately dour and intense indictment of a law-enforcement community that did not value the lives of some victims enough to devote anything but the slimmest of resources to tracking their killer down.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have thought through every scene and every line in Foxcatcher. Nothing is irrelevant. The film proceeds like a well-constructed argument.

Viewers can walk away with something more precious than factoids: an emotional, aesthetically striking experience that cuts more deeply than words. And if they crave more information, that’s what the Internet is for.

Narco Cultura makes it abundantly, forcefully clear that the illicit business of narcocorridos thrives on the illicit business of cartels—and business is still booming.

While it’s corny by design, Hairspray also aims to get at something truthful, about the various kinds of prejudice weighing down the city circa 1963, and how youthful optimism and music made a difference, if only in the lives of those kids craving some kind of diverse, progressive community.

But it’s also edited so crisply, and shot with such an overpowering sense of decay, that it’s hard not to look on all the dismemberment and despair and think, “Man, that’s pretty.”

A heartening but tempered portrait of the media’s ability to effect social change.

For a film that clearly required a small army to make, it often feels thrillingly off-the-cuff, which keeps with The Lego Movie’s themes of creativity and weirdness: Nobody’s following an instruction book with this one.

Director and co-writer Zack Parker (Scalene) combines a Hitchcockian penchant for disorientation with a Brian De Palma-esque formal bravado, and he’s made the rare film that’s impossible to peg all the way up to its final minutes—a truly unnerving study in multiple pathologies.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

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 would be enough for The Babadook to get by on scares alone—the eponymous spook is eminiently franchise-able—but Kent doesn’t give the audience that kind of distance. Her agenda is more personal.

With its action taking place primarily in the beige-walled, wood-accented environs of legal offices and courthouses, The Case Against 8 compensates for its visual blandness with good old-fashioned storytelling.

The film works best when it focuses on the talking heads. Reuveny captures everyone’s initial reactions to the news and how their feelings change over time, uncomfortable silences and all. She knows exactly when to cut and when to pause, to let those moments of silence speak for the deceased, and let the pain of the past resonate within the frame.

Something, Anything is the rare film that gently asks the big questions, then gives us space, and room.