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.

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.

Sometimes important plot-points unfold through windows, too, and The Long Goodbye as a whole peels back the surfaces of private-eye stories, paying special attention to their macho bluster and abused women.

The tedium of The Raid 2’s setup is offset by some of the most jaw-dropping, bone-crunching, flesh-ripping setpieces ever filmed.

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 Selfish Giant is a harsh movie, but it isn’t devoid of hope, because Barnard understands that everything has value—even if it can’t be realized until after an object’s been tossed out.

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.

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.

It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment.

Even with material as strong as Show Boat, Whale recognizes he’s making a film, not just a record of a stage production.

The Horn Blows At Midnight rarely pauses to catch its breath or give audiences time to catch up as it runs its hapless protagonist through a gauntlet of frenzied business and smart comic conceits over the course of its briskly paced 78 minutes.

With thoughtfulness and passion, von Trier strives to give his audience a high, accompanied by the meaning of the high.

Much of the film is difficult to understand—as with many poems, its meanings are so personal that they’re often cryptic—but Gorchakov’s (and Tarkovsky’s) displacement comes through powerfully in lonely rooms and in tracking shots that give the impression of a soul adrift.

First Cousin Once Removed doesn’t come across as overly demeaning or exploitative, because Berliner himself is so kind to Honig in their meetings. But it’s hard to deny that Berliner is using Honig’s deteriorating condition as fodder for his art, just as it’s hard to deny that Berliner’s willingness to risk that criticism is what makes First Cousin Once Removed such a great film.

In Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, a fascinating, essential marker in the ongoing saga of his exploits, the government fights Weiwei with artificial law to maintain an illusion of total control, fueling its target’s heroic persona in the process.

Appropriate Behavior is very funny, even while it’s also being real and heartfelt. It’s a raw story with refined production values, and Akhavan is so open and true in the lead role that what could be an overly insular story instead feels relatable and amusing.

Gunn, a B-movie enthusiast who got his start at Troma, has found a way to bring funkiness and humanity to a galaxy-spanning blockbuster, one filled with dogfights and floating fortresses, but also with heroes quick with a quip, fast on the draw, and more than a little beaten up by the universe.

What makes Human Capital a worthwhile experience is the way [Virzí] focuses on understanding his characters’ desires, rather than deriding them as unworthy.

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.

Throughout The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, even when it gets bogged down in too much story, the animation is so gorgeous that any given frame could pass for a masterwork.

It ultimately amounts to a feature-length origin story, but with characters this unknown and execution this fun, that’s an asset, not a liability.

Though the film portrays the racism of the South as institutional and inescapable, it’s a little too eager to offer glimmers of hope with increasing frequency as the film nears its end and Tibbs and Gillespie come to understand each other better.

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.

Yet for all the heady ideas at play, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes remains a visceral film, one of movement, action, unexpected developments, and disarming poignance.

Ida’s piercing intimacy makes the deepest impression, but its vision is deceptively wide-reaching despite a scale that’s deliberately pared-down and small.

Cordero and screenwriter Philip Gelatt demonstrate a deft understanding of how to handle a found-footage narrative without making it too familiar.

The emotions evoked by Bird People should be familiar to anyone who ever stared out the window of a classroom, imagining what it would be like to leave school, hop on a bike, and go for a ride around the mostly empty neighborhood.

Even the flaws mesh with the overall fabric of the film in a way that impeccably choreographed musical numbers and fight scenes might not have. Altman reverses the emphasis of most mainstream family entertainments, which are about pace and snap, and instead favors a gentle, more inviting evocation of Sweethaven and its oddball inhabitants. Robert Evans wanted an answer to the Broadway hit Annie. Instead, he got a Robert Altman film.