For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.

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 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.

The greatest achievement of Middle Of Nowhere is that DuVernay and Corinealdi make Ruby’s big decision believable, by showing how it’s really just been a series of smaller choices.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

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.

The Great Flood works as a wordless narrative of human endurance, showing communities gathering to stack sandbags, then gathering again to dig out of the muck after their previous efforts failed.

Given that this is a film about a very specific political situation, with lifetimes of scholarship and signifiers behind it, writer-director Hany Abu-Assad made a bold decision in pulling back and going broad.

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 Skeleton Twins has a pair of terrific, sharply etched lead performances, a polished, autumnal look, and some affecting moments where its protagonists bond. But to borrow a water-based metaphor from the film’s overflowing stock of them, The Skeleton Twins just lies there, cold and clammy, like a dead fish.

Gomez-Rejon has erected a gleaming shrine to adolescent narcissism.

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.

Cheryl is a thoroughly realized, warts-and-all character, and the flashbacks contribute to that. But like their heroine, the filmmakers do some fumbling to get to their destination.

Computer Chess may seem like a novelty item, but it’s that and more, accumulating insight and substance without ever losing the fun of being a lark.

It feels like 100 minutes of arch nudges, a highlight reel from Politicians Say The Darndest Things. Political junkies may find that appealing, but for more general viewers, the film—like Rick Santorum’s campaign—feels largely irrelevant.

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.

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.

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.

Howard and Morgan make the journey intense enough to keep audiences guessing up to the finish line.

While virtually every shot looks like a work of art, much of the beauty of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints comes from Lowery’s refusal to choose sides.

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

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.

This is grave business, and After Tiller registers the weight of it.

Beyond theme, however, these stories are united by the agonizing, low-level tension Östlund brings to bear on every scene, which vary in importance, but not in consequences for the characters involved.

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.

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.

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

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.