Less a coming-of-age film than a series of crucial episodes in that process, Skate Kitchen mixes dreaminess and disillusionment as it observes the choices Camille makes and the ensuing fallout.

It’s Never Over might not be the Buckley bio everyone needs, but it’s a stirring tribute made with a lot of heart.

It's a tribute to this thoughtful, deeply poignant, splendidly executed film that we replay the conclusion in our minds long after the lights come on.

A highly political movie that's also a personal story of two men going head-to-head while the women around them are left to pick up the pieces, this gorgeously shot and classily acted feature might be a reel too long but is nonetheless a fascinating piece of work.

While it’s a wisp of a movie, almost directionless at times and self-consciously quirky at others, Fremont contains enough poignantly observed interludes to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Kenneth Bowser's terrific documentary is a poignant portrait of an uncompromising artist.

Is it possible for a viewer to be touched by a character’s predicament and despair when every element of their life is so strikingly arranged? Because Pfeiffer disappears into her role and plays it small, and because Dosunmu’s modus operandi privileges visuals and the unspoken over dialogue and facile melodrama, the film sort of gets away with it, if just barely.

It’s a tough balancing act that the director, whose previous works dissected teen movies (Beyond Clueless) and horror flicks (Fear Itself), pulls off with a mix of earnestness and cheekiness.

The raunchiest, funniest and most enjoyably nonjudgmental American movie about selling sex since "Boogie Nights."

If the movie pushes most of the ugliest behavior off onto side players (like the notorious Suge Knight, played by R. Marcus Taylor), it does for the most part fulfill its mission, breathing life into the origin story of a group whose influence is still being felt.

Tale of Tales combines the wildly imaginative world of kings, queens and ogres with the kind of lush production values for which Italian cinema was once famous. The result is a dreamy, fresh take on the kind of dark and gory yarns that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, only here they're pleasingly new and unfamiliar.

Especially refreshing, even radical, is its sympathy for characters who read for pleasure and value rigorous thought. Unfortunately, by the end, it’s gone as mushy and ragged as a homespun hemp blanket.

Raiff is so credible in the part one can't help but suspect there's a lot of him in Alex; the film's willingness to look so frankly at his vulnerability, in an unmanipulative way, feels especially refreshing now.

It's in the more personal moments — such as when the artist enthusiastically describes her painting of an elderly Marilyn Monroe — that it becomes most interesting.

The doc’s personal portraits of the work required to forge an independent life should connect with and inspire parents and educators.

Less performance-centric than it might have been, the straightforward documentary consists largely of talking-head testimonials and interviews with current Trockadero members about how they spend their too-brief time offstage.

Maybe Korem’s primary objective is simply to make you think more about Milli Vanilli than you ever have before. In that, it’s a total success. It’s more of a failure when it comes to trying to answer some of those big questions and engage in direct accountability, and I don’t know if I buy most of its cultural conclusions

A tender take on life after stardom.

The film playfully critiques certain Muslim customs, but never in a demeaning way, while providing a heartwarming coming-of-age narrative that’s a tad predictable.

It's a true-life yarn loaded with extremes, of wealth, personal eccentricities, grief, tension, daring, criminal means to political ends, maternal drive and luck, both bad and good. It is also a peek into a rarefied world where money knows no bounds and yet means everything.

The strength of Asaph Polonsky’s debut feature, One Week and a Day (Shavua Ve Yom), is that it’s actually a bittersweet comedy-drama in which the pain is as real as the frequent chuckles.

Haroun is uninterested in big war scenes and is best at evoking the little details of life.

With Nanny, Jusu crafts a contemplative, thematically rich story that deftly explores the emotional and spiritual costs of leaving your homeland behind for an uncertain future in a strange land.

Effects work is slick, and Goddard keeps his foot on the accelerator with help from David Julyan's suspense-building score. It's just too bad the movie is never much more than a hollow exercise in self-reflexive cleverness that's not nearly as ingenious as it seems to think.

Director Jean-Francois Richet shows a career in crime with pulse-pounding moments of pure cinema, then lets you decide what to make of this homicidal sociopath.

Foster’s research and storytelling are very satisfying, even if the results aren’t. Many of those involved wound up serving prison time, but of course it was far too short, too gentle and not served in the same cells as the Big Pharma execs who made this horror story possible.

A gleefully discomfiting portrait of male bonding that delivers some of the year’s biggest laughs.

Here's a film about kids and for kids that has not lost touch with what it is like to actually be a kid.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s hard-won renaissance, as chronicled in Aaron Wolf’s fondly crafted documentary, proves to be a vigorous affirmation of the vitality of Jewish tradition in Los Angeles that will fascinate the faithful and enlighten the curious.

Twisty enough to please many arthouse patrons, though some will be rolling their eyes by the end.

Life-affirming without being saccharine and enormously entertaining, film could be one of those rare specialty pictures that crossover to a mainstream audience.

While the main actors are excellent, the gains from not just making a documentary instead of this hybrid form, or from multiplying the running time by 10, are open to debate. That said, the community-minded sincerity behind Union County cannot be questioned.

Colaizzo’s dialogue often crackles with modern idioms and good pithy comments, flowing from the distinct characters in easy fashion. As a director, he’s paced the action well. He knows what he’s doing, even when he’s doing the wrong thing.

Ladkani's Sea of Shadows is a stirring adventure — inspiring and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The film’s only weakness is its ending, which is so subtle it risks being interpreted by the majority of viewers as enigmatic or unclear.

Ghobadi always uses non-pro actors but you would never know. In fact, professionals wouldn't do theses roles justice since the recruited performers are partly playing themselves and partly playing people Ghobadi has known since he was a boy.

This is an art film in spades.

Fennell’s film could be called a polemic, but dramatically it’s so sharply and boldly laid out that its narrative shocks rule the day. It’s jolting to witness how it refuses to let anyone off the hook.

The beautifully acted serio-comedy takes a potentially smirky premise -- a chance dirty phone call between an introverted writer and a persuasive mystery woman becomes a meaningful long-distance relationship -- and turns it into something that really reaches out and touches you.

The climactic final scene at the wedding hall begins as grotesque and humiliating, then slowly the threads come together, while Burshtein mischievously plays with perceptions about whether the unfolding miracle is a fantasy or not.

Although some might argue that not mentioning anyone's difference is a kind of erasure in itself, it's hard not to get swept up in the cast and crew's joyful insouciance. Plus, the cheeky showtunes, co-written by onscreen villain MuMu and executive producer Peter Halby, are a hoot.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

The film confidently highlights the delicate relationship between people and their spaces, while also acknowledging the understated harshness of a job that requires you to assess, with a certain degree of remove, one of the more intimate elements of another person’s life.

It’s an expertly carved chunk of cheese. But taken on its own, limited terms, Love, Simon is also a charmer — warm, often funny and gently touching, tickling rather than pummeling your tear ducts.

This terrifically performed piece of filmed theater is filled with twists, turns and underhanded schemes that show how history sometimes lies in the hands of a selected few, not to mention a good glass of Chardonnay.

With its bittersweet outcome, this is a tremendously moving story, strong in social commitment and deftly woven out of years of footage.

Horror and cold humor commingle in Dogtooth, a Greek import whose screenwriters approach scenario construction like misanthropic social scientists planning an experiment -- one whose result suggests that governments might want to rethink policies allowing parents to home-school their children.

A clear-eyed, compelling look at getting out the vote, grassroots-style.

As a glimpse of a distinctive world and what happens when a young man who thrives within it gets uprooted, the film will yield low-key charms for patient viewers.

Digging deep into the archives for rare and revealing material to accompany interviews with many of his collaborators and intimates, filmmaker Amy Scott packs a lot into 90 minutes with this insightful and warm look at an artist whose best work always revealed a heightened social conscience.

[An] accessible and informative close-up documentary.

For anyone with a keen interest in this unique American musical form, Rejoice and Shout is a must-see and see-again.

Satisfying for devoted fans and might even win a convert or two.

M3GAN might be too frequently funny to be terrifying, but it’s never too silly to deliver tension and vicious thrills. It seems a safe bet that the killer doll will return, not to mention become an in-demand costume next Halloween.

Home movie footage shot by Judy during a period of Belushi's sobriety at the couple's summer home in Martha's Vineyard provides a poignant glimpse of the normal life he could have lived. That his early loss left so much potentially great work undone makes the documentary as much elegy as tribute.

An incredibly powerful story of renewal, commitment and the resiliency of the human spirit, this is a movie that should attract a large theatrical audience, and no one will go home disappointed.

Actors dominate with finely nuanced performances where every scene feels dramatically right.

Strong performances propel a movie that wears its influences (De Palma, Lynch) on its sleeve without feeling like a copycat.

What viewers take away from Kids is the sense that even after 80 years of hard living, it’s still possible to live a meaningful, happy and influential existence — an authentically feel-good message for these feel-bad times.

Although it feels all too familiar with its storyline about a bullied 15-year-old, King Jack boasts an immediacy that makes it compelling throughout.

Bong’s adventurous new film barrels forward with chaotic plotting, as is often the case with the director’s work. But thematic coherence remains frustratingly elusive.

The result is slightly less interesting and less appealing even as arthouse fare.

This atmospheric, expertly crafted little New England noir has droll dialogue, a female empowerment theme and a sly use of crime elements.

Even admitting that films like Cache (Hidden), The White Ribbon and Amour have raised the bar higher and higher, Happy End feels like it’s pulling its punches and not in their league. For one thing, it’s hard to pin down the theme of the piece.

Although Earth falls short of its potential, it still contains enough glorious photography to please its target audience.

Even for viewers who know much more about Burden than that thing with the rifle, it's almost certain to trigger a hunger for more.

Gibney is convincing on every front. And while Apple (big surprise) refused to cooperate — meaning that key players like Jony Ive and Tim Cook are all but invisible in this story — he gets enough of Jobs' collaborators on camera to lend emotional color to the portrait.

Wajeman is particularly skillful at obscuring the lines between right and wrong, setting his story in a a dog-eat-dog world whose moral compass is slightly askew.

Kahn never offers an easy way out for Thomas, even if the finale tends to wrap things up in ways that seem a little too conclusive. But his film mostly explores, with steadfastness and moments of raw emotion, the crude uphill battle faced by junkies on the path to recovery.

Though the film stretches out long enough to impress us with the difficulty of their journey, the four actors ensure that the two hours or so we spend in their company aren't dull.

It’s a familiar template, and Saleh’s direction can veer toward the heavy-handed in places, but it’s also an intriguingly damning portrait of the corruption currently hitting Egypt on all levels.

Alternately disturbing and brutally funny, and ending with the sort of capper that perfectly encapsulates its provocative ethos, this marks an auspicious directorial debut for Oscar Boyson.

There is much to appreciate in Poitras’ low-key, down-to-business approach which employs instinctive editing choices, and not her own persona (she never appears onscreen), to build the most revealing portrait of Assange and his WikiLeaks staff in the public domain.

There's no denying that this is a fascinating story, albeit one that raises far more questions than it answers.

It's full of wry observations about the confusion of relationships — female friendships in particular — along with droll insights about a writer's inspiration and whether drawing from real life constitutes a license or a betrayal. In addition to wonderful performances from an ace cast, especially Bergen in divinely flinty form, the production is a technical jewel.

Joshua: Teenager vs. Super Power is actually a rousing documentary on a youth movement against, essentially, educational brainwashing.

It packs an unsettling message of empowerment very rare in the social injustice genre.

If Am I OK?‘s tone occasionally tilts too far toward comedy (including in an oddly staged climactic confrontation) its laughs land far more often than not, and bring us closer to the characters by inviting us to laugh with them.

The real stars are the magnificent black and white images shot by Dweck and Kershaw. The co-directors’ eye for composition allows them to find visual magic and an arresting sense of drama in every frame.

This premise — of two people with divergent personalities potentially falling in love — is not new, but 7 Days satisfyingly freshens up a stale formula, thanks in large part to the lead performances.

Herzog’s film may not be the final word on Gorbachev, but it is affectionate and candid and leaves audiences in a melancholy mood about the sometimes short-lived nature of reform.

For all the film's intellectual pretensions, both good and bad, Duke's great gravitas and Beetz' spontaneity lift the film partway out of its quasi-spiritual morass; they provide a hint of the real, of a beating heart, even if the drama itself exists in a parched desert realm devoid of actual life.

Beautifully shot with an acute eye for crisp composition, this intimate mood piece explores the subtle intricacies and low-level power struggles of long-term love in forensic detail.

Wallace was clearly a very ambitious, capable and confident man, but the film, as absorbing as it is, is two-dimensional.

Director Bryan Singer positions this new film as a sequel to Donner's film, and his Superman -- played with winning fortitude by newcomer Brandon Routh -- is less a Man of Steel than a Man of Heart.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

Entertaining and substantive enough to be interesting even for those completely unfamiliar with weaves and relaxers.

Though it doesn't address all of their complaints, the movie makes an excellent case against those who seek blanket prohibitions against genetically modified organisms — and, maybe more importantly, against those of us who support such bans just because we assume it's the eco-conscious thing to do.

The Outrun — the title refers to tracts of outlying grazing land on arable farms — is slightly overlong and at times feels cluttered. But it depicts the protagonist’s brutal struggle with enough distinctive elements — in every sense of the word — to make it more than just another draining addiction story.

With a mix of retro eye-candy for grown-ups and a thrilling, approachable storyline for the tykes, the film casts a wide and beguiling net.

Part let's-get-it-together band saga and part road movie, the story arc is awfully familiar, but that doesn't stop it being a rollicking romp.

What the film doesn’t have is the visceral impact that would take it from a well-intentioned treatise to a searing work of art.

Power exposes the myth of good policing for what it is: one of the most expensive and calculated PR campaigns in history. And by extension, the film dismantles the idea of America as the land of the free, emphasizing that freedom only belongs to those with enough power and social capital to avoid the oppressive boot of law enforcement.

ParaNorman is an amusing but only fitfully involving animated caper.

This is very much an actors’ film, not least because director-scripter Agnes Jaoui also appears in front of the camera in the well-seasoned role of Agathe Villanova.

A very entertaining film, stuffed with colorful idiots and serves-you-right twists. Silly in ways that reflect poorly of the filmmaker's taste but will endear it to many viewers, it's a true-crime tale that has much to do with Major League Baseball but requires no interest in the sport to enjoy.