Yes may be purposely over-the-top and unsettling to watch — at two and a half hours, it won’t win over audiences looking for light arthouse fare — but Lapid is trying to show us that it’s hardly an exaggeration of the truth, or at least his own truth about his homeland.

Davies Jr. deftly connects the broken promises of the nation state with the fragility of the family at the center of his story. It’s in these final scenes of this impressive debut that he displays his full promise as a filmmaker.

Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story.

Also featuring an unfortunately underutilized (but always welcome) Nancy Travis, Sovereign benefits greatly from its empathetic, non-exploitative approach to its controversial subject matter. It’s uncomfortable but necessary viewing.

Although its very R-rated humor inevitably starts to wear thin during the course of its feature-length run time, Fixed manages the neat trick of injecting some genuine heart into its nonstop offensiveness.

On one hand, She Rides Shotgun is a New Mexico-set crime drama that makes Breaking Bad look like family entertainment. On the other hand, it’s an ultimately touching portrait of the growing bond between a criminal father and the young daughter he’s barely gotten a chance to know.

Featuring enough slightly rambunctious humor to amuse younger viewers while providing a relatable, moving portrait of adolescent angst, sibling bonding and marital tension, In Your Dreams showcases consistently imaginative computer animated visuals (with one segment reverting to hand-drawn) and the sort of original storyline that’s increasingly rare in animated films.

Shot in grainy 16mm to better capture the mood of the epoch, Broken Voices keeps its drama grounded in the social and cultural realities of its time. Provaznik coaxes strong performances from the young cast, whether in their chorus rehearsals or behind the scenes.

No Sleep Till does a particularly fine job of portraying an eerie kind of climate adaptation, one in which people acquiesce to their fate in the face of the elements. That’s especially true of the families for whom the idea of evacuating doesn’t seem to cross their mind.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants easily delivers another rib-tickling, delightfully frantic fourth installment of the series.

Other attributes carried over from Liu’s nonfiction work are his restraint and avoidance of sentimentality in a slow-burn, heavily observational drama whose unhurried pacing requires patience. But there’s a haunting quality to the melancholy story that stays with you, and despite what often seems like a bleak outlook, it finds resonant notes of hope.

Duplass and Strassner’s script traces the one-step-forward, two-steps-back progress of the main characters’ connection over the course of the night with delicacy, never stretching the boundaries of credibility.

The movie remains the work of a master craftsman with his own idiosyncratic storytelling signature, though the pathos and suspense of a hardworking family man driven by desperation to murder get short-changed in favor of wacky humor.

Moments of humor and rare quiet are essential to relieve the manic chaos that more often reigns in this unflinching but compassionate slice of social realism.

The premise is so cute it’s surprising a movie hasn’t done it already. Eternity mines its compelling conceit for both peppery comedy and bleary sentiment.

It’s an unassuming comic drama that sneaks up on you, its emotional honesty fueled by gorgeous performances of unimpeachable naturalness from Will Arnett and Laura Dern.

[Fraser's] superbly nuanced and expressive performance proves key to the film’s power, and he’s well matched by excellent supporting players.

The film aims to inspire action and stave off despair with a reminder that the most powerful tool younger generations can wield is their imagination.

This is a story of national identity and resistance with contemporary resonance, but it’s also a classic genre movie, its historical tapestry populated by a strong ensemble of screen stars as well as impressive newcomers.

A ghostly story that’s not exactly a ghost story, Rose of Nevada is a typically imaginative film from the director Mark Jenkin.

At once a satire of artistic pretensions and a tantalizing character study, Late Fame isn’t focused on big cathartic moments, and its third-act cataclysms are almost anticlimactic. But there’s a satisfying depth to it, and the movie abounds in exquisite grace notes

Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his Algerian victim may live on as a harbinger of what’s to come — that is, of a time when rebels like Meursault no longer exist, in a country finally free of them.

Dead Man’s Wire is a timely, entertaining reflection on the way the offer of the American Dream often tends to be snatched back.

The assessment of Candy’s life and legacy provides ample cause for laughter while also provoking plenty of tears.

The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature.

The standout performance here is Charli XCX as Bethany, channeling her party girl persona into a character who approaches her wanderings as an introspective vision quest, searching for a deeper truth within herself.

The end result is a nifty ethical puzzle about balancing the needs of individuals versus those of the community. Still, it’s best not to take the plot too seriously given the wild implausibilities that come into play in the third act.

Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.

The Rip doesn’t reinvent the cops-in-a-pressure-cooker genre, but its mix of closed-quarters tension, car chases and gunfire gets the job done. Thanks to Carnahan and his accomplished cast, it’s both more convincing and more watchable than the average original streaming movie.

The movie is a sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.

The writers have, wisely perhaps, toned down the language of the original version, although it is still lusty entertainment.

The result is a sharp-eyed, open-ended inquiry into marriage and romance.

Charlie Polinger opens his thrilling and uneasy directorial debut feature The Plague with an arresting sequence that quickly establishes the haunting undertones of this adolescent psychological thriller.

The film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.

The interconnected structure lays the ground for a gripping mystery attentive viewers will be eager to solve.

I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film’s joy.

At a time when people feel obliged to choose which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they stand on, Holding Liat takes a thoughtful middle ground that exposes the situation without exploiting it.

With its vivid footage, sometimes captured from breathlessly intimate proximity, you might be able to believe, just for a moment, that you could really reach right through the screen and touch her.

It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.

In an indie landscape with an insatiable appetite for trauma and misery, it’s a breath of fresh air, a fun time that’s also a witty commentary on shifting sexual mores.

There’s integrity to the performances even when the writing falters, or when de Araújo gets overly literal in showing how haunted Josephine is by the incident, despite mostly maintaining an inscrutable expression.

When it’s cooking, which is most of the run time, this is a smart, sophisticated and incisively acted adult entertainment that savages the crumbling institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down in a bitter reckoning that seems irreversible — until a window of hope and healing gets cracked open.

In his latest, Fjord, the Romanian New Wave auteur brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama of parenting and education, in which a suspicion of possible child abuse escalates into a full inquisition during a head-spinning rush to judgement. It’s also a nuanced reflection on otherness, and how anyone failing to conform to the values of a community invites distrust.

Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.

A shot of a bear sitting on a clifftop gazing out over Hudson Bay while waiting for the waters to freeze — flashes of seals, beluga whales and other prey shuffling through its head along with images of traps, cages and vehicles in pursuit — is one of the more heartrending movie images in recent memory.

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind.

While it feels a fraction overlong, Gibney’s film is a vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.

Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

One in a Million feels both ultra-specific and universal.

Josef Kubota Wladyka, the director and co-writer, shifts from poignant emotion to comedy to surreal scenes that take us inside Haru’s fantasies just as gracefully as the dialogue shifts from Japanese to Spanish and English.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

By its very existence — and in what it reveals about the IDF’s killing, maiming and wounding of Palestinian civilians over the past few years — the film is a condemnation both of Netanyahu’s far-right war machine and the U.S. government’s steadfast support of it.

Frank & Louis poses thoughtful questions about atonement and forgiveness, about how much sense it makes to keep ailing men behind bars when they no longer remember who they were or what they did. It’s an interesting angle for a prison drama, handled with great sensitivity by the filmmakers and cast.

The Friend’s House Is Here chooses to emphasize love, courage, community. It zeroes in on the sacrifices its characters make for each other, the community that builds around them, the resilience that keeps them going in the face of fear and oppression.

At 93 minutes, Lady could stand to be longer. The conversations between the women could go further. Nwosu is digging around in fertile ground, but there’s always a sense that things could go deeper. As it is, the film excels at depicting the complexity of female friendship within a devastating and isolating economic landscape.

In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it’s war’s futility that rings loud and clear.

There isn’t a predictable or hackneyed exchange in the drama, which understands not just the immense challenges its characters face but also the throwaway humor that can be essential to a family’s connective tissue.

Understanding the life and work of Luis Valdez is a way to broaden one’s understanding of what it means to be American, perhaps now more than ever. Watching this enlightening and entertaining documentary is a good way to start.

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.

A sci-fi-action-comedy-thriller loaded with zippy style, upbeat humor and sneaky heart.

If at times the dramatic balance feels off, or the passion exasperating in particularly Gallic ways (l’amour!), Desplechin and his superb cast convincingly bring the angsty emotions to a place of unexpected brightness and clarity.

Like a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals, Kreutzer’s strategies and themes slowly become clearer, and the scene isn’t pretty.

A Woman’s Life is, in its own way, something almost as gratifying: an elegant, enjoyable sophomore outing that proves the breakout was no fluke.

It’s such a seamless, harmoniously composed work, effortlessly edited and elegantly shot, that it’s almost too easy to just drift along with it, like floating down a river on a canoe, letting its currents take control. This isn’t a grabby, attention seeker of a film, but a quiet, watchful sort of movie that whispers its secrets sotto voce.

Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced.

Everything is connected in a movie that never ditches its razor-sharp view of class exploitation.

There’s nothing simple or reductive about the emotional throughlines the documentary traces. It embraces the complexities of a man who turned artifice into a kind of superpower, whether he was dreaming up scenarios for fashion spreads or confronting an America as far removed from haute couture Manhattan as you could get.

It's a pleasure to experience Scorsese as a circus master. One just hopes he doesn't continue in this vein.

So has "Percy Jackson" successfully cracked the "Potter" code? In terms of overall quality, not even close. Still, the film's carefully calibrated mixture of CGI-enhanced spectacle, diverting (and blood-free) action sequences and adolescent angst could make it a modest hit with the eight to 12-year-old set.

Crazy Heart lacks that spark of originality. So what Fox Searchlight has salvaged essentially is a highly watchable performance by Bridges, one of many he has furnished throughout a long career.

The collision of adolescent hormones and parental folly, hardly new cinematic territory, gets a bracing absurdist slant in Youth in Revolt.

Bullock is an irrepressible hoot in writer-director John Lee Hancock's otherwise thoroughly conventional take on Michael Lewis' fact-based book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game."

Director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.

There is a lot of very black humor; and it develops, somewhat surprisingly, into something suggesting a kind of cheerful pessimism.

What Meyers doesn't do is take chances. She sticks to formula and predictability. In "Complicated," this is as much a matter of casting as writing.

This is a pretty minor film from the filmmaker. It feels like more of an exercise in plotting and movie nostalgia than a story about real people.

Eye-popping special effects ensure that this movie will be a smash hit, and while it's entertaining for most of its excessive running time, the cheesy script fails to live up to the grandeur of the physical production.

Emily Blunt, one of the best and most glamorous actresses to come out of England in recent years, makes an unusual but highly successful choice for the young Victoria.

Even if The Men Who Stare at Goats is not worth comparing to "Dr. Strangelove," it should satisfy audiences with its great cast and patent absurdities, coated in quaint nostalgia for the happy hippie days of yore.

Andre Techine's many admirers will not be disappointed by his latest offering, The Girl on the Train, but they might be hard-pressed to define it.

Ninja isn't a great movie, but if you're in the right frame of mind, it is a bloody good time.

Once again, the three young leads give committed performances, with Lautner's character allowed a larger share of the spotlight this time around.

The script does create sufficient tension and intrigue to hook viewers along with a photogenic, hardworking cast.

Director Tom Hooper ("John Adams") ably balances the games (surprisingly little football footage, actually), the personalities and the drama.

The splashy animation is well-executed but again a bit monotonous for a full-length feature.

Most of these linked "shorts" succeed remarkably in nailing the serendipitous flavor of love, New York-style.

Christian McKay's impersonation of young Orson Welles is sensational in this enjoyable, though slight, historical fiction about a teen who spends a memorable week with the legendary wonder.

Apatow is on the right track. In moving his adolescent male comedies into more adult realms, the humor sharpens and characters deepen.

May not offer up any fresh revelations, but this effectively assembled documentary puts it all in valuable, if depressing, perspective.

What's perhaps most fascinating about the film is Boyle's relentless focus on the realities of present-day India as a vehicle for his spectacle and laughs.

No question, watching this film is a tough go. Horror films cause less seat-squirming.

As enjoyable as this foodie movie is, you wish it would take a deeper, more nuanced measure of the women who, in two different eras, star in the movie's kitchens.

Like its characters, Good Guy is sharp, fun and pleasant to behold, and its recreational, apartment and workplace locales are appropriately slick and showy.

Giamatti is aptly cast, playing his own persona with awkward anxiety and suitably skewed humor.

Will mesmerize some and mystify others, while many will be bored silly. It's not a dream, Kaufman says, but it has a dreamlike quality, and those won over by its otherworldly jigsaw puzzle of duplicated characters, multiple environments and shifting time frames will dissect it endlessly.

Furhman plays pure evil with such supreme calmness that only her eyes shine with madness. Indeed, all of the child actors are superb, especially the expressive Engineer.

A prelude that provides the beams and columns for the narrative framework, but with a few decisive and spot-on action spectacles, it sufficiently kindles expectations for the climactic clash in Part 2.