You don’t have to be an animation buff to appreciate the chances this stirring saga takes.

Similar in form to the director’s previous nonfiction studies (Our Daily Bread, Over the Years), this wordless assemblage of fixed shots is as much a museum piece as it is a strictly art-house item, inviting viewers to sit back and let the imagery consume them.

The director ties themes together at the end with more finesse than usual, letting a couple of meaningful visuals speak for themselves where he might have thrown in a line or two of explanatory dialogue. And as for that final twist, it's a doozy.

Even more inappropriate physical gags, foul-mouthed dialogue and outrageous situations all contribute to raising the stakes, as Waters pushes the cast to amiably outdo the original.

The film has a different though no less riveting intensity, thanks to Rooney Mara's emotionally naked performance in the title role, and unflinching support from Ben Mendelsohn.

Though Asante is no stylist or and no very deep psychologist, she is adept at reaching an audience through direct storytelling.

Flirting with sitcommy high jinks, Clark instead gives us a bittersweet cocktail of soul-weary defeat and unassuming vigor.

At some point, we realize we've stopped counting the '80s dance hits we recognize (or trying to figure out when that Frankie Goes to Hollywood remix will end) and have become invested in the social lives of the men and women on camera.

Draper constructs a concisely assembled editorial package that covers the essential historical backstory of the 1936 Games while building drama during the competition and establishing a consistently affecting emotional arc throughout.

Earnest, direct and sometimes surprisingly dramatic.

The film works as a moving anti-war essay and as a gripping thriller.

Splash, the story of a lovelorn bachelor who falls in love with a mermaid, deserves high marks both for technical verisimilitude and artistic merit.

Sketchy with biographical information, An Art That Nature Makes is sometimes frustrating in its lack of context and wandering focus. But the filmmaker serves her subject well with her excellent presentation of many examples of Purcell's work from throughout her long career.

An uplifting sense emerges of the resilience through community of youth who are marginalized, abandoned, isolated, bullied or sexually exploited.

Lola Kirke stands in no one's shadow here, delivering a quietly winning performance that would ensure viewer identification even if her character's challenging first-love plight weren't so universal.

An assured doc debut that knows how to stand out in a crowded field, Craig Atkinson's Do Not Resist avoids the handwringing format of other (very welcome) examinations of 21st-century American policing, offering instead something like a despairing tone poem.

Infusing its nightmarish scenario with bracing doses of satirical humor, Tunnel is smarter and more sophisticated than most Hollywood attempts at the genre.

If some anime films also feature more painterly details in the backdrops, especially when depicting nature, what feels new here is the attention to details such as the glow of light sources, including candles and lanterns, that are warmer and more realistically detailed than usual.

So intriguing are the driven, smart and compromised characters, and so infinite are the dramatic possibilities at the intersection of big business and politics, that a vastly expanded small-screen take built around these characters, and others like them, would be quite welcome..

Falardeau, who made his mark with the Oscar-nominated teacher-student tale Monsieur Lazhar, again brings real tenderness to his portrait of a man in trouble.

If the feature film reached for, and often failed to achieve, great emotions to match its imagery, the non-contemplative Imax Experience seems even farther from this goal. Vastness and infinity are all fine and good, but the beauty of the universe tends to feel monstrous and inhuman without an element of human chaos to counterbalance it.

The sheer likability of these lived-in characters is a powerful magnet, thanks to insightful writing and a note-perfect ensemble anchored by a never-better Annette Bening.

Deliberately skirting the Halloween horror corridor, Brian Bertino’s tautly composed monster movie serves as a brutally effective metaphor for the turmoil of adolescence, with all of its rebelliousness and confusion.

Despite his clear interest in matters philosophical, Veiroj has a built-in anti-pomp detector and The Apostate, with its winsomely shambling central character, is always deft, engaging and teeming with ideas.

Barry emerges as an involving and credible portrait of a smart young man with a good deal of growing and learning yet to do.

An intriguing exposé of a gripping story.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a lightly gothic murder ballad made with great finesse and a fine cast.

Katie Says Goodbye is a plaintive story of hard luck and fringe dwellers, one that might have felt clichéd in lesser hands. But first-time filmmaker Wayne Roberts conjures new, resonant chords in his taut, tender drama.