By focusing entirely on Zappa’s outlook on his own work and the way it related to the outside world, Schütte manages to form a tight narrative around this fascinating man.

My Love, Don’t Cross That River serves as a testament that romantic love can endure, particularly when it is nurtured by people who care deeply for one another and don’t hesitate to show that feeling with every breath.

This lack of visual energy, combined with the choice to forgo a score, leaves little to buoy the moments needed to propel the film toward its inevitable close. But where Land And Shade shines is in its outrage, and the heartbroken fury at the center of the film.

Any time the duo build up a significant amount of energy, the messy mechanics of the story come barreling in, shifting the narrative attention to the tedious developments involving encryption keys, which is nothing more than a Macguffin to begin with.

The animated story finds true buoyancy in its social value rather than its creative frontiers. Has the movie reinvented the animation game or Pixar’s standing within it? Far from it, but Finding Dory is a well-told promise that individuality and self acceptance always win.

With an enjoyable atmosphere, solid performances from Hawke, Travolta, Farmiga, and one gifted canine, In A Valley of Violence ends up a solid entry in a genre gradually fading from mainstream cinema.

A thriller so turgid that its setting in logging country starts to feel like heavy irony: Lord, does it lumber.

Arguably the most persuasive and compelling of Ferguson’s films to date, Time To Choose is an imperative, essential essay on our climate change crisis, and if it ever feels didactic, it’s counterpointed by its very real and very human nature.

Fans of high octane, fast-paced martial arts action might be bored with the deliberately calculating style of The Final Master, but those who look for a more patient and meditative experience within the genre will get more than their money’s worth.

Your mileage will vary on Genius, depending on where you place Law’s performance on the irritating/entertaining spectrum and your tolerance for somewhat formulaic tales of creative ego and “The Price of Fame.”

Filled with plenty of ideas and a strong sense of identity, The Witness can still be somewhat unfocused, unfolding in a multitude of directions, but failing to provide a complete portrait about Kitty and her life, which is a truly fascinating one.

Art Bastard is a respectful and affectionate look into the life of a true outsider in the art world.

It’s successful in its aims and will ably bring the book’s readers and romance fans both joy and tears.

Unlike some mock biopics or music documentaries that rely on a particular kind of specificity to succeed, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is universally, gloriously stupid. And that’s not a slight — it takes a considerable amount of smarts to make something that so winningly observes the ridiculous facade of the pop music sphere, but gives it a wide-ranging reach.

As it fritters away character work and ideas about faith and devotion, this is a film clever enough to scare us but not smart enough to accomplish anything more.

Out of the Shadows’ barrels forward like such a rampaging beast that it decimates everything – plot, character, emotion, basic visual lucidity – in its wake.

While Holy Hell only offers answers about this particular group and the experiences of these individuals, it’s a riveting piece of work, a look into a tightly-controlled and private world of brainwashing, abuse and exploitation in the name of spiritual fulfillment.

Although “Olli Mäki” ostensibly belongs to the boxing film genre as much as it is functions as a romantic drama, it never seems truly invested in the underdog narrative of its title character.

For all its safe choices and standard narrative, The Idol succeeds in communicating its message that the Palestinian people deserve a voice and representation. Its most powerful images somehow aren’t shots of Muhammad’s wonderful singing; instead, it’s the reactions of the Palestinians to those performances and cheering on one of their own.

It’s just as predictably mind-numbing and tedious as any other comedy Sandler has attached his name to post-“Funny People.”

Although the film is rooted in arthouse film territory, and is particularly inspired by the films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, Raw turns out to be its own wild animal.

Herzog’s latest proves a masterful inquiry into technological evolution.

According to Len, rock ‘n roll is "blood, bourbon, and napalm," and it’s exactly those elements that the film needs, but doesn’t provide.

After the Storm is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.

The off-putting aesthetics of ‘Looking Glass’ are complemented by an equally putrid tale that’s determined to make its protagonist loathsome.

While The Ones Below doesn’t make it over the finish line, Farr shows good instincts, and has an ease for creating tension without overt manipulation, while keeping everything engaging enough that you’re willing to overlook questions that nag after the credits roll.

Warcraft may provide grand, thunderous spectacle as it transforms human actors into hulking Orcs, but when trying to perform the alchemy of transmuting genre archetypes into characters with soul, the magic fizzles out.

What The Wait really needs is more: more story, more character, and more reason to grieve with these women. Because what these women have to grieve is worthy of time and attention, yet these qualities are frustratingly absent from this film.

The film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.

His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role.

Even within Schrader’s own back catalogue, Dog Eat Dog feels like a lukewarm retread of elements he has achieved, as a writer and director, much better before. It’s just that here they’re mashed together gracelessly, with a kind of bullying undercurrent, as though designed to get a rise out of you, just so it can deliver two for flinching.

An excoriating, gripping, intricately plotted morality play, Mungiu’s film is less linear, more circular or spiral-shaped than his previous Cannes titles...but it is no less rigorous and possibly even more eviscerating and critical of Romanian society, because it offers its critique across such a broad canvas.

Once it ends, you may be panting from exhaustion while still appreciating that Endless Poetry is greater than the sum of its parts as it feels naturally necessary and appropriately organic to the series.

The list of the film’s transgressions against the culturally acceptable is almost gratuitously long. But the spine of self-aware intelligence that runs through even its most grotesque, exploitative, and offensive twists, and the basically incredible, irreplaceable central performance from Isabelle Huppert, make this queasily hilarious mass of contradictions just about cohere.

Fumbling between broad comedic strokes you’d find in a Disney film and the kind of darkness that usually creeps out of heavy Danish dramas, “Two Lovers And A Bear” is tonally off-kilter on top of failing to engage on any deeper level.

It’s less a convincing, involving narrative than an episodic picaresque that rambles loose-jointedly from absurdist encounter to vaguely fable-like incident.

From the performances to the repetitive jokes and bizarre actions that have little bearing on anything, Slack Bay exhausts you with its intense spirit.

Puiu scoops up storylines and arguments and revelations armful by messy armful and the inexplicably titled “Sieranevada” becomes by turns pit-of-stomach-sad, flight-of-fancy funny and pin-in-heart moving. And never less than wincingly true in its deadpan acknowledgement of the beautiful absurdity of family life.

Though it is dense in allusion and rich in texture, there are choices he makes that ultimately pull The Salesman back from the greatness, and the engulfing universality of his best work. It is as compelling as anything Farhadi has ever made, but it’s also somehow smaller.

Laura Poitras has done it again. Much like the celebrated Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, “Risk” is instilled with a sense of immediate urgency as an apprehensive cloud hovers over every action, every word, every wayward glance.

An unfeasibly charming film full of little wisdoms and quiet comforts where we might expect to find provocations, its only deception is that it is so much richer than it seems at first glance.

A dexterous, mischievous, almost incomprehensibly intelligent film that has such invention packed into every frame that the only real danger is overload, Neruda works most thrillingly as an effusive love letter to the very concept of fiction and all the ways it can set you free, written in lyrical but staccato meter, perhaps with a rose between the teeth.

It’s, all told, a preposterous and pretentious mess of a film, and all the good intentions in the world don’t mean anything when the execution is as ham-fisted as it is here.

Purposefully joyless and bereft of any kind of aesthetic gratification other than the one found in Mendoza’s use of cinema verite and non-sentimental approach, Ma’ Rosa is tough-as-nails, and leaves you with a heaviness and a pulsating sympathy that’s impossible to ignore.

Harrowing, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking, Pervert Park is an important film with an urgent, compassionate message.

The biggest lesson to take away from I, Daniel Blake is how a movie doesn’t have to be psychologically complex or cinematically dazzling to dig beyond its surface. It’s rudimentary in terms of technique, but how the film generates its power is through the themes of humanity and kindness at its center.

An intensely pleasurable, lavishly shot dessert tray of utter hokum, The Handmaiden is a prime example of why we should be glad that there’s someone out there still invested in the overwrought Gothic melodrama, and that that person is Park Chan-wook.

It’s timely, it’s entertaining, it’s a blast of energy, but Weiner also drills down into the unique nature of American politics in the media saturated, smartphone-enhanced, Twitter hot-takes age.

Even if you don’t agree with Jarmusch’s introductory claim that The Stooges are the greatest rock and roll band ever, there’s still a lot of pleasure to be gleaned from Gimme Danger; most of it coming from Iggy’s love of the band, the music, and inability to be anyone but his incomparable and uncompromising self.

Your time would be better spent staring at a postcard for two hours. No, not even the presence of the usually magnetic Marion Cotillard will stave off the boredom of Garcia and Jacques Fieschi‘s screenplay.

Having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.

Hell or High Water might walk over familiar ground with second-hand boots in terms of character development and structural beats, but it does so with great personality and zero pretension of wanting to be anything more.

Personal Shopper is a mess — not an uninteresting one, and better that than a staid, unadventurous bore, but a mess nonetheless.

It is indulgent in its length and relative plotlessness, though there’s no point at which the bravado of Arnold’s filmmaking, Lane’s riveting performance or Ryan’s stunning Polaroid-shaped lensing ever flag.

As polished a film in terms of craft and performance as Nichols has ever made, the director’s trademark considered intelligence shows itself in how subtly it reworks and refreshes the tired conceits of the historical biopic, while still remaining a conventionally appealing and, yes, Oscar-y example of the genre.

Spectacular, gross and delicious (so unsavory it’s almost sweet), the film is more proof of Refn’s mastery of his trash aesthetic and more fun than anything this indulgent and empty-headed has any right to be.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Every family is its own country with culture and customs and embarrassments that seem alien beyond its borders, but the genius of Maren Ade‘s brilliantly funny and slyly crushing Toni Erdmann is that it makes the utterly foreign nation of its central father/daughter relationship feel so much like home.

If the resulting film, Julieta feels neither wholly Munro nor typically Almodovar in final execution, there is still a very compelling energy given out by the collision.

Not wondrous enough to be likened to a ghost, "Journey to the Shore" is the corpse of a film: lifeless, bloodless, insensate.

Falls flat on its face thanks to a severe lack of self-awareness and an air of dramatic self-importance.

The Nice Guys, which the screenwriter also directed, is the best of Black’s films. It is eccentrically, sometimes broadly funny, with top-notch performances from Crowe and Gosling and a pitch-perfect sense of timing to help smooth over some of the script’s fault lines and blind spots.

The BFG exceeds expectations thanks to Rylance’s performance, and joyously expounds the essence of a cherished children’s tale in all of its imaginative glory.

Extremely entertaining and well-crafted, Crush The Skull promises a bright future in genre films for Nguyen.

Given how good the cast often are elsewhere, it doesn’t seem unfair to put this at Armstrong’s door, and the film has a very first-time-director feel to it.

The film is never as savage as the first-act anarchy suggests it might be, and its best ideas are subsumed into familiar thriller concepts. Good craftsmanship elevates the result above workaday thriller territory, but ultimately Money Monster never rages in the “mad as hell” mode that’s always kept just out of reach

Director Anne Fontaine’s film is based on actual events and grapples with thorny questions that plague even the most zealous during times of crisis. It’s a pity, then, that this picture finds Fontaine compelled to find a resolution in a situation that seldom yields easy answers.

What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances.

Apocalypse feels like a cog in Fox’s perpetual-motion blockbuster machine, paying lip service to the story’s allegorical potential as it grinds our interest to dust.

At its best, the film becomes something winningly subversive.

A sinister dread pulses through Bridgend, one that is engrossing and terrifying.

Dark Horse is crowd-pleasing and rousing, but its biggest problem is that no successive part of the documentary can sustain the power of its opening prologue.

Mother’s Day is the cinematic equivalent of spilling boiling hot coffee on your mother when you bring her burnt toast for breakfast in bed.

Thomsen builds a fascinating film around a fascinating man, but never, despite his evident deep affection for him, allows it to fall into hagiography.

A moving movie that tries too hard to please and thus never truly satisfies.

Uplifting in a tiny, understated and very authentic way, Sworn Virgin shows us gently how its possible to be living in exile in the world you know best, and how it's possible to come home to a place you've never been before.

The actors test one another like boxers perpetually about to throw the first punch, but all the buildup around their encounter is flabby and forgettable.

Perhaps most impressive is how, despite the nostalgia inherent in this kind of endeavor, "Sleeping Giant" never sentimentalizes its story, and never compromises on the essentially bleak idea that you can be transformed from a carefree child shading your eyes from the glare of a huge, wide future to a scarred and haunted young adult in a single moment.

Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.

Though it delves into a number of topics beyond fashion, it refrains from going underneath the glossy surface. It will appeal to fans of Wintour’s brand and style devotees, but it likely won’t make too many converts outside her kingdom.

Striking and consistently engaging, the Russos deftly craft compelling blockbuster entertainment out of a a moral and emotional conflict, and that’s more impressive than any overblown display of loud and vulgar power.

Sure, there's a bit of spectacle to the film's utterly ridiculous violence. Even that dulls, however, without character or stakes to inject urgency into the parade of broken bodies.

For a movie that is all about accumulation, it adds up to very little, and for a story all about connectedness, 11 minutes, intermittently enjoyable though it may be, never connects.

A taut thriller that almost doesn't waste a single step.

McCarthy has a great knack for vicious verbiage, and in combination with her supreme physical control there's pleasure in seeing Darnell tear an opponent to shreds, even (or especially) when she's in the wrong.

Unfortunately, while Husson clearly has talent to burn, her film is something of a case of all talk and no trousers.

There’s very little in The Huntsman: Winter's War itself that is actively bad. Compared to some of its blockbuster rivals, it’s reasonably watchable, never offensive, and mostly coherent.

The strikingly realistic scenery is dappled with color, light and shadow to create dramatic stages for masterful character animations— if only the story played out on this impeccably-realized fantasy had the same persuasive command.

Get A Job is such a baffling endeavor the callow movie could conceivably come with its own milk carton campaign asking: “Where is Dylan Kidd and what have you done with him?”

Bercot's setting out to make both a character study of a troubled young man wasting his potential, and an examination of a system trying desperately to do right by its charges, despite the immense difficulties and occasional bureaucratic red tape that tie their hands. It's more successful at the latter than at the former.

There is plenty to marvel at in Tardi’s darker, alternate universe Paris, one that’s best watched with open minds and mouths agape at the incredible visual and storytelling imagination on display.

A film as mercurial as this can be an impressive thing, but the back half is so filled with half-baked metaphysics, pseudo-Lynchian maybe-dreams, and a sour, cheap conclusion that feels nihilistically cruel to at least one of its characters, that even the pleasures of watching the actors on screen start to fade away.

Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice is an extraordinarily odd, idiosyncratic movie that presents aggressive, even warlike concepts of Batman and Superman without entirely justifying the eccentric visions.

The Trust is many other things — darkly funny, flawed, with a eminently watchable dynamic between Cage and Wood — but from frame one it reasonably entertains, while its characters have nothing but contempt for one another.

The result, while featuring some superbly non-sequitur moments and gags, feels forced into a road trip package caught between self-awareness and naivety.

As exampled in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” any chance to hear Hawkes perform solo on guitar is time well spent. It’s time well needed, too, as it provides a moment of reflection to remember why we came — Hawkes — and wonder how he found himself in such a confounding misfire.

With a bare minimum amount of suspense, and a screenplay that needs too much work for one that has so many long stretches of silence, this film leaves you with too many reasons not to care about it.