Goodbye To All That is not going to impress the visual, form or style cinephiles of the world, but it really shouldn’t matter. The content is tops. And as an astute and empathetic portrait of human crisis, resolve and survival, it’s a wonderfully authentic and perfectly touching one.

Funny, unique, and entirely inappropriate, Appropriate Behavior is a supremely satisfying and irreverent take on the New York rom-com.

Unfortunately Things People Do scuppers its own chances by having people do things we just don't ever, ever believe they would.

Though the plot gets points for originality, there may be a reason why no one has told this story before: it’s ridiculous. But Take Care occasionally succeeds with funny dialogue and performances from Leslie Bibb and Thomas Sadoski.

Red Knot" is insightful in the way few first films are, and marks Cohen as a filmmaker to watch.

For filmmakers Angus Macqueen and Guillermo Galdos, they've undoubtedly chosen a great subject for a compelling documentary. Unfortunately, they squander the opportunity with Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty, and it's due to the common problem of contemporary documentaries, where the directors get so far in the way of their own story, that any context or objectivity is lost.

It’s a searing series of accounts from dignified patriots, weary politicians, and desperate civilians stuck in a frantic situation, and a remarkable piece of work that should be seen by everyone who thinks they know everything about the Vietnam War.

Comedy is most effective when it’s taking a risk. Here, the directors took a big risk, and managed to finesse something shocking and novel out of the familiar Franco-Rogen dynamic without overplaying their hand.

It'll pass a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon without too much trouble. But whether as an adventure tale, a thriller, or a morality play, Black Sea never quite makes a compelling enough case for its existence when better examples of the submarine genre are already out there.

An irreproachably tasteful, easily digestible but an unsurprising, undemanding watch.

The Salt of The Earth is a mesmeric and unforgettable look at the world and it sufferings through the eyes of a remarkably insightful and honorable artist.

As compelling as R100 is in spurts, it's ultimately an exercise in excessiveness that only a niche audience will be able to fully stomach.

This is a film that should, at the very least, make one appreciate the all-encompassing breadth of cinema, and, at most, provoke deeper thought of transcendental existence in correlation with nature and The Idea of Man.

If you have the patience to play the role of silent witness for the full two hours, Maidan is a rewarding experience and an alarmingly important wake-up call for those still in the dark about one of today's most critical situations.

Wisely, Broomfield doesn’t harp on alleged police incompetence, beyond letting a handful of activists and locals repeatedly raise it as an issue; Tales is far from overbearing as far as agitprop goes, letting the outrage quietly seep in.

Time Out Of Mind is a film of tremendous patience and pace, as it wants you to inhabit every minute, day, hour and year of homelessness. But it's through that considered approach that the reveal of George's deep self-hatred and low self-esteem carries an extraordinary power; time has worn his sense of self to the point of despair that's deeply moving.

As a director, Colangelo has a firm if cautious grasp on the material, but as a writer her grip is less sure.

It's a found footage movie that feels instantly dated, even with its supposed political undertones. It's creaky, laborious, and not, in the least bit, scary.

Ullmann’s version of Miss Julie exists in a special cinematic category; it’s toxic, it’s hypnotic, and passionately translates Strindberg’s genius instinct for enlightening the multi-layered psychological spectrums of human desire for lust and power. It’s unforgettable in every sense of the word.

Respectfully presented, Unbroken is competently made and even has a sequence or two that’s impressive, but it’s ultimately very familiar and eventually draining.

Meticulously crafted and investigated (and no doubt heavily vetted by lawyers), Berg brings a sobering solemnity to a very grave matter, but also lends a dignity to its subjects without pandering.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the best film of the new trilogy, more entertaining and energetic and tonally in sync with Jackson's earlier, edgier work, shifting from berserker comedy to abject horror at a moment's notice (and then back again).

The Dying Of The Light is forgettable, anonymous and at times almost amateur, and the product of a director searching for a new method of storytelling.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a creaky, sometimes painfully boring Old Testament slog, and finds the visionary director unable to successfully wrangle a human story out of a tale of gods and kings.

Paddington is totally delightful.

Tremendously evocative and inherently enchanting, Horse Money is one of the year’s most profound films and an essential step forward for both Ventura the Cape Verdean, and Pedro Costa the artist.

With her underdeveloped, dismissive, screenplay and myopic direction, Rondòn is as delicate with her theme as Michael Bay is with his American flag shots or Tim Burton with his kitschy quirkiness. That hers is a serious context makes it that much more disappointing.

Isn't a bad freshman effort, but it doesn't offer anything to set it apart from dozens of other indie dramedies.

A film which for the most part is enervatingly classic in format: stately, reverential despite the conflicting accounts the various narrators give of Hong's motivations, and often quite dull, despite its focus not on her work or talent but on the more salacious and controversial aspects of her personal life.

Death Metal Angola is deeply involving and, in its own way, completely and refreshingly unusual.

In zany set piece after zany set piece, the movie sets itself apart as willing to try anything, do anything for laugh, and it succeeds more often than it fails, even when falling back on some creaky wordplay and the occasional over-emphasis on both fart gags and pop culture references.

The fact that the sequel is a messy, dull, instantly forgettable trifle somehow makes it the perfect follow-up to the original -- it's just as horrible.

Not only a searing look at Europe's painful involvement in participating, encouraging and backing regimes of oppression, Concerning Violence makes it clear that not much has changed in the fifty years since Fanon's powerful words were first printed.

Avery can't commit to whether he's making a gritty "Animal Kingdom"-style crime picture, or a light caper film, and the final result is wonky in the extreme, particularly in the conclusion, which feels particularly muddled.

Mahony and Sampson certainly know how to lay out a crime/thriller/comedy structurally, but unfortunately, they mishandle the tone and momentum this sort of movie needs to work.

It's rare to see any blockbuster in any genre make decisions informed and driven by character, rather than by the more superficial requirements of blockbuster entertainment, but the rewards in that regard are plentiful in Mockingjay.

A fascinating story told with deep insight, Little Hope Was Arson finds that both fire and forgiveness burn in different ways.

As it did with the actual case, Happy Valley will divide audiences and create heated discussions over the many contradicting reactions given by its subjects. However, there’s one point that won’t be controversial: It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

What We Do In the Shadows is the type of little movie that you watch and feel like you've discovered something really special. It's a total surprise; a silly, scary delight.

A darkly mysterious and extremely accomplished first feature.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

It’s a reminder of what a tremendously talented writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is, and hopefully we’ll see him venturing back to the big screen sooner rather than later.

Selma is vital correspondence, filmmaking lived on the streets where brutal facts were ignored then reported, and now snatched back from history to sustain a spirit few films can or will possess. It is stunning humanistic cinema on a mainstream scale... It has inventiveness, urgency, humor, and most of all emotion that draws effortless parallels rather than leaving its lesson up on the screen.

Eastwood wisely trains the camera on Cooper's face and keeps it there — he knows his actor can carry the story’s emotion when other aspects fail it.

Alluring and captivating, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely can’t ultimately overcome its undeveloped arty tendencies, but its hazy exploration of dread and desire is still unique enough to make an impression.

Decker is good at articulating sinister moods and unstable psyches, but anything resembling a cogent narrative is challenged.

While zooming in and out of Burre’s life, Greene foregoes true insight in favor of a stylistic approach, using the kind of cinematic language that’s often reserved for fiction and feature films, and the result leaves you admiring Actress greatly, but from a distance.

A genre exercise such as this needs invention, and while Wyatt trots out a slick stamp on proceedings with a game cast, his version never works up steam enough to render the effort worthwhile.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

Mostly, the film's very funny, Sono displaying a sense of how to frame and time a visual gag that feels positively Zucker-ish. But there are real stakes, and bursts of real feeling too.

When Horns thankfully concludes, relief sets in; this hellishly misguided effort concludes with an inferno and sequels are never sprung from the equivalent of a mouthful of ash.

Anchored by career-best performances from Long and Rossum, and a juicy script that bravely dives into the darkest parts of breaking up and making up, Comet is an original and inventive retelling of an age-old and universal truth.

An absorbing office saga and diverting dark comedy, Zero Motivation is a surprisingly insightful coming-of-age tale, utilizing the milieu of the military to look at desire, loneliness, identity, fitting in and many aspects of everyday complex female life.

The story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

Algorithms is a completely unique film, unlike any other documentary you might see this year, both for its content and its form.

Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you’ve never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you’ve seen all too many times before.

This is a movie primarily concerned with numbers and the way that information is fed, processed, and acted upon. But it plays like the greatest paranoid thriller since "All the President's Men."

The film is effectively scary, filled with plenty of jump moments and a few slow-burning scenes, but the scares aren’t enough to balance the poor writing and lack of imagination.

Whatever flaws it has are ones of over-enthusiasm and over-ambition and are therefore easy to forgive, especially because when it works, it really works.

The film isn't bad enough to be some kind of potential cult classic: it's tedious, with even the stranger moments and plot developments failing to raise the pulse.

Loo and Lau’s Dragons is too busy reveling in tilted angles, music video editing, mind-numbingly clichéd dialogue, wooden acting and a one-dimensional story about brotherhood.

Camp X-Ray is as transparent in its message as the title suggests, and the scan shows a malignant tumor in the very bones of the film’s structure. An on-the-nose approach smothers all subtext into submission and leaves nothing of interest alive.

There is a better, more contemplative movie to be made with this material, but with Brand and the filmmakers opting for cheap thrills, it leaves the movie, like the passengers on the plane, stuck on the tarmac.

Young Ones and its serious, bone-dry approach won’t be for everyone. The picture is languidly paced, but its ideas, moods and tones strike many thought-provoking chords.

The Best of Me features actors who are playing well above their material, but Monaghan and Marsden aren’t enough to save this film.

Yes, it’s funny and charming and sometimes deeply amusing. But at the same time it lacks any kind of emotional resonance.

It's not the most complex WWII movie you'll see, but there's no denying the blunt intensity of Fury, and even if it doesn't sustain, Ayer commits to staring straight into hellish eye of war and bringing audiences along to witness every gruesome detail.

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

He's a romantic and a psychopath and creature of the night. Sadly, Dracula Untold, with its humorless aura and been-there-done-that feel, doesn't allow Evans to inhabit many of these aspects. Instead, Dracula Untold feels largely uninspired.

If there’s any criticism to be levied, it’s just that we wanted to see more dance, which can’t quite be fully captured on film, only in person. Still, capturing Streb’s artistry, inspiration and thought processes behind her work makes it more than worthwhile.

It's just a bore, barely registering as a movie (visually, it looks more like an USA cable series), which is a shame, because with the oddball cast and somewhat notable director, it could have been fun and trashy. Instead, it's just forgettable.

A unique filmgoing experience that’s both intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding.

With all of its glaring faults, Automata has some shining moments, most of which come during the surprisingly emotional climax.

The entire film could start to feel like a feature-length justification, but Darius manages to sidestep that path by never letting himself off the hook.

While the execution may be somewhat of a misfire, the obvious effort and thought put into making the concept work is worthy.

Big, wonderfully oddball, sometimes confounding and beautiful, Inherent Vice supplies good dosages of stoner giggles. But its doobage is potent and reflects some heavy ideas you’ll need to unpack and meditate on for a long while.

Ultimately as harrowing as any backwoods horror story but enhanced by a humanity those stories will almost never have, We Gotta Get Out Of Here is a terrific film, precisely because it takes the components of a traditional thriller, approaches them from a less-frequently explored perspective, makes them feel relatable and then elevates them with the right amount of style.

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

Kill The Messenger hopes to solemnly lionize and exonerate Webb, but rarely does it reflect anything back to its audience other than reminding us how corrupt and unprincipled our system is.

Hellaware is a cynical, caustic, and often very funny send up of not only the current commercial art world but the entire borough of Brooklyn.

The filmmaking is admittedly functional rather than particularly artful, but you somewhat appreciate that Warchus is determined to distract you as little as possible from the story and characters.

While Gone Girl is certainly his slightest film to date, it's nonetheless undeniably gripping. Fincher clearly enjoys turning the screws and rounding the wild corners of the plot from the first frame.

The Boxtrolls charms, in every way it can – with its gorgeous animation style that combines lo-fi with high-tech (the puppets were printed using 3D printers), with the huggable nature of the characters, and with the boldness of its storytelling and thematic concerns.

While The Town That Dreaded Sundown is ambitious and supremely weird, it fails to cohere into something more resonant.

Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.

There are enough pleasures going on in John Wick to elevate it above just another dumb action movie.

You’ll walk away almost certain that you’ve seen a decent thriller, but your thoughts may stumble on the word “thrill.”

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

While a truly original comedy, While We're Young is the rare one that also laces rich thematic elements with wonderfully drawn characters to create a picture that's as genuinely hilarious as it is thoughtful about how hopes, ambitions, dreams and ideals of personal and creative accomplishments that ebb and flow across decades.

It avoids the trap of simply being a celebrity vehicle about celebrity, by displaying a surprising heart beneath its very funny surface.

The film is a boilerplate biopic, but with stunning cinematography and a couple of fierce performances, The Theory of Everything is nothing if not an accomplished and emotional work of cinema.

Competently directed, and delivered with the expected emotional beats, Still Alice achieves its modest goals, but one wishes it had a grander vision.

All of that star-making and directorial grace Scherfig possesses is substituted for a bludgeoning attempt at provoking the British elite into taking a long hard look at themselves through a cracked mirror. She retains her confrontational sensibilities with none of the subtlety, and hammers a single message to mind-numbing effect.

"Pigeon" is a near-perfect cap to a near-perfect trilogy, a cavalcade of oddness, humor, banality and even horror.

Petzold distills a familiar atmosphere to create a work veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power.

Pawn Sacrifice certainly whips up a dervish of energy, and as a piece of dramatic entertainment, it's mostly engaging, and features character actors doing very good work.

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is a frustrating film, despite vast stretches of compelling storytelling.

Straightforwardly shot and sensitive of its subject, Art And Craft is a intriguing depiction of counterfeit impulses (both wrongly perceived and irrepressible), immense talent gone awry and what lies behind the desire to create.