One of the masterstrokes of Sarah Gubbins’s screenplay is how deftly she underscores the differences in the perception and presentation of the sicknesses within this marriage.

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Black Souls is a solid example of the recent string of Italian mob dramas that utilize a somber and reflective tone as opposed to the more flashy and stylized approach of American crime epics.

Dosch, though she’s been appearing more and more in French films of recent years (including Maïwenn’s “My King”), will make heads turn in the role of her career thus far. Her Paula is instantly charming, never too outrageous, hilarious and supremely sympathetic. She will steal your heart.

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.

It’s [Trachtenberg's] measured hand with tone that's really noteworthy, never over-reaching with each twist of the plot, keeping the tension on a simmer, and even when things boil over, “10 Cloverfield Lane” gets feverishly exciting but not hysterical.

What makes Birdboy: The Forgotten Children so effective is the ability to turn the innocent into the macabre.

Holler succeeds at putting a human face on large-scale economic trends, telling a suspenseful coming of age story that shows the true cost of lost opportunity.

Ulman’s black and white freshman feature is an absurdly and assuredly packed jack-in-the-box that’s short, sweet, and, incidentally, a quirky sharp, vainglorious commentary on these post-crisis, Robinhood Redditor times.

Mud is as unmoving as it is because it doesn’t aspire to be anything other than a competent anti-fairy tale in which the paint-by-number morals are enforced by equally obvious main protagonists.

There’s tremendous social and moral texture throughout the drama, but the socio-economic commentary of the movie is fabric, not heavy handed accessory. And the provocative ethical breaches—savage and scathing in the latter half—give the movie its delectable and wicked bite.

The Woman King is more than an action movie. It’s a film that depicts a side of African history that is rarely told and an opportunity for Black people to assert their humanity and regality.

Brügger’s movie plays mostly like a real-time thriller, to be honest, but whatever hybrid of non-fiction you want to categorize Cold Case Hammarskjöld, it’s nothing short of groundbreaking.

The minor problem of it all is while what Anderson is trying to say can be read across the sky like a beautifully glistening moonbeam; it does often lack the craterous depth of feeling we know he’s capable of when doing his best creative and emotional astrography.

Catching Fire is a monumental achievement, a massively entertaining crowd-pleaser that is thought-provoking and personally inspiring in all of the ways that it aspires to be.

At 127 minutes, Giannoli’s script feels overlong and a bit repetitive in its heroine’s disastrous performances. Lucien, the critic who helps propel Marguerite and her story forward, disappears for a large chunk of the film, only to randomly appear toward the end. Other than these missteps, Marguerite is worth watching with a well-earned grimace, largely for Frot’s pitch-perfect performance.

This pleasingly mellow portrait of a bunch of kids making movies is also an instance of defanged nostalgia — when it was an occasion to highlight the economic, political, cultural circumstances that made this kind of creativity possible.

Despite Herzog’s efforts to keep it as entertaining as possible, “Inferno” does feel like it overstays its welcome a bit. That being said the access and footage they’ve compiled coalesces into a truly cinematic experience. One that would be hard for anyone else to even fathom attempting to duplicate.

There’s the potential for melodrama, but despite the misleadingly grandiose title, The Truth is not in the business of the grand, tormented revelation. Instead, it’s an accretion of little moments, often very funny, sometimes a little sad, but always embedded in the reality of these sharply drawn, idiosyncratic characters.

Flimsy logic notwithstanding, Pearl is the superior of the two heavily-stylized slashers, partly because it dedicates so much time to building the eponymous antiheroine from the ground up.

Full of fresh faces and unique stories, Paris, 13th District makes a case for genuine connections in a culture bent on transposing them into commodified products.

Dead Man’s Burden (the directorial debut of Jared Moshé) demonstrates just why film is important, simply by being beautiful. But beyond that, it’s also a moody, violent, classic, yet modern Western.

To his credit (and without affectation), Gondry doesn’t cloak the fact that he is often perplexed by his subject. Because of his confusion though, we are able to learn quite a lot.

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.

A Hard Day is a film that sets itself fairly narrow ambitions, achieves all of them and then some and yet has no pretensions to importance, weightiness or artistic self-expression.

The characters in The Lovers and the problems they face and struggle with feel entirely authentic, as does the magnetic chemistry between the leads.

Depriving “Nothing Compares” of any mention of O’Connor’s more recent life irreparably wounds the film. Had Ferguson bothered to cast aside her rose-tinted gaze, the documentary might have, akin to O’Connor’s rebellious spirit, broken the mold of what’s expected from cinematic works of biographical nonfiction.

Like many Vietnam stories, the film openly contends with the futility of the war, questioning the larger purpose behind it and how it affected these specific men. The film’s greatest strength, then, is in that specificity and its historical corrective.