By the end of Blue Film, it’s hard not to feel like it didn’t quite live up to its potential. As a novel, it would be engrossing. As a movie, it’s got good bones but a cowardly lack of boners.

It’s through the alchemy of cinema that the Davies brothers have carried out a resurrection of a soul now frozen intact on the screen.

While Eisenberg is excellent on screen, especially during a dinner scene when he unloads his concerns over David to his fellow tourists, it’s Culkin who, rightfully, steals the film.

A disappointment, certainly, but not one without its pleasures.

It bears the aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of an expertly rendered film with an impressively nuanced subjectivity.

Although Firstman’s brand of modern humor highlights the absurdity and hypocrisy of social interactions, it is in no way cynical. On the contrary, his comedy playfully exposes those primal emotions and impulses that we think we’re hiding better than we actually are. This comedy of honesty carries well into drama, essentially blurring the boundary between the two.

Told in sumptuously gritty imagery, this epic feat of bold imagination, unconcerned with mitigating its creative force for the sake of unadventurous audiences, has an unconventional film grammar and irregular structure that peers into the different possible outcomes of the would-be paladin’s trek.

Tea with the Dames is absolutely charming and surprisingly emotional.

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.

Movies with this serious a message about race are rarely fun to watch, but Peele has a perfect handle on tone, knowing just when to lean toward menacing, eerie or sharply funny and when to tip things in another direction.

The whole thing moves like a freight train, its 156 minutes passing in barely a breath, and that breakneck pace, combined with the expressionist aesthetic and candy-colored imagery, reminds us that blockbusters don’t have to be these lumbering processions of greyscaled dreck. It’s a rarity, a big-budget holiday movie with style and pizzazz.

California Split keenly and perceptively captures how someone you meet in a chance encounter can become a best friend (at least for a while) in a few short hours.

It's a gripping and thoroughly effective, perhaps even brilliant piece of biographical documentary filmmaking.

Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind

Ash is Purest White borrows heavily from “Mountains May Depart” — the narrative construct, the same actress, the musical gimmicks, even the flawed ending — and yet we are nevertheless absorbed by the finesse and grace in a film by this venerable artist.

Aptly named and drolly executed, leading to a transcendently funny, endearing and unexpected finale, The Treasure confirms Corneliu Porumboiu as the joker in the Romanian New Wave pack.

As Night Will Fall shows, even in the darkest hour, sometimes the greatest heroes are those willing to stare bravely into humanity's worst depths and tell the world what happened.

Focusing on the indigenous community of the Pine Ridge reservation, Zhao reimagines the entrenched masculine persona of the cowboy. The result is an entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences on its wider release.

While the film lavishes in the beautiful landscape and the vibrant, eclectic music that abounds, it never coalesces into anything greater than the sum of its parts, or become the film the subject deserves.

Charm City may not be an easy watch, but Ness argues that through empathy, progress can be made.

Even if Varda by Agnes sometimes betrays its roots as a lecture, it’s a touching and memorable reflection on the life and art from a true legend of cinema, one whose ideas are as relevant as ever.

Writer-director Rodrigo Moreno methodically unfurls a genius tragicomedy on the elusive nature of freedom: an idealized state in which, in theory, one does as one pleases at all times.

Fisher must be given immense credit for making it all work as her performance is pitch-perfect in every respect. Sometimes, it feels like you’re not even watching an actress perform but an actual person. The way Burnham shot some of the scenes makee it feel like non-fiction rather than fiction.

This film more than proves its director and lead’s talents. Sure, it’s gut-wrenching, but film fans will also find it exhilarating. It is the artistic equivalent of watching a well-trained underdog vault the finish line at her first big race.

Girlhood is a fascinatingly layered, textured film that manages to be both a lament for sweetness lost and a celebration of wisdom and identity gained, often at the very same moment.

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.

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.

The empathetic instincts of Sanders and his talented artists result in a tearjerker of an ending that may have you bawling.