Leon’s New York has plenty of uncertainty, but it hums with possibility, especially the notion that if you miss one connection, another one’s right around the corner. In that respect, Tramps is beautifully breathless.

Like any artist, Miller has the right to reinvent herself, but we don’t need one more director of winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms. That said, as winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms go, Maggie’s Plan is a pretty winning one.

Both everything and nothing happens in Filipiñana, the cutting, confident, and ultimately formally captivating feature debut from writer-director Rafael Manuel.

The men are slightly forgettable, but the woman is not. Far from the flawless fembot in “Ex Machina,” Vikander’s slight gawkiness is highlighted here, allowing her to look like a real girl, absolutely the right decision by Kent.

Every subject shares genuine enthusiasm after watching Guy-Blaché’s work, and as messy as “Be Natural” can be at times, with that frenetic pace of info delivery coming from all directions at once, it’s actually the natural tone and pace of a creator who’s excited by their subject matter.

It features a striking lead performance, but it ultimately leaves the viewer unmoved, and possibly confounded.

Murphy’s resplendent turn anchors a true if predictably told story of showbiz aspirations and can-do spirit, but in the great whoosh of majestically profane, beaming energy he provides from beginning to end, it’s clear that his brand of electrifying, in-the-moment comedy has sorely been missed.

Unlike the stiff-jawed heroics of the other Marvel films, this feels a little looser and lighter, with Pratt as charming, amoral accidental leader Peter Quill, an earthling among the stars who, as he will tell you, is also known as the roving brigand “Starlord.”

Ultimately, Corsage is a deeply sympathetic portrait of Elisabeth, enhanced by Krieps’ delightful performance.

The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic brings up the continued need for disabled directors and screenwriters. There’s certainly enough charm to spare from the film’s leads, but the storytelling too often relies on disabled people in peril and other tropes that simply regurgitate what we’ve seen.

If the end result is less a comprehensive biography than a long overdue and entirely deserved tribute, it is, nevertheless, truly terrific.

While Red Rocket very ably explores the headspace and mechanisms of the 100% beef-fed all-American huckster, it loses a step or two when it does so as a kind of morality tale assessing the damage and human toll Mikey leaves in his wake.

Their Finest delivers in a way that would please the Ministry of Information: it’s rousing and emotional, there are laughs and tears, and it portrays people trying and, mostly, succeeding at being their best selves in the service of their country.

The White Tiger illustrates the extremes to which the poor are driven to violate the rigid class structure of India, with the implication that our hero and his methodology is perhaps the face of post-superpower capitalism itself.

Lovell’s intimate connection to the subject forms the basis of the film’s power, which rests on a palpable pride in sisterhood.

Both Kai and Lasker-Wallfisch’s daughter, Maya, encourage the reluctant Hans Jürgen, now a frail 87-year-old man, to confront his family’s complicity. As they push and he resists, the process is unsettling and unsatisfying for everyone. But somehow it unfolds that Anita, an extraordinary character and the film’s true heart, sees Hans Jürgen most clearly.

It’s the faces that stand out in Retrograde, a stylistic and thematic motif that offers an empathetic power to the film as well as an aching poignancy.

Although this single-minded existence will fascinate and inspire devotees, anyone new to the details of her life is likely to be left wanting more. Even so, all will be moved by the honest approach Dion and Taylor take towards her illness.

Needless to say, this kind of thing wouldn’t work if its leads didn’t have chemistry, and Duplass and Falco do a wonderful job keeping up our hopes for them as we fear the slightest dip in the outlook for their lives, whether together or apart.

As Zappa makes clear, Frank Zappa spent his whole career keeping himself unique, often to his credit and occasionally to his detriment. Winter’s movie does the same, in a way that does justice to a guy who’s not easy to do justice to.

This is a war movie from the perspective of the losers, visually spectacular but by turns infuriating and heartbreaking. “All Quiet” is excessive, but it probably needs to be; the screenplay by Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell takes a dark story and makes it even darker.

The film is vital for both its history and its currency. Above all, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson works powerfully as a rallying cry for tolerance, love and understanding.

Bahrani (and co-writer Amir Naderi) want the audience to go to the dark side with them without losing their faith in the system. To anyone who has watched this crisis unfold over the last decade, it will feel like a cheat.

“Super/Man” is emotional, resilient, and inspiring, opening up private battles to the general public.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 moves beyond Sorkin the writer of dialogue, or Sorkin the supplier of scripts to the likes of Rob Reiner, David Fincher and Danny Boyle, to Sorkin the filmmaker.

Flora and Son feels more like a scrappy demo tape than a polished album.

It’s an undeniably informative and vital documentary, which clearly illustrates a disturbing political farce that has been allowed to thrive for far too long. Which is to say, at all. Where Citizen K falls short is its depiction of Khodorkovsky, whose early indiscretions are breezed over as quickly as possible in order to get to his redemption.

Half the Picture is maddening and enlightening and, most of all, necessary, as much as I wish it weren’t.

A film like Rebel Ridge reminds us that you can lose yourself in exciting, engaging, stimulating entertainment while still keeping your brain completely on.

Although fascinatingly hilarious, Hail Satan? is a conventional non-fiction effort on the technical front, but Lane does spike her frames with an offbeat score by Brian McOmber (“Little Woods”) that reaffirms the quirky tone of the piece with circus-like melodies.

The characters in The Whistlers turn language into music; Porumboiu does something very similar with criminality and corruption.

Though The Dog can be seen through any number of lenses — a study of media distortion, an illustration of life-sustaining grandiosity, a love story gone deliriously wrong — it's perhaps most meaningful as an exploration of the limits of the gay rights movement's political correctness.

Zola feels utterly contemporary but will no doubt be examined for decades to come, as a marker of both this particularly crazy time in history and of the moment that social media became self-aware. Whip-smart, funny, complicated, and just plain wild, Zola is 90 minutes of brilliance.

This uneven film is more a showcase of all the craftsmanship and horror knowhow the Philippous are capable of bringing to the genre table than a movie that fully works. For now, it’s not a bad reason to shake hands with this gifted duo.

Midnight Special goes off its own narrative cliff, capping a compelling story with a third-act resolution so misguided that’s it’s the dramatic equivalent of punching the gas and plunging into the abyss.

It’s exactly because of the repetitive, monotonous pace and structure of Occupied City, a film that smartly omits talking-head interviews and archival footage entirely, that McQueen’s excursion feels as spiritually searching as it does.

Neither obtuse nor obvious, Spa Night finds the perfect balance in communication. It shows enough, but not too much; it articulates its ideas, but it doesn’t asphyxiate the audience with them.

Tickled inspires many laughs throughout but, true to its subject, more and more of them are born of discomfort as it goes on — part of you wants it all to stop even as you’re amused.

Mucho Mucho Amor is a tribute as inspired and jubilant as its majestic subject, a true original, who “used to be a star and now is a constellation.”

In an era in which the collision of Russian and American interests is never far from the headlines, a weird little story about one crazy time those interests collided might even teach us a thing or two.

It might be hoped that the passage of time could give him some fond or melancholy distance from such material, but Sorrentino serves up his memories in an unappealingly inert and flat manner.

Those willing to commit to a fascinating story about talented and intelligent people who can also be selfish, vulnerable, strong-headed, short-sighted, and emotionally needy, however, will want to pull this one off the shelf.

There’s nothing showy about Amrum, but it can leave an audience shaken. Akin has fashioned a rare film that relies on the power of simplicity to tell a story that is anything but simple.

It’s not only properly unsettling, making great use of darkness and sound, but also becomes a quietly poetic reflection on loss when you least expect it.

As it traverses the sacred and the factual, the film intently portrays the liminal space anyone who’s ever left home knows well. It’s the threshold between the person you were, who you’ve become, and how the two halves are at odds mutating into a unique color, a new prism-like worldview.

In the recent flood of superhero movies, several have managed to be quite good — but Wonder Woman ranks as one of the few great ones.

Kusijanovic isn’t interested in tipping her hand as this coming-of-age story turns into one more cinematic journey by a young woman through an inhospitable world.

Benson and Moorhead direct and shoot their film smartly, but their performances are what ground it and give it shape. It’s Benson’s moping alienation and Moorhead’s desperate need to believe in something — no matter how nonsensical, even if he knows he’s making it up himself — that resonate.

Tito and the Birds is extraordinary proof that universality comes from specificity. Sometimes there is nothing more globally relevant than a hand-crafted Portuguese-language animated indie.

It’s a magnificently unflinching film from a master director in the making, whose thunderous strength will surely make waves in Bustamante’s Central American homeland and abroad.

A treat for anyone with a taste for rock, for rock imagery and for the glories that can be found in that piece of cardboard wrapped around a record. Anton Corbijn knows those glories well, so his movie’s got a good beat and a good look.

Make no mistake: This is an angry movie, both in form and in content.

Is the relentlessness too much? At two and a half hours, perhaps, but inventiveness abounds.

Though Greenfield is too skilled to overplay her intentions, the picture that emerges gains additional power from its clarifying distance. The Kingmaker is required viewing for anyone concerned about the direction of their own democracy.

This is a triumph for Bernal and for Williams and all his collaborators, a film that takes on very fresh territory and suffuses all of its frames with love for all of the people in it.

If a movie’s going to take us to “Chinatown,” it needs to come up with a new and different path to get there. Instead, the film revels in its genre trappings, only to grab at gravitas in the last ten minutes with the sudden introduction of historical iniquities into the story.

Road to Revenge is everything you could want from a rough-and-tumble, tough-as-nails action movie. 'Sisu' was even more of it, but only by a matter of degrees.

It’s hard to watch September 5 without feeling some serious ambivalence – but in a way, that’s one of the strengths of the film, because it embraces that ambivalence as a necessary part of the story.

Schnabel creates a natural, immersive motion picture that conveys the experience of being, living with, and painting like Vincent Van Gogh.

Its feverishly edited volume of concert footage and first-person interviews occasionally delivers a slightly dizzying chronology of Bernstein’s life and times, but Tirola does an exceptional job of showcasing the irrefutable truth that he contained a few more multitudes than most.

The only agenda of this scruffy and urbane comedy, about a young comic contemplating abortion, is to be true and funny.

The current results don’t necessarily redeem this troubled film, but seeing it again might remind audiences that it’s better than they remember. Certainly, this time out, it’s better than it’s ever been before.

King Richard may be a fairly straightforward biopic, but it’s an enjoyable one, giving viewers the chance to enjoy a heartwarming if not uncomplicated story, talk about parenting and the stresses the many characters faced on their way to the history books

Stolakis is not afraid of complication.

Decker is a superbly imaginative director, which leaves one wishing her creative powers had pushed the film even further away from the constraints of reality. But that’s a downside that comes with working from material written by another artist.

For its combination of ambition and audacity, this is a glorious piece of cinematic insanity.

By taking the mob film back to its basics of land, family and death, Munzi’s film strips away artifice, cliche and gun-in-fist glamor to make a story of family and fury that burns cold and slow.

At a brisk 86 minutes, What We Do in the Shadows never sags or drags, delivering its comic punches with surgical precision and then getting off the stage. Being immortal doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of timing.

Even if this material might have been better served as a 40-minute short than as a full-length movie, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg has cast a trio of actors at the top of their game, and they elevate the material.

Once the spell of Tigers Are Not Afraid ends and the credits roll, its story lingers in the air. It’s a story of sadness, loss and survival, a fairy tale tailor-made for our anxious times.

The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor.

The Woman King possesses broad appeal. It’s an oft-told tale, yes, but here imparted with a fresh angle and a meaningful moral. And it has something in store for those who prefer the action genre, too.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is more than what Ang Lee calls a “breath of fresh air”; it’s an affirmation that all films, however humble their origin, can matter and be counted.

The first half is a drowsy day at the office, full of complex paperwork minutiae that, too much of the time, doesn’t even pan out by the end of the movie. The second half is more horrifying to think about but less scrupulously presented and, as such, harder to believe.

American Symphony is about the creation of art in the face of pressure, tragedy and heartbreak, and about the tension between the glory of creation and the pain of living. It manages to capture the glory but it never ignores the price.

It looks amazing, of course, but it might well be the least involving movie he’s ever made, with an amazing cast providing little but momentary distraction.

In its final moments, How to Blow Up a Pipeline proves it has the guts and lucidity to challenge even the most capitalist of minds, even if the film never blatantly endorses the extreme measures it depicts.

A labor of love and a product of considerable craft, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague — which chronicles the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless — is more than just a valentine to the French New Wave; the film is also a stealth showcase for a filmmaker rarely heralded (or for that matter, tribuned) for his technical sophistication.

Kore-eda’s first film made outside his native Japan, it’s a fascinating exploration of the fallibility of memory and of how the truths we tell ourselves so frequently outweigh an empirical certainty.

Pearl isn’t just great; it retroactively makes its predecessor great, too. It’s a handsome and sad horror drama, with scenes and shots and performances that will make you wonder if you’re supposed to laugh, cry or shriek. Until you realize that the best part of this film is that you are absolutely supposed to do all three. And you probably will.

The episodic nature means that, despite the frequent physical comings together on screen, it never quite comes together as a drama.

Combining so many disparate strands — historical, contextual, personal and even gossipy — with the performative could have felt disjointed. But in Armstrong’s capable hands, it all comes together fairly seamlessly, providing a compelling portrait of Kelly’s noteworthy career.

This film is a real pleasure and surprise because it sees old emotions as things that can be replenished and renewed if you are open and not too rigid about the boundaries of your relationships with others.

It’s a potent film that explores the roots of the brilliant but troubled Irish singer ... but it also turns her recent years into an afterthought, bypassing many of the highs and lows that led her here over the last two decades.

It seems impossible for anyone to remain unmoved by Harper’s thoughtfully-constructed history.

Enchant it does, in ebbs and flows, mostly when relatable human ache peaks through the razzle-dazzle.

As involving as the story is with its impressive ensemble cast, “Norman” is above all a showcase for Gere’s substantial talents.

Kiss the Future is a portrait of a city and a people who used culture to fight back; it’s also the story of a rock ‘n’ roll band exploring the limits of how its music can impact the real world. Above all else, though, it’s a rich and moving chronicle of the use of art as both a weapon and a means to salvation.

What makes Mistress America so lovely — and so of a piece with “Frances Ha,” my favorite film of 2013 — is its balance of compassion and scrutiny: Baumbach and Gerwig don’t let these characters get away with their shortcomings, but neither does the film condemn these people or present them as irredeemable.

Border is dark and unsettling and proudly deranged.

In 95 minutes, Ford unfurls a gritty and suspenseful L.A. noir that also serves to examine the structural issues that uphold wealth inequality in this country. But Emily the Criminal isn’t trying to be preachy or political, it’s just authentic, and urgent, and Plaza’s performance keeps the emotional and physical honesty at the forefront.

Anyone with some patience and a penchant for thoughtful ambiguity will find more than enough rewards here, from Gyllenhaal’s intelligent performance to Colangelo’s empathetic insight. True, it’s not always an easy movie to sit through. But the impact of Lisa’s plight lingers long after her fate’s been sealed.

The Naked Gun is back and it's as naked as ever. And also as gun.

It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is a wonderful heist film, a thrilling action-adventure, a gorgeous visual feast, and an intriguing look at an artist whose greatest talent is recognizing the value of the art inside others.

The Order might be the filmmaker’s most accomplished work to date, offsetting a kind of broody fatalism against natural splendor, and punctuating the bloody affair with an action beat.

Days after watching the movie, I still have some reservations about how abuse is shown in the film, but it’s hauntingly effective. I haven’t been able to shake those images since.

Precisely written and deliberately shot, José, a Guatemala-set LGBTQ character examination from Chinese-born director Li Cheng, is a movie preoccupied with the private tragedy of unfulfilled impulses and aspirations as a result of widespread homophobia and emotional blackmail.