Bustling with manic energy, I, Tonya attempts to cobble together a variety of perspectives — including that of the filmmakers — to create a portrait of, and perhaps rejoinder to, history’s assessment of the record-breaking athlete as little more than a ’90s tabloid footnote.

Spy would be a standout if only for its ability to keep me laughing while also keeping me from figuring out who was really double-crossing whom. Add to that this extraordinary ensemble of actors (who knew Jason Statham could be this funny?), and you’ve got another memorable offering from McCarthy and Feig.

The real show here is Herzog and Gorbachev, two of the most interesting people in the world, getting to know each other, asking the big questions, fumbling through small talk, and becoming friends.

In a strong field of excellent performances, the standout is easily Shalhoub, who is enthralling and almost entirely sympathetic in what could have been a monochromatic bad guy part.

On one hand, Goldhaber’s film is a terrifying, stark, oppressive horror film that outscares the other modern slashers. On the other it’s an intelligent treatise on the grim obsession we have with being obsessively grim.

For director Jean-Marc Vallée, the film's smarts and soulfulness give him a leap upward from “Dallas Buyers Club” that puts him head-to-head with Tate Taylor (“Get On Up”) as 2014's Most Improved Filmmaker. The other big surprise of Wild turns out to be Reese Witherspoon, going far from her usual comfort zone here.

it’s an endearing Sundance bonbon: quirky but not annoying, charming but not cloying, slight but in a good way.

Things come to a head in a way that is simultaneously slapstick-y and touching, and entirely in keeping with a movie that has never lost its sense of charm through an hour and a half of twists and turns and engaging mountain escapades.

A unique take on one of the most painful and important parts of being human, the film is original and honest. Even knowing very little about the traditions of Hasidic Judaism, it was easy to relate to the very human element of finding a connection that ultimately leads to healing.

When chewing through some oddly phrased text, Qualley’s non-verbal tics offer twice the information with half the winces, making “Stars at Noon” sometimes feel like two films in one. There’s the paranoid thriller and the dreamlike dirge; a steamy drama and its feminist reappraisal; the work of a master with the promise of new kinks to iron out and maybe greater heights to which to soar.

Instant Family is a decent, involving, endearing story, with funny performances and heartfelt, entirely earned dramatic crescendoes.

It’s not that The Long Walk has made walking terrifying — although certainly it’s a fraught and frightening walk. It’s that it makes every trudge through every day remind us of torture.

An intimate and sensual and highly forking successful debut from Amrou Al-Kadhi.

Winterbottom and cinematographer James Clarke use the gloss of both food porn and travel porn to occasionally distract us from the darker elements of the story, in the same way that Coogan and Brydon will turn to humor to lighten up their roiling inner conflicts. In this case, however, both the sugar coating and the bitter pill are a treat.

Crackles with manic energy, fed at every turn by exhilarating fight choreography and a thoroughly game cast. Hartnett carries the whole silly, bone-crunching enterprise masterfully.

“Until the Wheels Fall Off” works better as a humanistic exploration than it does as a biography, making its Hawk focus occasionally feel like a weakness.

The Daniels are unusually present ringmasters here, eschewing the flippancy that marred their splashy quirk-quake “Swiss Army Man” for a more big-feeling anarchic escapism. In their nifty code-switching, we-all-contain-multitudes metaphor, they’ve concocted something that feels genuinely attuned to our modern anxieties, but also embracing of our coping mechanisms.

Bad Times at the El Royale is vibrant motion picture, in a way few films are nowadays. One might even call it indulgent, although “decadent” is probably more accurate.

Michael Damian’s film has no nutritional value, but that’s by design: It’s a flaky dessert for the mind, and it’s irresistibly decadent.

Everlasting Storm is an anthology film that is as uneven as most anthology films, but one that offers a disquieting and essential snapshot of the time from which we hope we’re emerging. Like the lockdown itself, it can be a slog and it can be a kick.

The First Purge completely earns its action-packed and rousing finale, but getting there certainly takes a while.

Dark and unsettling, The Forgiven doesn’t ask us to like its characters, but it forces us to watch as privilege begins to shatter and people for whom everything feels inconsequential have to deal with consequences.

If you knew Yechiun, or even if you just knew his films, it’s a sad and sweet catalog of his brief, inspirational life. If you didn’t know him, you’ll eventually feel like you did, and you’ll cry the kindest tears by the end, as you realize just how much he meant to the people who were in his orbit all along.

Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best “Transformers” movie. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good “Transformers” movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.

The Way I See It is a marvelous portrait of Souza and of two administrations that not coincidentally also works as a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump. It is decidedly not a film for Trump fans, but others may well find themselves moved and saddened by the contrasts between then and now.

The film can be confusing, but it’s not meant to be pinned down. And despite the occasionally surreal touches, it’s an examination of how the beauty of tradition can also be an opponent to justice and humanity.

Megadoc, whether it’s showing all there is to show or not, is a fascinating exposé of a filmmaker who risked everything so nobody could shoot down his ideas, only to shoot himself in the foot in the process.

It’s a film about hubris, selfishness, failed bureaucracies, and a stubborn inability to learn from past mistakes.

At an hour and 27 minutes, the film has the feel of an exquisite miniature, succinct and evocative.

"The Story of Film" is long (though not by Cousins’ standards), it’s infuriating at times (entirely by design) and it overstates its case with defiant glee (again, it meant to do that), but you can’t love movies and not love a good chunk of what Cousins puts on the screen.

The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives.

May very well be [Lithgow's] creepiest performance since Brian De Palma’s “Raising Cain” — and that’s saying something.

It’s not consistently hilarious but it is consistently imaginative, sometimes even breathtaking.

“Boston Strangler” may muddle its facts, but its message never wavers. In a genre dominated by perfunctory intrigue, how exhilarating to see a film with morals this clear, consistent, and touching.

The performances are uniformly fantastic, but I was most impressed by Wright Joseph and Nyong’o, both delivering distinct and completely unique work. Nyong’o gives a master class in acting in dual roles and is almost unrecognizable as her doppelgänger persona.

Corsini has delivered a wonderful film, a beautifully calibrated coming-of-age drama that ever so elegantly flutters questions of race, class, guilt and opportunity through a seaside summer breeze.

What’s clear is that as a stylist, Perkins is at the top of his game. Maybe even the top of anyone’s game. As a storyteller, he’s either a bold innovator or just slapping dream logic onto old-fashioned pulp.

Much like the UCLA interviews that inspired it, Framing Agnes is a vital part of the historical record, addressing trans life as we know it right now and providing deeper understanding for current and future viewers.

Chiarella’s film is small in scope but shattering in emotional range, slowly burrowing under your skin. Once it makes its home there, there is no shaking free of its haunting, heartbreaking and surprisingly harmonious vision.

Part unlikely friendship tale and part potpourri of genre tropes orchestrated as a parade of red herrings, this debut feature takes on modern culture’s blatant disdain of aging and veneration of youth. ... Greatly entertaining.

As DeBlois engineers this tale towards an expectedly exciting and poignant conclusion, one realizes how well that cleverly misdirecting title How to Train Your Dragon has morphed from literal to figurative, from being about command and obeisance to handling the turmoil within.

The best gag comes from rom-com world’s cloying PG-13-ness.

It’s disturbing and messy, a fever dream for a disturbing and messy time in Brazil. And occasionally, it’s a lot of fun, too.

The Rescue is an enthralling documentary, with a real-life story so spectacular you can hardly believe it. That’s why the film’s overwhelming polish sometimes undermines the real-life story it’s trying to tell.

Jane by Charlotte is a sensitive, pretty, reflective and artful piece that attains intriguing levels of intimacy and emotion alongside moments of banality.

Ultimately, Den of Thieves falls short of its goal, but it gets points for aiming high; there are worse things than trying to be the next Michael Mann when few others would dare try, especially if they lack the enthusiasm oozing out of every frame of your imitation.

McConaughey dives headfirst into the well here, howling all the way, and his committed performance is one to admire even if it’s not one to like.

Undercooked dishes aside, with eye-popping production design and an invitingly rowdy premise, you feel just thankful enough for the full, calorie-rich meal Roth’s latest slasher provides — bones and all, but no leftovers.

Casablanca Beats argues that the power of personal expression can turn the world on its head. And for a good spell, the film does just that.

Begert’s aim is to shake Hollywood up. Yet his two movies-in-one proves that some old rules persist for a reason. As good as Schwimmer is as Martin, that story sinks under the weight of the one Fike and Ryder tell.

Though Toni Morrison: The Pieces that I Am comes from a white storyteller, it distinctly and profoundly reflects the point of view of the subject herself. What we see is a woman who has always been in charge of her own narrative, no matter who wants to share it.

Jack Quaid was born for a role like this. The actor’s unassuming cheerfulness provides the perfect comedic counterpoint to the film’s increasingly absurd gross-out action gags.

The film doesn’t take an extra step towards cinematic showiness, nor does it glamorize or sensationalize Berg’s life. It’s just a nice time talking about World War II and baseball, sharing stories and retelling old jokes. It’s a respectable ode to Berg’s unusual, remarkable life.

The real accomplishment of Mifune: The Last Samurai, and perhaps of any successful documentary about cinema history, is that it makes you want to run out and see the movies all over again.

Between the scorching chemistry of leads Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha and the glorious mid-century outfits, hair, décor and cars on display, Sylvie’s Love is a delectable valentine.

It’s a film whose magnificence sneaks up on you, delighting in plenty of clever silliness before hitting you with a succession of somber scenes that lay you flat.

Scott Cooper has directed a film with a gimmicky premise but genuine dramatic weight, anchored by handsome filmmaking and striking performances.

Miller is after immediacy, not reflection or explanation.

As Salles shows us, such a seismic loss spans many generations just as it does entire histories that are still being written. We must then always remember the people, their individual stories, and what it was that they endured so that others may never have to do so again.

True to formula, the neatly wrapped ending is telegraphed from continents away. But even under those rules, Harwood’s already rarefied quality and Butterell’s adept choices in his film directorial debut — his familiarity with material yields a positive transfiguration from stage to screen — color Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, a high-heeled and glossy romp that’s radical in its loving optimism.

Concurrently, as Maitland provides pockets of warmth and humanity in the legacies of a handful of letter-writers, he relays through archival footage and interviews the fallout for Brody himself when the sheer volume of outstretched hands and scrutinizing eyes became too much for him to handle.

It’s a sweet, savory blend of oddball mythology and deadpan humor that’s easy to adore, worth many a healing smile.

What Whannell wants most to do is torment and eventually pulverize most of the people in his narrative orbit and make you laugh while he does so.

Below the Clouds is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.

For their reinvention of Father of the Bride, Alazraki and Lopez manage to make it feel so rooted in the Latino background of their characters that comparison to the older films doesn’t seem all that relevant. This one stands on its own.

Despite its plot contrivances, the dramatic arc of Mutt delivers a changed individual on the other side of its many tribulations.

Does the film explain “Hallelujah?” Of course not – the song stubbornly resists explanation, because it’s so many different things and because there’s a beautiful mystery at its heart. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is smart enough to embrace that mystery and that beauty, and to know that there’s far more to Cohen than can be summed up in four, or seven, or even 150 verses.

Fahrenheit 11/9 grows slowly from an exhausting movie that is all over the map to a rousing one that makes a call to arms in troubled times.

Riley, proving himself to be a romantic just as he is a believer in revolution, clearly not only loves these boosters with hearts of gold, but anyone that is trying to make it all work for themselves and those around them.

Skate Kitchen is a funny and stirring saga of female empowerment that will no doubt delight young women who skate while inspiring many more to pick up a board. It also heralds Moselle as a director who can easily switch stance on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide.

It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this, the better it gets, sweeping you up in stunning visuals that swallow you whole.

Freaky Tales is a great time that knows how to channel its many loves (of the Bay Area, of movies) into an infectious force. Come for the campy, bloody fun but stay for the clear love for the mediums it’s working in: Movies and memory.

What makes "Lucy and Desi" so compelling is that we can feel, all the way through, that Poehler enjoys telling their story just as much as we enjoy watching it.

Premature captures that unexpected, earth-shattering moment in life when you realize adulthood, real adulthood, is not so simple and cute. It’s difficult, it’s scary, and it’s heartbreaking at times. That’s what Howard’s beautiful performance conveys.

Harry Wootliff’s True Things is a raw and passionate look at the type of love that can be both all-encompassing and destructive, passionate and dangerous.

It gets away with missteps because of how consistently heartwarming and affable the people on screen are. Clemons and Offerman are especially effective, with Frank’s earnestness comically shot down by Clemons’ quick-witted preciousness.

No matter where you think Send Help is going, you’re probably wrong. Thankfully, that’s a huge part of its appeal. It’s not a mystery, by any means. But it is a story rooted in the exploration of human nature and exactly who we become if it means survival both in the literal and figurative sense.

Dhont tracks it with the elegant (if hardly new) symbolism of the changing of the seasons. Carefree summer gives way to the fall harvest, which soon leads to a winter of shared discontent. But he is a generous and patient director of his unknown and more established performers, giving all moments to shine.

Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive.

Barker’s fly-on-the-wall approach eschews showy grandstanding and divisive biases. So there’s a better-than-usual chance that viewers on both sides of the aisle will find themselves moved.

If it may be a return to familiar pleasures rather than an excursion into anything new, that’s hardly a problem when those familiar pleasures include Herzog dropping bon mots.

For better and for worse, Carax never goes for half measures and Annette never stops being bold and weird.

Despite its missteps, Coming Through the Rye is a sweet and inviting road trip.

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.

Girl Picture is a thoughtful, funny, and empathetic look at lives in flux.

Everybody Wants Some!! may not achieve the lasting status of some of Linklater’s more acclaimed work, but there is something wonderful in watching a movie remain joyfully plotless, as intentionally lacking in direction as so many college students manage to be before society harangues them about the importance of responsibility.

As always, what’s so joyously, infectiously funny about “Jackass” is rarely the prank itself, but how funny they all find it to reduce each other to writhing heaps.

The implications — ethical and otherwise — that the film raises are too vast to be papered over with a closing plea for tighter gun control. The sentiment is fair and true and absolutely valid. But delivered as sober end titles at the end of “Nitram,” one can’t help but notice a certain irony in such small white letters barely hiding a much darker abyss.

Baumbach’s films may reflect a prickly brand of humanism, but they’re humane all the same. In an era of untrammeled cynicism, each new release feels like an all-too-brief moment of hope.

James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”) keeps his film permanently trapped in a liminal space between childhood and adolescence, where magic is real but intangible and largely metaphoric.

In addition to creating a brilliantly engaging narrative, Berger’s sense of cinematic style is enhanced all the way from his production and costume design to the extreme close ups that have assisted in defining his cinematic style.

Although it’s hard to shake the sense that on a practical level this studio is just scraping the bottom of the barrel, desperately hoping their minor characters can be converted into headliners, they’ve done a damn good job of it.

As straightforward in its conception as its unfussy title, Mitre’s latest can be described as an effectively utilitarian piece of cinema that exists to preserve the historical memory of his homeland and to pay tribute to some of the people who ensured that for once, the arc of history, as insufficient and belated as it usually is, did bend towards justice.

Though a vengeance riff, it remains a Farhadi film all through, so dancing around each other means a lot of talking about action instead of doing action. And that’s fine – the former playwright is uncommonly gifted in writing third acts, where each line of dialogue and simple gesture are imbued with meaning.

If Howard and Sweeney can make movies together like this all the time, may neither of them ever stop.

Disarming and delightful, the sleeper indie comedy Feast of the Seven Fishes proves anew that the most universal storytelling is also the most specific.

Blue Jay never seems all that interested in breaking new ground, but its success at providing small pleasures – and memorable performances – makes it worth a look.

Its languid pace befits the Recife setting, and Filho sets many scenes on long walks down the coast or just after a particularly satisfying mid-day nap. His world is filled with music, dance and wine, and if the film takes a some time to get where it’s going, the beachfront setting remains a pleasant place to stay. Call it an escapist tale about stubbornly staying put.