Anchored by exceptional performances by the main actresses, Breathe is a confrontation with the terrifying volatility of adolescence.

A glorified pitch reel, submitting for our approval a few nifty movie ideas and wrapping it all up in a tidy bow. All action, no filler.

Even when it drags — 169 minutes is a lot of time to fill, even for this masterful crew — the film gamely mixes comedy, action, and drama into one truly satisfying cocktail.

Cortlund and Halperin (“Now, Forager”) demonstrate a gift for not only creating beautiful images in unexpected moments, but also avoiding narrative shortcuts or tonal clichés to tell a story that covers familiar territory while ultimately defying easy categorization.

Neville is deeply respectful — “Roadrunner” is an unabashed tribute to its subject — but the filmmaker doesn’t occlude the chef’s dark side.

Amanda Knox delivers its own justice by covering all the complexities of its ever-fascinating true crime tale.

There is tons of game in this fleet, fast-paced modern sports story, which entertainingly substitutes lived-in wisdom for expert dribbling, skillful gambits for clever passing, and witty dialogue for points-racking shots.

In the aggregate, Karam’s directing is so meticulously composed about conveying the density of what’s unsaid, and the mood around the people instead of the people creating the mood, that “The Humans” can feel a bit suffocating.

Even when considering how it’s graced with splashes of stylistic bravado and how vigorously head-on it distills its heady themes (all to an extent rehashed from Schrader’s own body of work) — not to mention the decision to keep part of the gruesomeness off-screen and concluding the piece on a semi-hopeful note — The Card Counter still doesn’t come across as urgent or magnetic as other efforts.

Perhaps Beatles ’64 will only appeal to Beatlemaniacs like myself, but that doesn’t diminish its strength showing the birth of Beatlemania in America.

Despite one wonky misstep, it captures some real magic.

Hamoud so deftly mixes both the intimate and the enormous throughout, endowing vibrantly-shot, slice-of-life storytelling with an often wrenching depth.

Actors turning to directing is nothing new, but it’s unlikely you’ve seen a performer’s directorial debut as boldly confident and emotionally precise as Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water.

Soberly shifting from war thriller to apocalyptic drama to oddly sentimental buddy film, “Onoda” bears the weight of its many filmic forefathers. But as it pulls off such moves with such quiet force, it also represents a different kind of emergence.

Even people who felt nervous about stepping into a bathtub after “Jaws” might find themselves giving these denizens of the deep the benefit of the doubt, thanks both to Taylor’s decades of advocacy and Aitken’s moving portrait of grace and compassion in and out of the water.

The Lost City of Z feels like a clear artistic advance for Gray, who proves himself here as one of our finest and most distinctive living filmmakers.

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

Avengers: Endgame has almost nothing on its mind but crossing the Ts and dotting the Is of a far-flung superhero saga, but to anyone with even a minor emotional stake in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has all the fleeting satisfaction of a shot of whipped cream delivered directly from the spray can.

It feels as though [Loznitsa] has wrangled an entire uprising’s personality into bite-sized pieces.

It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.

Bathtubs Over Broadway is pure pleasure, both in its exploration of a hidden and uniquely American corner of show business and its portrait of the charmingly nerdy Young and his singular path toward rescuing this sub-sub-sub-genre while many of its executors are still alive to tell their stories.

It’s filtering Vera Drew’s autobiographical story through the lens of contemporary popular culture, transforming her own life into myth while transforming corporatized IP into punk rock anarchy.

A chilly, yet engrossing drama, elevated beyond its four-people-locked-in-a-house framework by the eerie beauty of the production design and the thoughtful curiosity of Garland’s screenplay.

The Sisters Brothers gallops on screen with a lot of ambitions, and it fulfills them all. It’s a sprawling Western that’s also an intimate character piece; it has moments of wit but also devastating tragedy; it delves into larger themes like the impact of fathers upon sons, and how greed and industrialization lead to environmental devastation, and yet it offers the hope of redemption.

Without ever leaving the bar, Blue Moon offers a snapshot of wartime America expressed wholly through shifting public tastes (and the attending egos left shattered.)