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.