The movie’s points about immigration are made early; much of the rest amounts to good things eventually happening to talented and hard-working people. That might be a story, but it’s not much of a drama.

There’s a confidence to She Rides Shotgun that many other movies can’t match, as though the filmmakers always knew exactly where to put their camera and how long to let it roll.

Appropriate to its teenage milieu, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s breakthrough film isn’t unlike spending a couple of hours with an exceptionally witty high-schooler: It’s entertaining as hell, but you can’t help rolling your eyes a little at its self-satisfied pseudo-profundities.

The intensity with which Porcelain War presents its horrors will knock you down.

Shot in black and white and set mostly in a retail environment, the French-Canadian film gives off a “Clerks” vibe as the trio of protagonists slack off, bitch about pay, and talk about life and love.

At its best — when the flow of voices, archival clips (co-director Pollard being a master at the textural impact of found footage), and nicely blended-in recreations made to look archival, is thematically strongest — "Citizen Ashe" becomes a documentary about how experience becomes voice becomes action.

It’s a lush and intriguing experience that works so well for so long that it can’t be undone by a few flaws.

Deer, a rare filmmaker of Mohawk descent, portrays in Beans the hope and love that help people thrive in the face of such hatred.

Strawberry Mansion dazzles most in its execution. In its own search for creativity and inspiration, the film leans into experimentation and whimsy.

For all its presidential trappings, the movie is most powerful as a straightforward romance with two endlessly charming black leads, of a kind that, as far as movies go, is outrageously rare.

Perhaps it’s not quite the teen movie to define a new generation, but it’s one that gets at something unique about female rage and drive, gifting its young viewers a reset button and a release outlet, however imperfect.

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.

If a movie about this band of self-described “f—ing jerks” can make you feel emotional, maybe that’s proof enough that Spike Jonze didn’t need to get adventurous with this one — the material did it for him.

One of the best things that can be said about On the Count of Three is that it forces viewers to dispel any certainty that its protagonists won’t wind up dead at the end, which provides the film with both integrity and unpredictability.

It’s a film with a lot on its mind and plenty of plot and character plates to spin, but the results are both impressive and exciting.

Youmans ultimately grapples with several tough themes that center the black Baptist South in a way that is rarely seen on screen. Even so, the inept editing and screenplay ultimately bring down Burning Cane.

It’s a bit of a mess, no doubt about that, but a fascinating one.

It documents the unexpected timelessness underlying a hopelessly contemporary phenomenon by looking at the very specific ways the current generation of teenagers engage the world around them, pointing out the inevitable, inescapable sameness of the way the world always has, and will, look back.

Catherine Called Birdy only shows that dropping Dunham’s sensibility down into the Middle Ages results in a viewpoint that is suffocatingly small and unenlightening.

A lovingly crafted fantasy on an epic scale, Mary and the Witch’s Flower is a film about transformation made by filmmakers in transition.

Park creates a genuine tenderness that Stella beautifully captures, but the narrative itself paints a habitual tale of retrospect and the enlightenment of being in the present.

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.

Their initial meeting, as orgiastic as it can possibly be, is shot by first-time cinematographer Manuel Marmier without pornography’s genitalia-focused aesthetic tropes, and with as much intimate and magical lighting as any old-fashioned musical sequence.

Genuinely frightening in stretches and with the creep-o-meter jacked up to 1,000 all the way through, “Bones and All” is somehow more and less than a simple horror flick, and not quite a rambling romance.

Finding an enthralling equilibrium between hard numerical data and heartrending testimonials, Dick masterfully weaves together both the expert statements you’d expect in a documentary like this and first-hand accounts from victims; the results are alarming and essential for anyone even remotely invested in their own physical and psychological wellness.

Villeneuve’s Dune is both dazzling and frustrating, often spectacular and often slow. It’s huge and loud and impressive but it can also be humorless and bleak – though on the whole, it tries valiantly to address the problems of taking on Herbert’s complex epic.