A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood finds a gentle state of grace and shows the courage and smarts to stay in that zone, never rushing things or playing for drama.

This isn’t just a great horror story; it’s genuinely scary. You may be able to recognize familiar elements in its DNA, but it’s mutated into something distinct and unsettling. What a showcase of shocks. What a devilish debut.

The film has its twists, turns and resets, simultaneously giving the audience more information while also keeping it off balance. It can be riveting and at times repetitive, but it does what it sets out to do: It drops you in the middle of a crisis and it keeps you there.

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

Like so many memorable yet hard-to-describe movies, Why Don't You Play in Hell? takes a ridiculous concept and commits to it fully. You might laugh with surprise or shriek in horror — both, most likely — but you certainly won't dismiss it.

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

This is a polished, straightforward account of harrowing events, told with empathy and relative objectivity. If you’re looking for an entrée into one of the most bizarre, complex chapters of human history, look no further.

Nuremberg benefits not only from a terrifying performance from Crowe in a larger-than-life role like those that defined the early part of his career, but also from the ensemble of actors.

Arriving at a time when conversations once reserved for academics have filtered into popular culture, “Who We Are” never plays like the product of some Hollywood bandwagon effort. Instead, its existence speaks to the power of cinema to reflect the times by sparking conversations and changing minds.

For all its brittle hilarity, Potter has shot her film in black and white. In context, it plays as an avatar of artistic seriousness. Or a warning with implications worth heeding.

Resurrection pushes about as far as it can possibly go, and the incredibly game cast supplies much of the pressure.

Ultimately, of course, it’s Buckley who makes Rose-Lynn soar off the screen. It’s a dazzling, raw, intoxicating performance, and when she sings, it’s simply electric.

Assayas clearly loves actresses — their spontaneity and their self-doubt, and the mercurial way they can switch from one to the other — and Clouds of Sils Maria offers both a compassionate exploration of their lives and a powerful showcase for three of them to do some of their best work to date.

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 pacing, the performances (Albert Brooks is a stand-out as Abel's lawyer), and every facet of the production serves the story and the film's larger ideas.

The chasm of the wealth gap and the slow destruction of the middle class should matter to us all, and films like Two Days, One Night remind us of the human faces affected by corporate greed.

In her narrative debut, Diop has found a way to mix her hard-hitting documentary style with fiction to raise a mirror to society. This new arena, with its wider reach, makes Diop an exciting filmmaker to watch.

There are plenty of laughs — and nothing that goes over a kid’s head to an adult funny bone is smutty or smarmy — and the sentiment never feels strained or artificial.

If there is one disappointing element of this moving, amusing, sad and memorable film it’s that it isn’t five hours long.

It feels a little too light and even occasionally uncertain in the early going, but picks up steam, becomes deeper and more moving and absolutely nails the ending.

The buoyancy and electricity of Give Me Future will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there’s a good beat, and you can dance to it.

You’ll walk away from Rewind shaken by the story, and haunted by the face of a little boy with a world of hurt and nowhere to run.

Chomko doesn’t drag on a scene longer than it should be; there’s an expediency to her storytelling that gets the point across without the film feeling rushed. It’s blunt and bold, just like its characters.

This is more than just a career-best for Collins — it’s a career-redefining performance. His talent for profundity was always there but previously untapped to this extent. Now the hope is that this won’t be a zenith for him, but instead a revitalizing rebirth.

Hell or High Water is that rare offering that both feels old-fashioned in its action-thriller gratification and in-the-moment about everything else.

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

The musical is as malleable and eclectic a genre as any other, and Chazelle reminds us how effectively it can be applied to intimate moments as well as huge ones.

It’s bright and witty and packed with laughs, but those laughs stem from real empathy and understanding of its characters.