For memorable gags and fun but wildly implausible plot lines, it’s a ride.

The cast's performances are so gut-wrenching (particularly from Emmanuelle Devos and Areen Omari as the boys' equally empathic mothers) that the film's hopeful message and abundance of heart prove impossible to resist.

When sitting through this detail-heavy documentary, nonaficionados may feel like they're watching paint dry, albeit in the company of an artist who savors each and every shade.

Suleiman can be criticized for failing, ever so slightly, at crafting an overall structure-his latest, based on his dad's diary and other memories, is an autobiographical story of exile and return that skips like a stone over water, fleetly but not so deeply. Still, this is a welcome example of kitsch wedded to serious indictment.

Things in The Hand of God are often funny and sad – all at the same time.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are unusually committed to maritime mechanics, and the excitement grows as steadily as the sailors’ beards.

At one point, Paul describes his music as “somewhere between euphoria and melancholy,” which is also an apt description of Eden itself.

The Naked Prey inverts many of the conventions of Hollywood films about "the Dark Continent." The warriors are given more character depth than Wilde's protagonist, and the film seems seriously engaged in a debate over whether man is driven by Darwinian brutality or rises above it.

Rollins' charisma works wonders, and Jewison reveals enough solid professionalism in the deft handling of flashbacks to make it gripping entertainment.

This 'affectionate parody' of the swashbuckling Zorro myth is so determinedly amiable that one feels distinctly caddish for regretting that the laughs are not even more frequent. It fails only in that Leibman's villain shouts too much, and that the set pieces, the skeleton of most film comedy, are under-considered.

If the storytelling sometimes feels straightforward, it’s more than merited by its captivating story and powerful message.

Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on IMAX and hold on tight.

The most "Naked City"–worthy aspect is the film's temperature, fixed precisely between cool posturing and broiling anomie. Its vision of contemporary Thailand is recognizable as another society undeserving of redemption, but worthy of poetry.

It finds genuine humour in its characters’ almost down-and-out lot, but it’s fully on their side – the side of those trampled on by modern times.

Occasionally, the movie italicizes its points with heavy musical drones, but its tone is remarkably even and concentrated: It makes sense that Jolie excels at stewarding the scenes she usually tears apart onscreen: two people struggling in an emotional death grip, the camera up close.

It’s anthropology, not violence, that provides the sting in the tail – a thought-provoking coda to an often pulse-pounding survival horror.

Not a lot to it, but the sense of period is acute, the script witty without falling into the crude pitfalls that beset other adolescent comedies, and the performances are spot-on.

Not all heroes wear capes, some wear swimming caps – and The Swimmers is an empowering reminder that it is a human right to live safely, no matter where you come from.

Dreamweavers, visionaries, plus actors… filmmaking pair Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest DIY sci-fi bubbles with mad ideas and eerie pre-apocalyptic vibes.

A difficult and, at times, harrowing watch about an important subject, de Araújo’s unflinching eye and great care has a tonal precision the gravity of the events shown warrant.

If this is the end of the road for a British filmmaking great, it’s a thoughtful, heart-filled finale. British cinema’s old oak still stands tall.

Fisher taps a rich vein of Romanticism here, making this the high point of a series that afterwards degenerated into the sloppy self-parody of Jimmy Sangster's The Horror of Frankenstein.

It’s a sensitive, careful film with real emotional intelligence, but no less gripping for swerving dramatic fireworks in favour of quieter, more observational moments.

Kuhns makes time for political insights, provocative montages of race riots cut with the movie’s hick militia, and the comments of owlish Romero himself, who recounts the shoot like the enthusiastic 27-year-old he was.

What's missing, then? There's no fiery central performance in the mix (the horse doesn't count), and once Emily Watson's hardscrabble mom is rotated out of the action, you yearn for an anchor.

The first and only piece of advice needed on one’s way to the fishing pond is this: Bring your patience. Not surprisingly, the same could be said to a viewer of this slow-building but riveting experimental collage.

As a storyteller, writer-director Hafsia Herzi is not coy, but she’s careful, allowing intimacy to emerge with the same tentativeness as it does for Fatima.

It’s a testament to [Franco's] skill as a storyteller that Memory survives a calamitously mishandled plot point to slowly reveal itself to be his best work since 2012’s After Lucia, the first of three of his films to win awards in Cannes.

The importance of Tiesel’s performance here can’t be overstated, and even during what is easily the most excruciating birthday-party scene involving cock ribbons ever, the actor lends an incredibly profound sense of sorrow to the film’s pitilessness.

Plaza, who follows up Black Bear with another darker turn, is great in a role that lets her badass side out for a rampage.

Rather than a bruising marital wipeout drama, Is This Thing On? is a film about how new purpose and a new tribe can help you re-evaluate what was there all along (the title, of course, refers to the marriage as well as the mic). It might make you think about relationships differently; it probably won’t make you want to take up stand-up.

Rohrwacher weaves this thread in and out of the more grounded storylines with the most exquisite even-handedness, evoking Greek mythology while creating her own legend.

The portmanteau structure suits Dupieux’s demented sensibility, providing a wildly varied yet consistently entertaining dose of bafflement and bemusement.

Miller’s ace in the hole is the hulking, regal Harper, whose round face vacillates between childlike mirth and lung-stomping sadness. His casual charisma not only commands our attention and affection, it sidelines every social or thematic concern to this singular, tentatively aspiring life.

Cedar's idiosyncratically brilliant script also has a moral question at its heart: Is lying to spare someone's feelings ever justified? Surely the Talmud has a thing or two to say about that.

It’s absolutely a period piece (heightened by being in black and white), but its humanity is ageless, serving up an irresistible amount of thrills, spills and jaw-aches.

Alternating between stunning fixed takes and quick you-are-there camera movements, Bill and Turner Ross's portrait of their tiny Ohio hmetown (the title is its zip code) weaves a hypnotic tapestry out of everyday banalities.

The Outrun is adapted by Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot from her own searingly honest memoir, with German director Nora Fingscheidt as co-writer. Fingscheidt handles her true-life traumas with great care, but without sparing us any of the harsh realities of recovery.

Passionate, lyrical, and imaginative, it's a remarkably assured debut, from the astonishing opening helicopter shot that follows the escaped convicts' car to freedom, to the final, inexorably tragic climax.

As engrossing as it is maddening, Pierre Thoretton's documentary on the sale of Yves Saint Laurent's extensive art collection is perched somewhere between a sanded-edged official portrait and a keen examination of affluence run amok.

For three decades Clifton Collins Jr has been bringing a memorable spark to relatively small parts in everything from Capote to Pacific Rim. Jockey is his turn in the spotlight, giving the veteran character actor a nuanced lead role to inhabit in a slice-of-life racetrack drama.

Herb and Dorothy are adorable enough, but Sasaki’s documentary really shines when she gives center stage to the grateful artists whom they helped nurture.

The quintessential British caper film of the 1960s, The Italian Job is a flashy, fast romp that chases a team of career criminals throughout one of the biggest international gold heists in history.

All ye searching for Primal Fear redux, abandon hope. The character-driven drama he (Curran) offers viewers instead is something far more complex, cracked and unique for an American movie boasting big-name stars: an unblinking glare into the abyss.

The film’s subject is almost too horrible to contemplate, but it finds a way to space out the blows without softening them.

The result is an empathetic, emotionally candid treat – Pixar’s own brains trust back at full capacity.

The new Let Me In does more than merely preserve the original's mood; it actually improves on it.

For all the brazen charms of this warm, funny debut, though, its quieter moments signal a profundity that’s really worth getting excited about.

Losier has made a quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.

The acting is intense, as you would expect from Ullmann and Josephson, working under a director who was coming to terms with his own breakdown in this film; and the nightmare imagery (washed-out backgrounds clashing vividly with stark colours) delivers a strong jolt to the subconscious.

The real strength of Cohen’s occasionally didactic drama, though, is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there. It was an achievement Bruegel mastered early on. And it’s what makes Museum Hours its own work of art.

A deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them.

The impressively lean script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is shorn of almost all superfluity beyond a few dud Schwarzeneggeresque kiss-offs, while Anthony Dod Mantle's sensational widescreen cinematography harkens back to the tension-inducing inventiveness of early John Carpenter.

What begins as a spirited but safely familiar pastiche of John Hughes and Wes Anderson is compelled to become its own thing, Gomez-Rejon’s film embracing the most tired tropes of stereotypical YA weepies so that it can kiss them goodbye.

If you’ve had a hard day and want to watch something to restore your sense of justice in this world, then Braven has all the boxes well and truly ticked.

As a sequel, it works for the same reasons that make The Empire Strikes Back so many people’s favourite Star Wars film: there’s a darkness, a bleakness, that makes the fist-pumping moments feel all-the-more earned.

If you're even slightly interested in folk music, there will be something here to simmer that curiosity into a full-on boil: the Arabic trip-hop stylings of monomonikered rapper-singer Raiz, raspy Pietra Montecorvino's Stevie Nicks–like dance tunes, a gorgeous sax solo from local jazz legend James Senese.

Inventive, incisive and full of affection for the originals, this is easily the most fun the series has been since Scream 2.

Brilliantly atmospheric San Francisco settings, memorably bizarre supporting performances, a superb use of subjective camera (much more effective than in Lady in the Lake) throughout the entire first third of the film.

The storytelling is brisk, though the wealth of events and characters means you have to let yourself go with the flow. But Gangs of Wasseypur is always compelling, and Bajpai’s charisma means there’s always a colorful presence at the heart of the drama long after the endless hail of bullets has grown tiresome.

[Arcel's] crafted a kind of Danish The Last of the Mohicans that’s full of passion and political conviction. It should stand the test of time almost as well as its rugged hero.

Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.

Focusing on the personalities rather than the historical context, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville illustrate how both men’s lives were changed by the debates, and how neither could let it go even decades later. The result is perhaps better suited to TV than the big screen, but it’s a timely, thoughtful piece of work.

Like Crazy proves it's still possible to make a love story that's both genuinely sweet and bittersweet.

If you’re looking for a more granular account of the Oxy epidemic and its perpetrators, Emmy-nominated miniseries Dopesick and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller ‘Empire of Pain’ both have your back. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed plots a slightly different kind of narrative: one that’s full of defiance and emotion.

Ultimately, Jenkins teases out a fascinating theme of black identity shaped and altered by sales and evolving tastes.

It doesn’t seem new for them, yet as super polished, mannered, slightly surreal comedies go, the movie feels as rare as a unicorn.

Still Bill gives the onetime R&B superstar ample space to air his tough yet warmhearted worldview, and to demonstrate its daily application.

Immaculately composed yet skittish, edgy and surprising, this impressive debut by writer-director Michael Pearce emanates a chill that will have you hugging your sides.

Certainly, it is one of the finest movies to deal with the plight of those thousands of immigrants who travelled in steerage to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.

Like Aftersun on a gallon of SunnyD, this warm and freewheeling comedy-drama about a girl connecting with the dad she’s never met proves that working-class stories don’t have to be all misery and angst. Sometimes, that kitchen sink can be filled with bubbles.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.

Totally uncompromising and grindingly repetitive, the film nevertheless accumulates a kind of hallucinatory groove, with unexpected shafts of bizarre humour and vigorous, experimental new wave direction.

What comes across loud and clear is that 13TH is a serious, timely, important work with highways and byways of thought that are worth traveling for anyone who cares to understand why, as DuVernay argues, slavery didn’t end with slavery.

More often than not, September 5 feels like a great 1970s thriller that could only have been made in the 21st century.

The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching.

Stripped to a minimum of editorializing (but, like "The Hurt Locker," flush with sympathy), this Afghanistan-shot war documentary takes its cues from the unblinking style of cinema verité.

It cleverly pulls at the supposed laws of the series in a way that makes it more interesting without diluting the fearsome nature of the title character. Trachtenberg is making the franchise richer with every instalment. And if the film’s final shot is any reliable indication, he’s far from finished.

The movie’s b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant.

Apfel is constantly chatting to “Albert” off camera, not to us, and the affection adds an unusual meta level to Iris, a conversation between two old-timers who have gone from making history to becoming it.

Though infuriatingly difficult to categorise, the film is bold, inventive, stimulating and extremely entertaining.

This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion.

this is a wonderfully fun watch that somehow manages to simultaneously celebrate and satirise the Barbie brand, its feminism and girliness pairing like gorpcore sandals with a floaty pink skirt. It’s Barbie’s world, and it’s a thrill to live in it, at least for an hour or two.

It’s exhilarating, even exhausting stuff, though Fiennes lightens the weight of Zizek’s dense discourse with a welcome scattering of sight gags. He’s a man to be taken seriously, but not averse to donning a nun’s habit — and for that we love him.

Like a hollow-point shell, David Fincher’s slickly enjoyable assassin thriller is explosive but empty.

While the director doesn't hide her sympathies, she leaves remarkably few stones unturned in a dogged search for answers.

Funny, visceral, bloody, no-nonsense entertainment with a touch of class.

Scripted by Steve Tesich, it's Yates' best film since The Friends of Eddie Coyle and displays the kind of unsentimental optimism that went out of fashion with Hawks.

Much is unemphatic, but all of it carries the moving weight of conviction. And it ends on a healing grace-note which passeth all understanding.

In 1974 a director (Polanski), a screenwriter (Towne) and a producer (Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy.

A brave British melodrama from 1961, one of this country's first explorations of gay life on screen.

Disney's attempts at the visual illustration of Beethoven and Co - a dubious exercise anyway - produce Klassical Kitsch of the highest degree. Awesomely embarrassing; but some great sequences for all that, and certainly not to be missed.

Director Andrew Neel has hit upon a compelling reason for the found-footage gimmick: to indict a narcissistic generation who think their phones make them royalty.

It’s a film for cinephiles as well as musos and romantics, with its discrete ‘movements’ mirroring the movie making style of its time frame.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.

Falk's unflappable whimsicality is put to excellent use, Arkin commands sundry shades of blind panic, and if the car chases sustain the widely held belief that Arthur Hiller could not direct traffic, the script's out-of-nowhere zingers are wonderful.