Quietly touching and profound, it epitomises the youthful delight Varda always shows for the tools at her disposal and her sensitive and easeful way of expressing the sways and shifts of life, love and desire.

After the self-satisfied The Gentlemen and the slick but sparkless Wrath of Man, it’s a nice reminder that at his best, Ritchie remains an accomplished teller of tall tales.

All in all, a superbly controlled exercise in the malevolent torments of despair.

Rocky is an old-fashioned fairytale brilliantly revamped to chime in with the depressed mood of the '70s. Although its plot - nonentity gets to fight the heavyweight champ - is basically fantasy, the film deftly manages to suspend disbelief by drawing back at its more implausible moments.

Nothing about The Spectacular Now feels easy or After-School Special, although it tidies up too much (the personal essay should be retired as a device).

From its mundane beginnings to its melancholy closing grace note, Microbe and Gasoline is such a wonderfully touching film because it remembers the urgency of wanting to get older without growing up.

It’s anchored by a dangerously glum performance by 21-year-old Ross Lynch, who becomes more interesting the more you watch him.

Merchant never loses our interest: He’s made a sparkly, strutting film that doesn’t apologize for or look down upon its heroes. A “soap opera in spandex” is what Hutch calls pro wrestling to his trainees, and the movie follows suit. Who doesn’t love a melodrama in tights once in a while?

It's a great package: salutary, short (74 minutes) and sweet.

Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.

Forget the snark about him ransacking Eric Rohmer's bag of tricks; the gentle ironies and droll, bitter wit here prove Hong is the French New Waver's heir apparent.

The action scenes-blissfully easy to follow-are where Whedon makes the giant leap into the big leagues.

Breathtakingly risky but valid under scrutiny ... Jojo Rabbit isn’t perfect; sometimes it strains to reconcile Waititi’s more relaxed beats (“Let everything happen to you,” is a line from poet Rainer Maria Rilke that gets big play) with his visual fussiness. But he’s legitimately breaking new ground. It will find an audience that gets it.

Amazingly, Gere keeps it all together, via a kind of seething anti-rage that speaks reams to the character's survival instincts.

For all of its innumerable pleasures, however, The Forbidden Room can feel like too much of a good thing—premiering at Sundance, Maddin’s latest plays like a robust film festival unto itself.

It’s uncompromising. It’s disturbing. But it’s also deeply human, allowing for many glimpses of human kindness and human frailty beyond a wall of anonymity and pain.

Kalashnikov eschews submerging us in twisted metal and carnage. Instead, The Road Movie is a study of human nature under unusual circumstances, revealing the often stoic and nonchalant nature of the Russian character

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of those nice surprises, a so-called legacy sequel made with love and executed with flair. Think Top Gun: Maverick with better hats.

It’s a bold tilt into magical realism, but the effect is never jarring – rather, it’s a moving capstone to a film which argues that the act of remembering is itself a form of magic.

One of the best of Altman's early movies, using classic themes - the ill-fated love of gambler and whore, the gunman who dies by the gun, the contest between little man and big business - to produce a non-heroic Western.

One thing’s certain: This is no swoony love story. It intoxicates all the same.

Grief is fertile territory for horror, but while the script picks at Baghead’s thematic underpinnings, Corredor skips all but the most essential exposition, staying focused on delivering what the audience wants.

What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.

Her (Binoche) award-winning performance is reason alone to dive into such intellectual gamesmanship. (She can suggest an entire emotional arc with one facial tic.)

The film’s relentless masculinity and shouty attitude is tempered by a disorientating, troubling sense of characters tragically adrift. Equally powerful as what we do see is what we don’t – jobs, families, kids, colleagues – as the entire film exists in a selfish interval from real, daily life.

It's the cattlemen vs homesteaders plot, present in all its particulars, but refracted through the star personae of Cooper and Brennan.

Though the women could be stronger and the accents occasionally jar, cooper’s study of moral corruption enthrals. The Johnny-ssance starts here!

A Most Violent Year, Chandor’s absorbing no-bull NYC drama, further clarifies what might be the most promising career in American movies: an urban-headed filmmaker attuned to economies of place and time, with an eye on the vacant throne of Sidney Lumet.