If Pedro Almodóvar was hired to direct another "Sex and the City" film, it might end up like Cupcakes. The sort of movie that adjectives like frothy and bubbly were invented for.

Miraculously, the movie doesn’t feel mean-spirited so much as profoundly awkward. Scripted by smart guys like Etan Cohen (Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder) and two behind-the-scenes writers on TV’s consistently excellent Key & Peele, the film feels both daring and foolhardy.

Spring isn’t coy about the fact that Louise is harboring a dark secret, and the film’s appeal is rooted in its refreshing eagerness to focus on aspects that most monster movies would think too human.

Combining the knowingly arch style of Abbas Kiarostami (whose "Certified Copy" towers over and belittles this film) with the didactically educational passion of your favorite art professor, La Sapienza alternately feels like a self-reflexive love story or a haunted history lesson—its best scenes play like both.

A Lynchian coda upends the entire film, raising several questions and resolving none. Fans of rigorous storytelling may find it to be one whimsical step too far, but others will marvel at this miraculous coup de théâtre. Jauja is a film to make you wonder.

Al Pacino’s done so much Acting over the last 25 years (hoo-ah), it’s disquieting to see him digging deep again—often with subtlety—into a rich role with hidden depths.

The doc’s most intriguing moment has Summers dropping into a Japanese karaoke bar and singing along to an in-progress Police hit, an affable man wandering through his own legacy.

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

Seymour unfolds like a Jewish Jiro Dreams of Sushi—Bernstein may look like your average NYC grandpa, but he lives like a monk and talks like a guru.

Forget that The Lovers doesn’t have the courtesy to be fun; no cosmic romance should be so deeply afraid to shoot for the stars. As one of the film’s many forgettable characters so eloquently puts it, “This stinks worse than an oyster’s fart.”

For a group with property assets in the billions, it’s a major piece of the puzzle, revealing a critical failing: For a religion with so much to give, why do they do so little for so few?

It really packs a punch (bet you saw that one coming).

When the movie is doing its tough-guy-seeking-redemption thing, it’s more than just good.

If Merchants of Doubt ultimately proves that good data doesn’t often make for good drama, it’s only because this doc is such a hollow slog.

Stearns saddles himself with a touch more plot than he needs, and some of the film’s late-game twists are more satisfying than others, but Faults never loses sight of the one thing Ansel can’t see: Free will may come cheap, but most people still can’t afford it.

Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.

The doc makes a hairpin turn into sentiment, as the realities of immigration law impose themselves on Randi’s private relationship with his Venezuelan lover of 25 years. We already know that professional charlatans run from their pasts. Where they head to, though, is the better question: For a while, An Honest Liar brings a captivating crusader into view.

Entertainingly, the klezmer-scored Deli Man charts the history of urban eateries, nowhere near as prominent as they were during the early 20th century but still a vital link to Yiddish-accented comforts.

Wild Canaries may be modest stuff, but its madcap misadventures are loaded with honesty, and it earns the conclusion that love never feels like a cage when you fly with the right flock.

Whatever the film’s virtues, subtlety was never going to be one of them.

The Hunting Ground still shocks and awakens its audience in all the right ways, bringing the recent headlines of a Columbia University rape survivor carrying her mattress around into irrefutably urgent, sharp focus.

Grudges, minor insults and found-out flirtations lead to mayhem and murder on a cataclysmic scale.

The stakes may seem low, but these high jinks resound with abstract generational import, the various episodes cohering into a moving portrait of a nation that couldn’t account for all it had lost in a war that it won.

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn’s original), and the terror is theoretical only.

Look, the movie didn't have to cure cancer or anything. But sans the original's redemptive nostalgia or any newfound cleverness, it's just a manic, flop-sweat-drenched mess.

The acting, especially from Menash Noy as an ineffectual attorney, is phenomenal, resulting in a feminist knockout told in inverse.

A dryly amusing mockumentary from the Kiwis behind the similarly deadpan Eagle vs Shark and Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows unfolds like the darkest movie that Christopher Guest never made.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a sex-positive but hopelessly soft-core erotic drama that fails to be even a fraction as titillating as the E.L. James books that inspired it. And yet, that’s exactly why it works.