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.

Mistress America steamrolls through its mesmerizingly dense running time with such joyous violence that its themes only bubble up to the surface in retrospect, the heart of the movie identified like the dental records of a body that’s been burned beyond all recognition.

The movement of the story—from wrenching homesickness to blooming confidence and a smile on one’s stroll to work—elevates the movie into universal urban poetry.

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.

The Witch is one of the most genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory because Eggers has the guts to earn your fear.

It teases out the distinctly modern subject of celebrity profile-writing, a rare one for the movies, detouring into avenues of attraction and envy.

For a movie with a critique of mediocrity well within its grasp, this one settles for an embrace of it, barely breaking a sweat.

Fading out long before it’s able to cohere into anything memorable, Song One has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve)—it’s just in desperate need of a few strong hooks.

Cake chokes you on its self-seriousness, even as it trots out potentially interesting supporting players.

Still Life constantly threatens to become a better movie: John’s scrutiny of photos feels vaguely serial-killer–esque, and there’s a late-inning love interest (Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) that you privately cheer for.

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.

This is a bleak and bitter movie, but it knows the way forward, if not the quickest way to get there.

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

As Match wilts into a trite portrait of people who are at the mercy of their pasts, Belber’s menagerie of inexpressive shots leaves his film at the mercy of its own.

Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results.

Something, Anything doesn’t really engage with issues of faith or materialism.