With its easy pace and genial company, “My Donkey, My Lover & I” is a journey worth taking, even if, at the end of the day, there’s no cozy French inn waiting for you.

If this all sounds too insufferable and in-jokey, fear not: Gormican, with the help of his fabulously game ensemble cast, keeps the balloon afloat with a light touch, crisp pacing and an overarching mood that’s more goofily endearing than smugly self-amused.

At times, The Man Who Sold His Skin plays like a cultural parody, but its aim is dead serious, and more sobering. The pathos and tragedy of the global refugee crisis is its target, not the pretensions of the international art market, and it, from time to time, delivers a sting.

In nearly all the important categories -- story, direction, pacing, acting -- the picture is pretty much negligible. Still, almost by force of sheer winning dopiness, the movie seduces you into dropping your defenses. It's weightlessly, irredeemably enjoyable.

There are plenty of left turns (and the occasional dead end) here, but Riders of Justice is no waste of time. The mayhem is mixed with unexpected thoughtfulness.

As an exercise in sincerity, fellowship and earnest inquiry, it might be the most subversive movie in circulation right now.

Director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) brings handsome period production values and a lyrical, restrained sensibility to a narrative that might not qualify as riveting, but exerts its own unmistakable emotional pull.

A modestly budgeted but richly rewarding look at a Tennessee housewife's search for a better life.

Oyelowo brings a thoughtful sensibility and thoroughgoing good taste to the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t produce anymore but shouldn’t be so quick to discard.

Plan B possesses the requisite number of outré sight gags and gross-out humor to qualify it as a sophomoric teen flick. But director Natalie Morales keeps the action running smoothly, allowing her two gifted stars to deliver genuine breakout performances in vivid roles.

The subtitle refers not only to the twilight of the 1920s but to a changing of the guard in this entertainment franchise as well. In that sense, maybe Downton Abbey isn’t really giving its fans what they want, but what they have always needed to accept in this epic saga: that time doesn’t stand still.

By scaling back the script’s laughs and excising four songs (plus countless reprises), the film at times lands in an uncanny valley between the heightened musical at its core and the weightier young adult drama Chbosky seems to have envisioned.

The first Latina actress to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — the “EGOT” superfecta — Moreno doesn’t just seem to keep getting better and better, but more and more interesting.

Thanks to the taste and shrewd judgment of director Julio Quintana, this funny, heartwarming movie provides just the right combination of adventure, character-driven humor, spiritual depth and inspirational uplift.

The movie takes place in Iran, yet it’s really situated in the crack of daylight that separates truth from a lie. It’s a tight squeeze, Farhadi seems to say, and one whose pinch this tragedy of the everyday makes us feel, acutely.

There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.

The film brings a more human understanding of a figure so noteworthy he has earned mononym status for the title. Though we only see him in still images and old performance videos in Ailey, he seems much closer.

Veteran Arthur Hiller, who directed Peter Falk and Alan Arkin in The In-Laws and Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Silver Streak, proves equally adept at managing a female odd couple.

This is a story of family and of friendship, with enough humor to keep it from getting too sappy and enough restraint to keep it from getting too sophomoric.

After Love, the feature-length debut from British writer-director Aleem Khan, is a quietly compelling exploration of identity, grief and the secrets loved ones take to the grave.

Lamb is weird and disturbing, even by the standards of the movie’s indie distributor, A24, which is known for its eclectic and times unsettling content. But it’s also strangely beautiful.

Bergman Island is a compelling, enchanting film that works both as a relationship drama and as a conversation between one generation of directors and another. It’s almost as though Mia Hansen-Love were teaching Ingmar Bergman how to get down.

Dumont is clearly critiquing the way we mediate life via screens, large and small. There are times in this rambling story when the filmmaker’s point isn’t quite as obvious, but that’s only because he has a habit of trying to jab several moving targets with a sharp stick all at the same time.

Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.

Mostly gentle but occasionally turbulent comic drama, which is primarily about the ways people fail their families, friends and themselves.

Writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun paints a world that can feel as vast as it is isolating, while Amina, along with most of the other characters, speaks in a direct, almost transactional manner that befits her steely demeanor.

Director Pedro Kos makes lively use of archival footage and animation in Rebel Hearts, but the stars are the women themselves.

As absorbing and illuminating as Sabaya is — and as courageous as it is as an act of filmmaking — the viewer can’t escape the fact that it’s men who have taken these women hostage, men who are rescuing them and men to whom they are returning, as long as they obey their conditions and patriarchal codes.