If director Riley Stearns sometimes loses his thematic bearings, he never forgets to deliver large, violent doses of comedy in the instant cult classic, The Art of Self-Defense.
There's some mystery about the quietly conscientious artist and pioneer F. Percy Smith, and Minute Bodies can't penetrate it as easily as he revealed the hidden life of plants.
With The Dead Don't Die, Jim Jarmusch deliberately deprives his latest film of the propulsive terrors innate to most zombie films, instead using the genre to matter-of-factly rhapsodize about consumer culture and the inevitability of the apocalypse.
Sometimes a movie needs to overpower you, or why bother? So-called "women's films" Portrait in Black and Madame X glorify women's strength and resilience.
Music documentary Echo in the Canyon beautifully captures Jakob Dylan's search for the best lessons in collaboration from pioneering California Sound supergroups.
Olivia Wilde's directorial debut, Booksmart, featuring a lineup of superbly talented young performers, revels in a utopian view of progressive America.
In Olivier Assayas' speedy, slightly wan dispatch from salon society, Non-Fiction (Doubles vie), Parisians have badly concealed affairs and argue loudly but inconclusively about books and society.
The dynamic in Andrew Kightlinger's Tater Tot & Patton, wherein it falls on a troubled middle-aged man to teach a young woman how he thinks she ought to behave, is concerning.
Dismissed as "trash" in their day, Charles Bronson films Rider on the Rain and Cold Sweat belong to a Golden Age of internationally co-produced Euro-thrillers that combine pulp storytelling with stylistic elegance and intense emotion.
While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.
João Moreira Salles's melancholic documentary, In the Intense Now (No Intenso Agora) stitches together amateur footage of the riots of 1968 to create a riveting rumination on the glee and disillusionment of idealism.
