The Swell Season emerges as an incisive cut at fame's effect on the real-life music and romance of Hansard and Irglova. It's an accomplished piece of filmmaking from the trio, who are making their feature-length documentary debut.

Starkly beautiful and exceedingly demanding, The Turin Horse, which Hungarian master Béla Tarr has said will be his last film, is both easy and impossible to define.

Miller and Lord clearly understand the push-and-pull and hyper-competitiveness that make guy friendships both complex and stupid. That it comes to life so fully in 21 Jump Street is what gives the film an endearing, punch-you-in-the-arm-because-I-like-you-man charm.

The ambiguity is refreshing. And despite the complicated emotional story at the center of this film, the Dardennes, who wrote and directed, have opted to handle it all with a minimalist narrative style.

There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.

Somehow it is the waiting - for the fall that you expect is coming, for the marriage you figure will fall apart - that makes Take This Waltz one to make room for on your dance card.

By far the film's deadliest weapon is McConaughey. The way the actor leans into threats, dropping his voice, wrapping eloquence in sinister tones, is skin-crawling. The muscles in his neck literally seem to tense one by one. And if the eyes are the window to the soul, you really don't want to peer for long into his. It is not an easy performance to watch, but it is unforgettable.

An unusually intelligent cut at the relationship game.

It may be the most fun you'll have with ghosts and zombies all year.

The action is inventive, extensive and exciting, a bang-up job by cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, one of the town's hot new shooters.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki squarely lands that punch, creating a tense and chilling horror story for financially fraught times.

Remarkably, much of that sizzling sensibility was caught on film and has been stylishly stitched together with her personal history in the scrumptious new documentary, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.

A visceral story of beat cops that is rare in its sensitivity, rash in its violence and raw in its humor.

One of those documentaries that is sad and hopeful in equal measure and exceptional in its storytelling.

It is a striking and moving study of "what was" versus "what it has become" as the filmmakers try to get at the whys.

In a country that embraces cinematic violence with such ease but blushingly prefers to keep sex in the shadows or under the sheets, the grown-up approach of The Sessions is rare.

Bernal and Furstenberg exist within this meditative space with all the ease and unease of a couple still trying each other on for size. The forces that push and pull them feel so rooted in reality that if not for the layers of meaning it might seem a complete improvisation.

In Skyfall, Mendes has given us a thrilling new chapter in a franchise that by all rights should have been gasping for air - which really makes him the hero of this saga.

Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family's survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title.

In doing a little genre bending of romantic schmaltz and horror cheese - some fundamental zombie mythology is turned on its head - the film breathes amusing new life into both.

Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain Beautiful Creatures? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.

Herzog has become a master of the understatement — knowing just how long the images can sustain you without a word being said. Vasyukov and his team of cameramen gave him a stunning range to work with, so the filmmaker keeps his own narration to a minimum.

Barsky does a good job of taking all the complexity of such a major personality and the times in which he flourished and boiling it down to the essentials.

François Ozon can usually be counted on for dark irony of the juiciest sort...But the filmmaker has an especially deft touch when a dash of comedy is mixed in. He uses this to delicious effect in his latest, In the House.

It is the almost accidental way Tina and Chris go about going bad that provides Sightseers with its twisted humor and its unexpected charm.

So many things are done right that even with the bombast, "Into Darkness" is the best of this summer's biggies thus far. It's a great deal of brash fun.

Wisely, Hancock has given the film as much humor as heart.

The result is a film that unsettles as often as it seduces, though it does very well with both.