A fictionalized meeting that is very funny at times and boasts actors fully committed to communicating the bizarreness of a particular time and place in American history.

Based on 17th-century stories by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, who inspired the Brothers Grimm, one tale ends with a sting, another ends in triumph, and the third concludes somewhere in the middle. All of them linger.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier reminds one of a young Steven Spielberg. Not the family-friendly Spielberg but the mean, young, hungry Spielberg who had a taste for genre filmmaking.

The entire tone of Richard Linklater’s new, low-key film is infectious in a positive, sweet way. The characters are fun, vibrant, a little wild, and off-kilter, lacking in a cynicism often found in college comedies.

Emmanuelle Bercot’s empathetic and clear-eyed film presents a pungent portrait of a young adult. Its lead actor won the César Award, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for most promising actor.

This is a perfect film for smart, preteen kids (as well as adults) and a welcome relief from the YA dystopian merry-go-round that Hollywood finds itself in.

In this intensely moving movie, long, lovingly shot sequences of the titular food fits perfectly in the genre of culinary-based films in which food has metaphorical, cultural, and even spiritual significance.

Director Tobias Lindholm, employing a realistic, almost documentarylike style, explores the moral consequences of the choices men make. He has, with A War, made his finest film to date.

The best way to describe actor Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is a black comedy or, more to the point, a bleak comedy. Emma Thompson costars as an epically self-centered harridan: loud, vulgar, frequently drunk, and with a complete lack of social inhibition.