Velvet Buzzsaw

Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw is a stylish playdate for its growups (Gyllenhaal, Collette, Russo, Malkovich) and youngsters (Ashton, Dyer, Sturridge), who go for a ride on the film's bloody combo parody carousel and funhouse, a sendup of artistic pretensions and manufactured taste.

Fyre

Chris Smith's Fyre fumes over failed-festival organizer Billy McFarland's conman and cad while training a forensic lens on the folks who enabled his fantasy, charmed by McFarland's frat daddy slickness and cheesy optimism, to their emotional and financial detriment.

Cold War

 

Pawel Pawlikowski's mesmeric Cold War handles diffidence and disaster with candor, finding love (or its proxy) in the lines on the faces of his Polish lovers (Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot), who scamper all over post-WWII Europe, running toward and away from fate and each other.

High Flying Bird

 

 

Steven Soderbergh's wonderfully scripted High Flying Bird, starring a terrific Andre Holland (Moonlight and Castle Rock), is about the NBA but has no court action; instead it's both the story of a ballsy player agent during a lockout and a metaphor for black pride and self-determination.