A.A. Dowd

What’s uniquely remarkable about The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies’ 1992 return to his own childhood, is how gloriously disorganized its story feels.

Lady Bird is something truly special: a coming-of-age comedy so funny, perceptive, and truthful that it makes most other films about adolescence look like little more than lessons in cliché.

Marriage Story, unlike so many other breakup movies, offers venom in drips and drops instead of drowning us in it, because it knows that no matter how far apart Charlie and Nicole drift, the feelings that first brought them together are still there, informing their flawed attempts to move on without destroying each other.

For what it sets out to accomplish, across a brisk 98 minutes, Petzold’s film feels perfectly judged. And it builds to an ending that’s just plain perfect.

The Look Of Silence is a powerful gesture of political rebellion, one whose boldest action isn’t damning mass murderers to their faces, but being willing to believe that their stranglehold on country and history could be broken.

A small film of big insights, heavy on dialogue but light on speeches, 45 Years often seems closer in spirit to a ghost story: Nothing goes “boo” or rearranges the furniture, but there’s a unmissable sense that we’re watching two people haunted by a specter from another lifetime.

There’s a cumulative power here that transcends any rough patches. Boyhood isn’t perfect, but it’s an astonishing, one-of-a-kind accomplishment—and further proof that Linklater is one of the most daring, ambitious filmmakers working today.

In showing us the interest one man takes in everything around him, he’s suggesting that living a life of simplicity and security can be conducive to beautiful expression—even, or perhaps especially, in a place as ordinary as Paterson.

Two Days, One Night is a small miracle of a movie, a drama so purely humane that it makes most attempts at audience uplift look crass and calculated by comparison.

Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet.

Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment — the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade. In the process of justifying its own existence, Before Midnight redeems the very notion of sequels.

More "Full Metal Jacket" than "Dead Poet’s Society," the film is an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other.

There’s great integrity to showing life as it is really is, warts and all. But sometimes showing it as it should be has value, too.

What Coppola achieved is a psychodrama about the dangers of being locked in your own private world, of slipping on noise-canceling headphones of any variety. Listening and hearing are not the same thing. Confusing one for the other can have dire consequences.

Fans of early John Carpenter will immediately identify the master’s influence — on the voyeuristic slink of the camera, the synth pulse of Rich Vreeland’s throwback score, and the transformation of “safe,” warmly lit residential environments into landscapes of dread.

Manchester By The Sea sweats the big stuff and the small stuff, and that’s key to its anomalous power: This is a staggering American drama, almost operatic in the heartbreak it chronicles.

Blue Ruin rarely resembles anything but itself. Much of the singularity can be attributed to the film’s atypical hero, surely one of the year’s great characters.

There’s a tragic, moving resonance to the film’s vision of two marginalized characters—one Black, the other a woman, both stripped of everything—finding common ground in their parallel trauma and resistance. It’s there in the scenes between Franciosi and first-time actor Ganambarr, forging empathy and a mutual respect in the fire of survival, without a hint of bathetic sentimentality.

If there’s any fault to find in this expertly directed, frequently hilarious study of imploding male ego, it’s that Östlund basically arrives upon a perfect ending — one that brings the movie full circle, both dramatically and visually — and then bypasses it in favor of a more muddled one. But as climactic missteps go, it’s not exactly disastrous.

What’s special about Logan is that it manages to deliver the visceral goods, all the hardcore Wolverine action its fans could desire, while still functioning as a surprisingly thoughtful, even poignant drama—a terrific movie, no “comic-book” qualifier required.

For all the chaos erupting at all times, we never lose track of what’s going on, because it’s been staged not just with diabolical mischief, but also total clarity. What a movie.

Polley’s fledgling foray into documentary filmmaking is also an investigative mystery, a real-life soap opera, and — most compellingly, perhaps — a searching “interrogation” (the director’s word) of the hows and whys of storytelling itself.

What the two actors lack in vocal polish they make up for in commitment — and chemistry. La La Land is the third film to romantically pair Gosling and Stone, after "Crazy, Stupid, Love" and "Gangster Squad," and that history of onscreen relationships fortifies their playful rapport:

Part of the movie’s brilliance is in how it questions the very concept of a good deed.

In many respects, Adam and Eve are nocturnal cousins to the angels from Wim Wenders’ "Wings Of Desire": They’re secret observers of history, living records of the past with little control over the future. But Jarmusch has no interest in the kind of guilt and grief Wenders wove through his movie; Only Lovers comes in a hipper, sexier shade of melancholy.

Transit doesn’t just freeze its characters in place. They’re stuck in time, too, on a continuum that connects today’s exiled lost souls to yesterday’s. Because when it comes to people without country fleeing for their lives across the globe, there is no old or new, no then or now, no past or future, just an awful present tense. Transit, meanwhile, looks from this present tense like an early contender for the best movie of 2019. Or wait, is it 1939?

The plight of this struggling family unit weighs more heavily on the heart with each passing minute, making Stray Dogs the rare marathon-length art film that seems to grow less oppressive the longer it goes on.

Pawlikowski, who doesn’t waste a shot (nor compose one that isn’t a work of art on its lonesome), creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.

The queasy thrill of Sandler’s live-wire performance is the way he keys us right into Howard’s electric joy, putting everything on the line, consequences be damned. It’s a pure shot of the gambler’s high, and Uncut Gems gets us hooked on it, too. By the end, you want to hurl and cheer.

Easily one of the year’s best comedies, the movie thrives off the chemistry between its leads, with Pegg painting a very funny portrait of emotional paralysis and Frost demonstrating a heretofore unseen talent for intimidation.

Explicit lesbian lovemaking aside, Blue is, at heart, a somewhat ordinary coming-of-age romance, pulled and stretched nearly to its breaking point.

I reserve the right—as I do at every festival, where I tend to hedge my bets and temper my praise—to decide that, never mind, everyone’s right, this is a masterpiece. For now, what I see is staggering formal prowess that is maybe just a little at odds with the small, even modest character drama it’s supporting.

A fiendishly clever, sinfully funny con-job melodrama, the kind that keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone on screen and off.

That’s a lot of ground to cover, and the film can be as exhausting, in its flood of information, as it is exhaustive. But DuVernay keeps it all chugging and churning along, propelled by the force of her montage and the sheer volume of damning, gripping material.

Moving like the lit fuse that blazes brilliantly across the opening credits of both the original Mission: Impossible television series and its first big-screen adaptation, Fallout turns out to be a breathlessly exciting action spectacular: the blockbuster spy thriller as sustained endorphin rush.

Thoroughbreds...has been made with diabolical craft and intelligence, the kind that marks Finley as a major new American talent. But it’s no empty exercise, no mere calling card. The style all comes in service of the central relationship and the superb performances that bring it to bewitching life.

By the end of this strange movie — possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something — we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose?

There are no sentimental easy answers or shortcuts to uplift in this unusually prickly buddy comedy. Like Kyle and Mike, it just keeps peddling forward, in the hope that some kind of clarity might materialize at the top of the hill.

Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame.

Burning simmers. For nearly two-and-a-half perfectly measured hours, it turns up the heat without boiling over: a drama becoming a thriller in slow motion, intensifying little by little minute by minute, until finally it reaches a shocking, powerful crescendo.

Far from empty sleight-of-hand, Knives Out twists its borrowed, rearranged mechanics into a timely, sincere, and ultimately moving celebration of decency in the face of moral failure. To paraphrase one of Blanc’s funnier musings, that’s the donut within the donut hole.

If Widows is pulp, it’s pulp made with intelligence and craft and an urgent social conscience. One might even call it a throwback to a richer era of American studio movies, except that the story also feels attuned to a very contemporary anger, aimed at powerful men and the corrupt systems that sanction their abuses.

The potential for a tryst hangs heavily in the humid Mediterranean air; every look and line of dialogue drips with subtext. But Call Me By Your Name’s erotic tension wouldn’t crackle so loudly without the chemistry between its leads.

If this is a superficial tribute, it’s also an affectionately dense one. Most accurately, what we’re seeing is an Andersonian alternate universe: a Japan as old and new, real and unreal, steeped in pastiche and invented from scratch as the brownstone New York of "The Royal Tenenbaums."

There’s a cracked logic, a genius almost, to the film’s amped-up irreverence. Maybe laughter isn’t just the best medicine, but the only sensible response to this much brazen amorality.

Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation.

Monos isn’t a social-issue tract, or just a lament for the beasts of no nation. It’s a fever dream of a war drama, caught halfway between realism and the hallucinatory intensity of an ancient fairy tale.

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread — the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

The film fares best when Jenkins just trusts the expressive force of his filmmaking, when he uses his own tools to evoke, if not match, the magic of Baldwin’s writing.

The Irishman is the director’s longest drama, but it never drags. The 200-plus minutes pass in a blur of dark humor and characteristically gripping incident . . . But it’s in the final act, when Scorsese slows things down to a purposeful crawl, that the film accumulates its full power.

Under The Skin is rich with menacing atmosphere, so much so that viewers could probably tune out the narrative and still get on the proper wavelength.

Anderson’s most diabolical trick is woven into the fabric of his style: He’s used perfectionist craft to celebrate the value of imperfection.

Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles.

Parasite isn’t just thrillingly unpredictable. It pivots with purpose, the class politics setting the trajectory.

Bucking the current company mandate of churning out lesser sequels and prequels, it’s not just a brilliant idea, but maybe the most conceptually daring movie the Bay Area animation house has ever produced. And that’s really saying something, what with "WALL-E" on the books.

What Chazelle has made, in other words, is a nitty-gritty procedural that treats the NASA odyssey as a window into Armstrong’s unknowable mind, an inner space as mysterious as the outer one he blasts himself into.

Burshtein shoots in extreme shallow focus, framing her actors against a sometimes-blinding blanket of white fuzz. It’s a decision that, coupled with Yitzhak Azulay’s stirring, chant-driven score, lends each conversation a near religious aura.

What’s surprising about A Quiet Passion, given the writer-director’s own incurable melancholy, is how lively, how flat-out funny, it frequently is. The film sometimes flirts, even, with becoming a full-on comedy of manners, at least before characters start keeling over and breathing their last breaths.

American Hustle turns out to be a freewheeling party of a movie, one that never stops adding complications and wrinkles and hungry new players to the mix.

It’s a supremely effective gauntlet of supernatural horror that’s also, at blackened heart, a grueling domestic drama about how trauma, resentment, and guilt can seep into the roots of a family tree, rotting it from the inside out.

In examining the man’s selfless service, Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he’s made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.

The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure.

Get on the wavelength of this mesmerizing, singularly unusual genre experiment and the undead being at its center stops looking so silly.

The result is less portrait of an artist than snapshot of a brief, meaningful encounter, shared between two men enjoying different stages of professional success. That one of these men happens to be a modern literary hero is almost, if not quite, incidental.

This is a quantum creative leap for Sciamma, herself a keen observer of behavior. (Her previous films, like Tomboy and Girlhood, were rich with character detail.) Time traveling to an old world seems to unlock the full scope of her passion and insight.

The Missing Picture might have felt academic, even coldly removed, were it not for its scathing narration, penned by Panh (with Christophe Bataille) and read by Randal Douc.

Of course, the real star here is the staging, a balm for an age of lead-footed Broadway translations.

This is a movie with a lot on its mind, from art to altruism to the so-called bystander effect, and it could function as a Rorschach test for its audience, reflecting viewers’ anxieties and insecurities right back at them. It’s also just really, really funny, at least for those who can find humor in humiliation.

No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life.

Green Room is a rare gift from the genre gods: a nasty, punk-as-f..k midnight movie made by a genuine artist, a filmmaker with a great eye and a true understanding of the people and places he’s splattering in viscera.

There are some who have complained that C.O.G. ends too abruptly, but it has the bracing, devastating punctuation of a fine short story.

For all the influences glowing dimly under its skin, You Were Never Really Here remains its own bewildering animal, unmistakably Ramsay’s.

There’s a spontaneity to Climax—a naturalistic immediacy born of its exceptional, energetic cast of unknowns, firing off entirely improvised jokes and insults and threats.

The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.

As this flinty, self-sufficient, and geographically unmoored woman, McDormand provides a blend of toughness and vulnerability that’s a perfect fit for the material.

The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves.

The bloodshed is fast and brutal — the flash of a knife, a splash of crimson in a backseat, an opening robbery gone horrifically awry. There’s even a little Tarantino in the staging, as when a blood-splattered wallflower unleashes her Kill Bill-style vengeance straight into the camera lens.

Drenched in the evening glow of its urban and suburban backdrops, Darker comes alive in the dark, when its characters are drowning their sorrows in song, the sauce, or conversation.

Singularly haunting.

Like Baby, Wright just wants to feel the music. He makes us feel it, too, one spectacular pleasure high after another.

Believe it or not, though, the real horror of this superb Aussie monster movie has almost nothing to do with the title fiend and everything to do with the unspoken, unspeakable impulses he represents. Remove the Babadook from The Babadook, in other words, and something plenty terrifying remains.

At just 82 minutes, Krisha wouldn’t have hurt for a little more meat on its bones; the last act blows through a shitstorm of confrontation almost too abruptly.

These stylistic tricks open windows into the hearts and minds of the characters. They also make a movie about people grappling privately with their emotions feel energetic, even thrilling, in its own melancholic way.

This is clearly the work of a master in the making, an artist on the cusp of greatness. Farhadi may be fixated on fibbers, but there’s almost no one working today who makes films so emotionally honest.

Rex is a revelation here, a star reborn. He shrewdly conceals the depths of Mikey’s bone-deep selfishness under a lot of guileless blather, a hapless fool routine. The movie only works if our dawning awareness of his rottenness collides with what a hoot he can be, in all his calculated boylike scampishness.

At its core, Wild Canaries is a reminder that relationships require a sense of adventure, and maybe a little mystery, to keep the magic alive. Indie comedies, as the film proves, benefit from the same.

Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), is a fresh addition to Noah Baumbach’s ever-expanding gallery of neurotic, narcissistic New Yorkers.

For all the fascinating insight the film provides into a musical subculture passing slowly into the archives of history, its melancholy is more universal: Anyone who’s ever devoted themselves fully to a passion, only to discover that the rest of the world barely gives a shit, will smile sadly with recognition.

Individual personalities emerge, none more magnetic than Khaled Omar Harrah, who gained international recognition in 2014 for the rescue of a 10-day-old baby.

In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.

Hopkins methodically strips away every quality we’ve come to expect from him—the refinement, the silver tongue, the imposing intensity he lent Lecter and Nixon and Titus—until there’s nothing left but frailty and distress. In doing so, he helps convey the full tragedy and horror of dementia: the way it can make someone almost unrecognizable to themselves and their loved ones.

Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts.

Identity is the film’s true subject: As much as he pokes fun at the foibles of a privileged white America, Simien is more interested in the ways his protagonists conform, or refuse to conform, to society’s idea of them.

Fennell complicates matters throughout, toying with our identification by pushing Cassie’s tactics into some uncomfortably nasty places, even as she slowly reveals her motives.

Hamaguchi exhibits a careful, un-showy command of the frame, and a talent for creating small, sometimes comic surprises through editing.

If the endgame is tough to bear, the getting there is rarely less than involving, thanks to the sensitivity of Rees’ staging. She’s made an economical epic with an intimate modern soul.

In truth, The Little Stranger is barely a horror movie at all. It’s more of an impeccably crafted chamber drama with a supernatural bent, like Edith Wharton by way of Shirley Jackson.

It turns out to be something kind of special in its own right: a modern rom-com that’s funny and inventive and sweet and totally mainstream and a little deranged all at once.

Stripping away almost all traces of movie-star glamour to reveal the naked, nervy talent underneath, Pattinson finally bursts out of the chrysalis of his pin-up boy celebrity. The metamorphosis from YA heartthrob into electrifying character actor is complete.

Looking for poetry in a live-action family film is usually about as futile as hunting for dragons in your backyard; the vast majority of them wager on the indiscriminate tastes of kids and their dutiful chaperons. But Pete’s Dragon has poetry in spades.

Given the material, it’s fitting that Mr. Turner is the director’s most visually ravishing movie. With cinematographer Dick Pope behind the lens, every shot is gorgeous enough to hang in a museum.

Beanpole is grim, but it’s too superbly crafted, and too alive with human spirit, to be a truly grueling experience.

Landing closer to Coens country, Three Billboards is more of a slow-roasting tragicomedy about grief and culpability, with higher stakes, a lower gag count, and emphasis on the tragic. But McDonagh still lives for detours and digressions, for the opportunity to stall the plot and humorously slow play a conversation.

It’s refreshing to discover that True History has an actual perspective on the events of Ned’s formative years.

BlacKkKlansman, for all its indulgent… Spikiness, is held together by the force of Lee’s messaging. He’s the polemicist as insult comic, wedging truths between each karate chop to the (skin)head of racist America.

To watch Days in the context of this long-running creative partnership is to bring memories of the men, all more similar than not, that Lee has played before for Tsai; his weariness here carries the weight of a lifetime of relevant roles, almost a franchise arc of alienation and regret.

Anderson’s latest invention, The Grand Budapest Hotel, may be his most meticulously realized, beginning with the towering, fictional building for which it’s named.

Heavy with horror though it may be, Foxtrot turns out to be too conceptually and stylistically audacious to be called a slog; it keeps throwing curveballs, some crueler than others.

Horror movies often play with the contrast between deathly silence and deafening cacophony, one puncturing the other to shred nerves and send asses out of seats. A Quiet Place takes that strategy to a new extreme, engulfing characters and viewers alike in an eerie sustained hush, and then generating anxiety about how and when it will suddenly be shattered. It turns sound itself, cinema’s first invader, into a threat.

Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god.

The Lighthouse is more satisfying when viewed through the prism of its pitch-black humor; it’s fine as a thriller, borderline brilliant as a comedy of cabin fever and competitive machismo.

Like "All The President’s Men," it’s a muckraker movie that celebrates the power of the press by actually showing journalists doing their job, pen and notebook in hand.

In its funky, aimless, winningly juvenile way, Everybody Wants Some is about as inclusively celebratory as any college comedy in memory: Per its title, it really does want everybody to get some.

Pervert Park never demands forgiveness, only an attempt to understand and to maybe see where these dark impulses come from.

This as one of the director’s most pitiless visions—a drama as pitch black as the night that envelops its characters.

Come for the breathtaking architectural scenery, stay for the likable pair staring up at it.

With its sprawling cast of characters, digressive plot, and hit soundtrack (in this case, a boisterous Motown primer), Cooley High has been compared to another last-days-of-youth movie that came out just two years earlier, American Graffiti. Both films inevitably lace their fun with melancholy, chasing a long, wild coming-of-age bacchanal with the impending hangover of adult life. Difference is, Cooley High’s eulogy for childhood turns out to be much more sadly literal.

For Michael Keaton, Birdman is some kind of gift from the movie gods, a license to have his cake and messily devour it too.

Every new movie by Jafar Panahi is a miniature coup, an act of fearless political defiance.

There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.

Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends.

It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence.

In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.

Perkins commits even harder to his singularly strange approach to the genre, turning a simple ghost story into an exercise in extremely prolonged unease. It could give Norman Bates the willies.

The storytelling ends up saying nearly as much as the stories themselves: Not simply capturing and filing memories, the film becomes a portrait of how these survivors have processed their trauma, how they’ve framed the horror of their experiences, and how they’ve coped with survivors’ guilt.

This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.

For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.

In nearly every respect, V/H/S/2 improves on its predecessor. Free of poky mumble-horror filler, it offers four fruitful variations on the original’s best chapter.

The result is a horror movie that comes dangerously close to showing sympathy for the real devils, the kind that burned witches instead of instructing them. Good thing it’s scary.

In the end, Possessor privileges the visceral over the cerebral. Which is not to deny that it lands somewhere rather provocative as a character study.

The Old Man & The Gun is so reliant on the echoes of past films, on the career it’s constantly evoking and riffing on, that it sometimes feels as ephemeral as dust floating in a projector beam. But there’s something truthful and even moving in the way Lowery conflates the joy of one impossible occupation with that of another.

A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.

Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.

Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.

There was more than the usual dating-scene obstacles threatening their future together. Collaborating on the screenplay for The Big Sick, Nanjiani and Gordon have made a perceptive, winning romantic comedy from those obstacles, including the unforeseen emergency that provides the film its title.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.

This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.

Like a lot of really strong short story collections, Certain Women is greater than the sum of its parts, even if one of those parts is also significantly greater than the others.

What May is really after, in other words, is a glimpse at a post-Columbine America, where punishments don’t always fit crimes, cures are often worse than diseases, and the courts are frequently being used as a catchall solution to very normal discipline problems.

The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."

While Beginners unfolded almost entirely from the point of view of its directorial stand-in, 20th Century Women creates a more generous equilibrium of perspective.

What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.

The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects — of which there are basically none — but on heavy doses of paranoia.

Half a century after "Wait Until Dark" pitted a blind Audrey Hepburn against the three crooks trying to get into her apartment, along comes Don’t Breathe to successfully invert its scenario.

Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.

Dumb fun is rarely this smartly delivered.

The first feature from writer-director Richard Tanne is sweetly speculative historical fiction — a date movie with some very recognizable lovebirds.

Setting several scenes to the famously poignant plinks of pianist Frédéric Chopin, Love Is Strange never achieves the sheer emotional resonance of "Make Way For Tomorrow"; it’s gently affecting, not deeply heartbreaking — in part because Sachs builds to a less devastating punctuation than McCarey did.

It’s a surprisingly funny, even loopy film at times, with bursts of slapstick and screwball humor, plus a sporadic absurdism.

This is, perhaps, a movie easy to oversell. It earns a lot of goodwill simply by never devolving into a dumber version of itself, into what you might expect from a film featuring Dan Stevens as a sexy robot. But I’m Your Man’s charms are real, and steeped in a lightly inquisitive, even philosophical engagement with the meatier matters of smart science fiction and smart relationship drama.

In terms of mood, cosmetics, and rhythm, it’s a worthy addition to the great filmmaker’s canon.

The Humans holds a smudged mirror up to any unsuspecting viewers who might enter its cramped Chinatown abode in search of distraction from the unresolved resentments of their own clan. It looms large in the small canon of Thanksgiving cinema, a quintessential stomachache of a movie.

For all of Trier’s stylistic flair, the best scenes in The Worst Person In The World are unadorned conversations, little pockets of chemistry or conflict. The film peaks with a self-contained romantic episode, beautifully written and performed

Over an efficient 80 minutes, no shot feels wasted, and no one says much that couldn’t be better communicated through their placement in the artfully arranged frame.

Fireworks Wednesday carefully, organically introduces its characters, then lets the audience try to discern what they’re withholding.

Just don’t mistake the lightness of step for a softness of philosophy. There’s a political dimension to all of Reichardt’s films, which almost invariably follow characters muscled to the margins of society.

Some Kind Of Heaven contrasts the dissatisfaction of its subjects with the sunniness of their surroundings, the better to stress the wide gap separating how they feel and how they’re expected to feel in a community one talking head refers to, un-ironically, as “nirvana.”

John And The Hole comes on like a spooky portrait of budding teenage sociopathy, but it resists diagnostic shortcuts.

All this nesting-doll storytelling might feel hollow if Blind didn’t possess such a solid emotional foundation.

Licorice Pizza is a woozy time-warp shuffle of a comedy: a California daydream of infatuation, aspiration, and protracted adolescence that seems to propel its celebrated writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, forward and backward at once.

It’s more of a gently comic character sketch in boxing trunks.

By the rousing final act, Johnson has brought an apocalyptic grandeur to the lightsaber duels and airborne combat. His often-stirring addition to the saga finally lands on an affecting point about the importance of preserving essential cultural tradition without clinging too strictly to the dogma—and the texts—of the old way.

Bradley, who’s worked mainly in narrative cinema, lends a sharp eye for composition and a poet’s sensibility. This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end.

It’s a remarkable, chilling performance: from Harrison, certainly, but also from his character, playing code-switching mind games with his teacher.

What makes this coming-of-age film special is that it’s at once harsh and humanist: a perceptive, realistic comedy about tweenage life that’s also rich in compassion, that scarcest of junior-high commodities.

The M:I films remain blessedly, unfashionably self-contained: They’re stand-alone popcorn entertainments that can be watched in any order, with only the thinnest of connecting continuity between them.

The filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format.

An eye-opening, often-infuriating new documentary.

The Death Of Stalin isn’t quite as pointed or rat-a-tat funny as In The Loop (or Veep at its best), but its application of [Iannucci's] signature barbed comic voice to such grim history (executions are a constant source of gallows humor) packs its own punch.

Shot on gorgeous black-and-white 35 mm that only seems to enhance the melancholic drabness of the events it depicts, Tu Dors Nicole is an especially wispy, French-Canadian addition to an irresistible genre.

Beautifully shot by Amélie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis is instantly recognizable as the work of its sibling auteurs. But it’s also something of a departure — looser and more rambling than the average Coen concoction, with a lovingly recreated period setting.

George Cukor employs an unusually large number of long takes, often allowing the inspired spats between his leads to play out in unbroken real time. But the much more likely explanation for the film’s enduring popularity has to be the way it took the gender politics underlying many of the duo’s collaborations and made them the full-fledged focus.

For once in a Dolan film, an actor upstages the camera moves. That’s a promising precedent, as well as a hint that artistic adulthood won’t spoil this hotdogging prodigy.

Black Bear is the movie that proves, beyond any lingering doubt, that Aubrey Plaza has much more to offer than the best eye-roll in the business. Maybe that was clear already.

You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.

Turns out that, every once in a while, wedding something old to something borrowed can make something new.

Moving, perhaps inevitably, toward a final fork in the woods, Leave No Trace condenses big questions into something simple and quietly powerful: two people bonded by blood and shared history, discovering how their needs align and diverge.

Wildly entertaining.

Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.

Hittman isn’t really a polemicist. She expresses her empathy and political conscience through a refined version of what’s become her signature style, zeroing in on details of place and behavior, both magnified by the reliably involving scenario of two kids from the sticks navigating the hustle, bustle, and bright lights of the city. And moments of startling, unaffected tenderness peak through the grimness of the circumstances.

The power of this material—and of Dern’s devastating performance—stays with you.

McQueen has zoomed in on a very specific milieu, but he’s also tapped into the universal and suddenly inaccessible joy of an endless night of music and dance, a house party for the ages. You don’t have to know your reggae or have been born 40 years ago to long for the ache of communal fun on which Lovers Rock waxes nostalgic.

If nothing else, Gravity makes the case for throwing immense resources at true visionaries; the blockbuster craftsman as adventurer, Cuarón expertly blends the epic with the intimate. For every stunning 3-D setpiece involving a dangerous hailstorm of metallic debris, there’s a moment of small tenderness.

Early and often, Incredibles 2 makes the compelling case that animation is the ideal medium for stories based on, or at least inspired by, comic book fantasias, where reality tends to bend and twist as elastically as Elastigirl.

Us proves, if nothing else, that Peele has become a blockbuster visionary, fully in control of his craft. It’s a privilege to step back into the funhouse of his imagination.

Because of its autobiographical slant, Something In The Air has been compared to Assayas’ 1994 breakthrough, "Cold Water," which gazed upon roughly the same period of the director’s life.

The strength of Jackman’s performance is that he hoodwinks us with his decency.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Newtown is neither adventurous nor unconventional. It doesn’t need to be; no documentary this emotionally direct, this emotionally draining, requires bells and whistles.

The most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, with its cock-shot montages and frankly descriptive narration, is how flat-out funny it often is.

The film has its own celebratory, eccentric identity.

This Godzilla doesn’t tap into deeper cultural anxieties the way its 60-year-old ancestor did. Nor does it engender much dramatic investment in its hero... Yet as pure popcorn entertainment, Godzilla delivers plenty of goosebumps.

As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo setpieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective.

By going back to nature — and to his indie roots — the director of "George Washington" has reconnected with his poetic side. The Malick comparisons seem appropriate again.

Red, White And Blue is stark and straightforward, further proof that McQueen has distinguished each entry in his bold foray into small-screen storytelling.

The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll.

Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.

Not a drop of blood is spilled in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Even so, Italian-horror buffs may feel a flush of nostalgia watching this bewitching genre whatsit, which manages to evoke the crimson-splashed shockers of the 1970s without so much as a single frame of actual carnage.

Aster, it can’t be denied, possesses an almost supernatural command of dread. He knows how to hold a shot just long enough to create pinpricks of discomfort, to disorient with an abrupt cutaway, to drop stomachs with the godlike perch and glare of his camera.

It’s a useful reminder not just that this American hero was a widely vilified figure during his lifetime but also that he accomplished everything he did despite nonstop resistance from intelligence agencies, the media, and the public alike.

There are those who will surely argue that this is not a tonally coherent film. But I was nonetheless rather elated by the way Filho weaves in so many outside touchstones while still maintaining his core interests in social dynamics and anti-capitalist sentiment.

The actors navigate their uncertain motivations with finesse — especially Asano, who captures not just the shell-shocked daze of someone trying to readjust to life on the outside but also a carefully, unnervingly suppressed wellspring of resentment.

That Civil War doesn’t collapse under the weight of its various moving parts, that it manages to be the most serious entry yet in this franchise of franchises without sacrificing much in the way of valuable comic relief, is a testament to the creative mojo of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

This is something different: an acknowledgement that, for many young women in Iran, prison may offer an escape from everyday horrors, to say nothing of the paradoxical freedom it affords them.

Dread this thick stays with you, long after the shock of projectile vomit and masturbation by crucifix has worn off.

Saulnier savages the legal loopholes that allow police to exploit their community, all while offering the year’s most breathlessly suspenseful standoffs. It’s what a modern crowd-pleaser should be: smart, gripping, and about something.

Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.

For all its mode-bending gamesmanship, American Animals is ultimately a fairly straightforward heist movie, albeit a stylish and engaging one.

There’s something a little tidy about the resolution, closing a movie of messy emotional confusion on a note of affirmation and maybe even a kind of surrender. But On The Rocks shines brighter in the context of a career, especially in indirect dialogue with Lost In Translation.

More often that not, however, Captain Phillips is riveting. Though he remains unfortunately convinced that violently shaking his camera is the best way to achieve visual urgency, Greengrass nevertheless excels at pressure-cooker scenarios.

In a sense, what we’re watching is a classic con-artist movie, built around someone who plies his shady trade not for money but esteem—the feeling that he matters, that his name carries weight.

A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.

Sharp as the dialogue is, it’s hard to imagine any of this working as well without the late, great Gandolfini.

It’s something of a hangout Western, too, and its pleasures mostly come down to the company we get to keep with the characters and the actors easing into their eccentricities.

This handmade approach is a big part of the film’s DIY charm. It’s also a perfect match for the story, which seems to have been pulled, too, from the messy locker of teen-boy imagination.

Life is a B movie on an A budget, an old-fashioned creature feature that delivers its cheap thrills expensively.

At times, we might be watching a deadpan workplace comedy; that it’s possible to laugh at this subject matter at all is a testament to its matter-of-fact presentation and maybe also to the extent that this virus has completely seeped into every corner of life.

True to its name, Monsters University brims with cleverly designed creatures, a student body worthy of the recently deceased Ray Harryhausen. What the movie lacks is its precursor’s human ace-in-the-hole—that pint-sized, inadvertent agent of chaos, Boo.

Quintessentially, and maybe to a fault, this is a Farhadi movie: another of the writer-director’s gripping studies of a family torn asunder by a compounding mess of deception and revelation.

As always, Wiseman’s approach guarantees memorable encounters.

Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.

I, Tonya may be more of a pop-biographical exercise than a deep interrogation, but there’s a resonance to the synergy between its star and its subject: one famous female artist reclaiming her professional narrative by playing another who never quite could.

This new-new Baumbach isn’t necessarily better than the old-new Baumbach; "Young" felt meatier, with a stronger sense of who its neurotic New Yorkers were. But that film didn’t have Gerwig, bringing warmth, wit, and loopy star power to a character — a human bulldozer of incorrigible extroversion — as fictional as the Big Apple you see only on the big screen.

For as much as Van Groeningen may have pulled from both of his mirrored source materials, for as deep as Chalamet digs into his character’s skirmish with own urges, Beautiful Boy holds us outside of his struggle.

For two hours or so, he becomes a magnetic actor again, the same vibrant presence who wowed audiences with his work in "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation." He is, in these rare instances, just plain good.

As gross and spooky and, yes, occasionally frightening as these terror tactics get, they never quite cross over into the deep end of truly grownup horror. That’s intentional, and a key to the film’s fun: It gets away with everything it can on a PG-13 leash, smuggling some real scares to the under-18 crowd.

Zemeckis has fashioned an unfashionable throwback, and if Allied doesn’t land the gut-punch it winds up to deliver, there’s nevertheless plenty to admire in a blockbuster craftsman and two beautiful stars paying tribute to the spirit of an older Hollywood.

Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.

For all the minor creepiness Undine pulls from its inspiration (including some striking underwater shots), it also inherits a certain simplicity of plotting and one-note characterization. Yet I still wouldn’t hesitate for a second to recommend the film, because it’s been made with the superb economy of pacing, shot selection, and editing that’s become a Petzold specialty, nay a trademark.

An ambitious, expertly crafted, and admittedly kind of ludicrous horror movie.

Seeing the director’s usual style applied to a whole different culture provides fascination enough. Not surprising, maybe, but welcome.

Pain And Glory has are some beautiful passages ... What’s missing from the movie is any real sense of danger or subversion—qualities that used to basically define this once-radical filmmaker’s work.

Panahi has frequently blurred the line between cinema and reality; here, he builds the search for that line into the work itself, even flirting, playfully, with a self-critique.

High Flying Bird turns out to be a kind of shaggy heist movie, with a grand design (and payout) that’s only fully clear in retrospect.

There are elements of coming-of-age drama, tortured romance, and supernatural horror, though part of the film’s strange power is that it never seems to commit to any of those genres, hovering in some liminal state instead, teasing the audience with the various possibilities of where it might go.

Like too many franchise installments, Catching Fire builds to more of an ellipsis than a period, teasing the next chapter instead of providing closure. But isn’t that true of "The Empire Strikes Back" as well? At least casual fans will only have to wait a year, not three, to see what happens next in this galaxy not so far away.

The Killing Of A Sacred Deer doesn’t have as sharp an allegorical edge as his best work — it’s no Dogtooth in that respect — but it does find the director honing his command of unnerving atmosphere to a razor point, enhanced by a camera that glides menacingly down hospital corridors and gazes from above with the severity of a merciless god.

Closed Circuit may be little more than a high-minded, shrewdly topical gloss on a shopworn genre, but its cynicism is bracing.

No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor’s grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature.

Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers.

Nate Parker’s film on Nat Turner, imperfect though it is, deserves to be seen.

Written by Simon Barrett, another purveyor of micro-budget carnage, You’re Next boasts a sometimes-uneasy blend of comedy and horror.

If Ponsoldt can step beyond the 12 steps, he might make something truly spectacular.

It’s overflowing, like a bright portal into a new reality, with gorgeous details. So what if they don’t quite add up to a deeper whole?

This is no sympathetic drama of absolution, no portrait of forgiveness sought by sinners. Larraín is after something trickier and harder to pin down; he asks us to share real estate with these men, while offering few windows into their heads or hearts, or even a clarification of their crimes.

It’s a gripping portrait of boots-on-the-ground activism, at least so long as it keeps the focus squarely trained on the actual activism.

Deerskin is more of a twisted lark than anything else, but it hits on something meaningful—a first for a director who’s shown almost no prior interest in reality, even within a film called Reality.

It’s a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.

One reason that The Tribe “works” is that it presents a story so simple and familiar, so cliché even, that one doesn’t need to understand what the actors are saying to follow along.

There’s still something exciting about seeing familiar tropes placed in an unfamiliar context — in this case, a nation ravaged by violent conflict and stifled by fundamentalist law.

Yet for all its expensive grandeur, almost too epic even for the vast canvases of IMAX, Pacific Rim is unmistakably a Del Toro creation.

Madeline’s Madeline, the third feature from writer-director Josephine Decker, is a self-devouring thing: a movie about artistic process that doubles as a document of—and even a commentary on—its own artistic process.

The film is as campy and nearly as regressive as the E.L. James adaptations it consistently out-kinks, except that it’s been made with a slumming Hitchcockian verve that enhances, rather than apologizes for, the proud disreputability of the material.

It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.

Malick’s tricks may be aging, but every world still looks new through his eyes.

Style doesn’t triumph over substance in The Neon Demon. It devours it.

In a way, this B-movie on an A budget gets closer to the values of George Romero, the godfather of zombie cinema, than Snyder’s actual, hyper-adrenalized remake of Romero’s masterpiece.

Though gently outraged in its portrait of class divisions, Happy As Lazzaro mostly takes its tonal cues from the eponymous character’s comically gentle, trusting nature.

The easy elevator pitch on Swiss Army Man is that it’s "Cast Away" meets "Weekend At Bernie’s." Weird as that movie may sound, it’s not nearly as weird as the one actually cooked up by “Daniels,” a.k.a. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the branded directing duo making its feature-length debut.

The Eyes Of My Mother is a grotesque, depraved genre movie with the skin of an art film pulled tightly over its bones. If Ingmar Bergman had helmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.

It’s minor pleasures from a major talent: B-movie fun in the key of Kurosawa.

Much of the film’s infectiously youthful spirit comes courtesy of its star. At 21, Tom Holland is only a hair younger than Toby Maguire was when he first donned the tights.

Custody doesn’t do much more than plunge the audience into this hellish situation, but it shrewdly understands the bad dad’s pathetic pathology, and the film may resonate for anyone who’s grown up under the unhealthy supervision of a mean bastard. Take that as a sobering recommendation.

Intentionally exasperating.

At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.

Perhaps more than ever before, the animators do the heavy lifting: Every detail, from the gentle bob of a beast's breathing to the fluid shifts of Spot's facial expressions, has been lovingly rendered.