Andrew O'Hehir

Kristen Stewart doesn’t screw it up. She’s in on the joke, but she never plays Valentine as a joke. She’s alive and alert and present in every second of screen time, alongside one of the greatest living European actresses, working not for herself but for the benefit of a strange, imperfect and sometimes brilliant film. There’s nothing more you can ask.

As with the Antonioni film that Farhadi has so ingeniously turned to his purposes, you shouldn’t go see About Elly hoping for a Hitchcock-style thriller that will answer all your narrative questions. But if “L’Avventura” is a deliberately frustrating portrait of European postwar anomie and a study in abstract, black-and-white composition, About Elly is more dynamic and more realistic.

A memorable, haunting and highly original American movie.

Lurid but compelling.

Cohen had neither the chops nor the clout to prevent Get Hard from ending up, no doubt through the normal process of producer rewrites, focus groups, worried agents and weevil infestations, as a confused and contradictory mess. More to the point, it’s almost never funny, and full of elementary screenwriting blunders.

Another way of reading a movie like this is that it channels our ancient hatred of nature while recognizing that it’s essentially nostalgic, and that the occasional hungry ursine cannot compete with the animal we really have reason to fear.

It’s clearly a directorial accomplishment to assemble this level of acting talent in one movie and come away with something so – well, “bad” is not sufficient to capture the idiot glory of this motion picture.

It Follows pretty much earns its buzz as the scariest and best-engineered American horror movie of recent years, and that’s all down to Mitchell’s sophisticated understanding of technique and the trust and freedom he accords his youthful cast.

If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.

It’s not just that Chappie is a mishmash of familiar ingredients whose story quickly slides off the rails into a swamp of action-movie clichés, or another misbegotten project from the Land of Intriguing Premises. It doesn’t have an intriguing premise in the first place. It’s cluttered, goofy and incoherent from beginning to end, and much too long.

Love it, hate it or tolerate it with reluctance, Buzzard has a ruthless clarity of vision, and breaks new ground in pushing character-based comedy right to the edge of profound discomfort.

It’s a riveting, man-on-the-run genre movie, almost a combination of “Black Hawk Down” and “After Hours,” rather than an allegory or a historical treatise.

A delicate and affecting drama with grace notes of mystery and redemption.

The 21st-century combo of screwball comedy and half-baked thriller in Wild Canaries isn’t exactly like anything you’ve seen before, and it offers an unpredictable ride that’s kind of fun, or at least sporadically simulates fun.

I wouldn’t say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from Fifty Shades of Grey, precisely. That’s asking too much. But she and Marcel have risen to the challenge of this bizarre cultural moment with an odd and memorable film.

It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.

It’s a thoroughly incoherent, generally inane and surprisingly entertaining tale of witches and monsters and what legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls “beast fu,” all set in a sub-Tolkien, sub-“Game of Thrones” pseudo-medieval universe.

An extraordinary accomplishment, a heartbreaking, visually spectacular and largely accessible work from a cinematic master who is more than ready for international attention.

Amira & Sam came along and swept me off my feet, like Fabio riding a stallion. It largely works thanks to Starr and Shihabi, a pair of likable and restrained actors who build slowly from tangible discomfort toward an unexpected passionate chemistry.

There’s so much that is brilliant and unexpected and often downright thrilling about Mommy, the fifth feature (a fact amazing in itself) from 25-year-old Quebec enfant terrible Xavier Dolan.

This is a sweet-tempered and small movie that’s not remotely trying to be hip.

As a rich and exuberant character-driven crime saga in an idiom you absolutely have not encountered before, and a dense, unsentimental portrayal of the collision between democracy, capitalism and gangsterism on the frayed margins of the post-colonial world, Gangs of Wasseypur is a signal achievement in 21st-century cinema.

Akhavan turns out to be a distinctive and oddly charismatic performer with exquisite comic timing.

Leviathan, the fourth feature from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, may be the one true masterpiece of global cinema released in 2014.

It’s all just a little more boring than it ought to be.

The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.

A rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It’s entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill. If made 40 years ago, it would have been a leading Oscar contender and a huge hit, whereas today it’s a bit “meh” in both categories

Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.

This is a muscular and accomplished work of kinetic cinema built around two tremendous acting performances, and it’s really about teaching and obsession and the complicated question of how to nurture excellence and where the nebulous boundary lies between mentorship and abuse.

Mr. Turner is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

Winter Sleep belongs alongside “Boyhood” and “Inherent Vice” on the short list of the most powerful films of 2014. Calling a film “good” or “important” is subjective, of course, but this isn’t: All three are reaching for the kind of cinematic transcendence that exceeds language, that weaves together various art forms into an ascending spiral of meaning that cannot finally be captured or defined.

If I had the power to turn back time and start the tortuous production process that led to the “Hobbit” trilogy over again, with a different director in charge and a completely different approach, I would do it. But that’s precisely the problem with the One Ring, right? Once you put it on you are changed, and those changes cannot be undone.

Inherent Vice is like that; you’ll have to enjoy it for the pileup of exquisite images and hilarious episodes, and let go of the need to hold the whole thing in your head, or you won’t enjoy it at all.

Dore does not gloss over the ideological excesses or internal quarrels of feminism, but more than anything else she captures the excitement of that era, the growing sense of solidarity as more and more women discovered that their dissatisfaction was not an individual matter.

Aided by witty and understated work from Baldwin and Stewart and the capable direction of Glatzer and Westmoreland, Moore does her utmost to pull Still Alice toward the realm of meaningful social drama. Let’s put it this way: It’s a way better movie than it ought to be, but not good enough to escape its pulpy, mendacious roots.

Wild is a Hollywood holiday movie "based on a true story," meaning that its view of reality is conditioned by the three-act structure and the pop-Christian teleology of sin and repentance.

This could have been a story of immense heroism, tragic sacrifice and agonizing historical irony, and it hints in that direction, in its stiff-upper-lip fashion, before retreating into a vain search for a happy ending and an effort to turn itself into “The King’s Speech.”

A strange and gorgeous and haunting film that brings the indie aesthetic of the mid-1980s into a context that feels both timeless and highly contemporary.

A penultimate chapter without a real ending, but it’s also a thrilling ride full of potent emotions, new characters and major twists of fate, built around another commanding star performance.

Any thriller from first-time directors that starts out with a couple of teenagers in a Texas diner talking about legendary pulp novelist Jim Thompson has a super-steep hill to climb. Here’s what I can say for Bad Turn Worse... It may not make it all the way up that steep slope, but the effort is pretty doggone entertaining.

Jones, as always, knows what he’s doing. In only his second feature as a director, the laconic 68-year-old star has made a wrenching, relentless and anti-heroic western that stands among the year’s most powerful American films. Not everyone will like The Homesman, but if you see it you won’t soon forget it.

Foxcatcher is another strange and compelling anthropological drama from Miller, a director with evident expertise at enabling Oscar-worthy star performances.

Director James Marsh (already an Oscar winner for the documentary "Man on Wire") and screenwriter Anthony McCarten (adapting Jane Hawking's memoir) opt for the safe, pretty, and reassuring English period-piece choices the whole way through, as if deliberately underselling the fact that this is a story about two remarkable people facing extraordinary circumstances.

So this is the greatest Shyamalan movie ever made by someone else, or maybe it’s Christopher Nolan’s best impression of what a Shyamalan movie ought to be like. No doubt that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I don’t entirely mean it that way.

Nightcrawler executes its ideas with tremendous craft and cool, and the courageous and counterintuitive pairing of its leads — Russo is 60, and Gyllenhaal 33 – produces two electrical, interlocking performances and undeniable erotic chemistry.

I enjoyed this movie more thoroughly, and more liberated from frustration and ambivalence, than anything Godard has made in at least 20 years. It provided me with an interpretive frame that may even lead me back to another crack at “Notre Musique” (2004) and “For Ever Mozart” (1996) and most of all the extraordinary 1988-1998 video documentary series “Histoire(s) du cinéma.”

As Margaret Brown’s quietly devastating documentary The Great Invisible makes clear, the oil companies and the resource-guzzling, planet-poisoning economy they drive are too big to fail, and our entire consumerist culture of ever-cheaper goods and 24/7 convenience is bigger still.

Force Majeure is a prickly moral comedy for grown-ups, full of sharply observed moments, spectacular scenery and masterfully manipulated atmosphere. This is very much a work of 21st-century global culture, but also one that draws on the great cinematic tradition of northern Europe, with hints of Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer and Michael Haneke.

Once you adjust to Listen Up Philip, it’s also invigorating, disturbing and frequently hilarious, but that adjustment’s not entirely painless.

Citizenfour is both an urgent tale torn from recent headlines and a compelling work of cinema, with all the paranoid density and abrupt changes of scenery of a John le Carré novel.

Like Ayer’s cop flicks, Fury is a gripping ride all the way through, if somewhat restricted in its emotional and visual range.

The Overnighters is a documentary about real people in a real place. This is both amazing and frustrating.

Murray, as always, supplies any number of small, memorable moments — he ultimately relies on the same defanged sentimentality.

The Judge is watchable but thoroughly specious. It’s dull and reassuring, an infantile fantasy of homecoming and forgiveness set in a mythical version of America no one in the target audience has ever seen.

With Men, Women & Children and the equally laborious “Labor Day,” Reitman has gotten trapped amid the crumbling edifice of Hollywood. It’s turning him old before his time.

Amalric and cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne structure much of The Blue Room around Julien’s bewildered and increasingly disheveled face, as he tries (and fails) to understand the people around him.

It’s a work of chilly wit and bleak metaphor, an artifice that invites the kind of analytical response where we pull on our chins and discuss how other people, more naive than we, will receive it.

The damn thing is, Ridley very nearly makes this insuperable obstacle work to his benefit. He delivers a flawed, ambitious and deeply peculiar portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic musical talents, in the year before he ascended to rock-god status, that resembles no other pop-music biopic you’ve ever seen.

The Equalizer is gripping, mysterious and even sometimes moving, but it’s never pleasant, still less fun. If you decide to go, don’t claim you weren’t warned. If you skip it, you’re missing one of the year’s signal works of superior Hollywood craftsmanship.

A subtle, underplayed psychological drama with terrific work by all three actors.

For the most part, 20,000 Days on Earth – the approximate amount of time Cave has been alive on this planet – is an imagistic and impressionistic work, a Nick Cave-esque tone poem driven by moments of visual and thematic juxtaposition you either have to reject or accept.

Frequently irritating and occasionally insulting.

I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and if you've been lamenting the dearth of violent genre movies that don't assume the audience to be morons, you will too.

I found this dark odyssey through an amoral dream Brooklyn curiously invigorating; it’s a masterful construction that held me rapt from first shot to last, that builds intense electrical energy and then releases it.

At the very least, this implausible trifecta displays an abundantly talented new filmmaker who has risked everything, including the prospect that we may get sick of him immediately. If you care about the remaining possibilities of American movies, then this one – well, one of the three, anyway! – is a must-see.

Can I tell you exactly what happens in Memphis, or what it’s “about”? Absolutely not. But it worked its magic on me, and its meaning is something I take on faith.

With the genial pairing of Jennifer Aniston as a rich guy’s trophy wife and John Hawkes as a low-rent criminal at the center of a colorful cast and a pitch-perfect rendering of caste-divided Detroit, Life of Crime is a bittersweet end-of-summer surprise.

You need to give Love Is Strange your eyes and ears and attention, let it work its effects on you gradually, like the lovely Chopin piano music that forms the spine of its soundtrack.

There’s nothing disgraceful about The One I Love, and if you’re just in the mood for a VOD time-waster, you could do worse. But despite the agreeable lead performances, it doesn’t quite repay your 90 lost minutes of life.

An experience that wrenches you free of the everyday world and urges you to contemplate all sorts of big-picture questions.

I am not the first to make this joke, but The Trip to Italy may live up to the “Godfather: Part II” analogy, at least insofar as it’s better and tighter than its predecessor.

The initial setup for the story is engaging enough, but Noyce and cinematographer Ross Emery have shot the whole thing in generic digital fake black-and-white, so it looks like a late-‘90s TV commercial for a soon-to-be-recalled compact car.

This is not one of those Eisenhower-Little Rock moments where you get to feel warm and fuzzy about the power of the state being on the right side of history.

This extremely stupid movie, with its recycled Batman/Spider-Man-style plot involving a dead father, an evil scientist-tycoon (played by the reliably terrific William Fichtner) and a massive criminal underworld of masked thugs, also features the best action sequence of the summer, bar none. I’m not kidding!

What If could be the breakthrough film that underappreciated Canadian director Michael Dowse (“Goon” and “It’s All Gone Pete Tong”) has been waiting for, and at any rate it’s a sparkling screwball highball, perfect for a late-summer weekend.

Let’s be clear right up front that The Maid’s Room doesn’t quite work, intriguing premise and all, and that the fault lies with Walker’s labored script and wooden characterization.

McDonagh walks a hazardous tightrope from scene to scene, from amiable comedy to black-hearted farce to heartbreaking tragedy, often trying to strike all those notes within seconds. It doesn’t all work equally well, but the cumulative effect is powerful.

While Brown’s complicated trajectory as a cultural and political figure gets short shrift in Get on Up, his music does not – the sequence depicting his legendary “Fever in the Funkhouse” show in Paris in 1971 is an absolute knockout, worth the price of admission all by itself.

It’s a high-spirited, swashbuckling lark driven by cartoonish special effects and an ingenious double-layered nostalgia that allows it to become a virtual mixtape of ‘70s hits that predate its intended audience: “Hooked on a Feeling,” “The Piña Colada Song,” “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” etc.

In its own quiet way, it’s a world of marvels.

A subtle, witty, wise and deeply compassionate American movie.

Soberly executed and highly principled documentary filmmaking, tightly focused on the Winfield family’s efforts to navigate the byzantine Army bureaucracy and the ass-covering military justice system. But it’s also a kind of Rorschach test of any viewer’s attitudes about war, the military and the United States’ amorphous 13-year mission in Afghanistan.

Winterbottom's adaptation of the novel is spellbinding cinema, with all the atmosphere, technical excellence and expert pacing the British director is known for.

Maybe that pictorial pleasantness will distract summer moviegoers from the fact that shot-to-shot transitions are often awkward, dialogue scenes are forced and poorly staged and that even by rom-com standards the obstacles created to keep Sophie and Stanley apart until a respectable running time has elapsed are idiotic.

There are a number of terrific production numbers in Lucy, basically violent action scenes that border on slapstick, and as long as we agree in advance that the “science” in this movie goes beyond pseudo into total B.S., I believe you will leave satisfied.

This is Gondry at his most liberated and inventive. You simply can’t grab hold of Mood Indigo in its early scenes, and you’re better off surrendering to its crackpot energy and enjoying the ride.

If you liked “Garden State” — or if you hated it, for that matter — you pretty much know what you’re in for with Wish I Was Here.

An awkward and distinctly unsexy farcical misfire.

Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

Politically provocative and visually spectacular Snowpiercer - the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period.

This film is never less than pleasant to spend time with, and that’s not a minor consideration when it comes to summer moviegoing.

When it comes to any larger questions about what was lost or gained, and whether Frankie Valli’s odyssey was worth it, Eastwood throws up his hands. Who knows? He’s made a thoroughly tolerable and non-insulting summer movie for grown-ups; isn’t that enough?

After the fundamental problem of Coherence has become clear, or clear-ish – there’s another dinner party, at that other house, that looks an awful lot like this one – the movie becomes slightly too much like an unfolding mathematical puzzle, although an ingenious one that reaches a chilling conclusion.

Hellion offers a startling and memorable portrait of adolescent life in downscale East Texas suburbia, along with a white-hot breakthrough performance from teenage actor Josh Wiggins.

22 Jump Street is the good-natured, sloppily rendered pile of balderdash for that moment, a movie that’s immune to all criticism and not worth bothering to dislike.

Often scabrously funny in a post-Lena Dunham, post-Woody Allen New York comedy vein, and finds a star performance in the thoroughly unlikely personage of Jenny Slate.

If you can tolerate watching it once, it will burrow into your brain and never get out again; your only recourse will be dragging your friends into the nightmare and seeing it again.

Citizen Koch is kind of a mess. But it’s a mess well worth discovering for yourself.