Anthony Lane

For the first, and maybe the only, time this year, you are in the hands of a master.

The film could have sunk beneath this symbolic burden, yet it is lightened by the speed and precision of Bresson’s art; he could derive more from one pair of hands than most directors can from two hours of blood and guts.

So smartly has del Toro thought his fable through, and so graceful is his grasp of visual rhyme, that to pick holes in it seems mean; yet Pan's Labyrinth is perhaps more dazzling than involving--I was too busy reading its runes and clues, as it were, to be swept away. It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.

Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow.

Bong, in short, is a merchant of stealth. There is no more frenzy in the editing of Parasite than there are shudders in the motion of the camera, and, as with Hitchcock, such feline prowling toys with us and claws us into complicity with deeds that we might otherwise fear or scorn.

Roma is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more.

Summer of Soul is one of those rare films from which you emerge saying, “My favorite part was that bit. No, that bit. Wait, how about that bit?”

Even if you love the film, as I do, all the lurching, stop-and-go exchanges of these unquiet souls may leave you with a craving for “The Philadelphia Story,” or something equally streamlined.

I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.

For an instant, I heard the rumble of the coming Revolution, and wondered how Sciamma would conclude her engrossing movie. In violent devastation, perhaps? Well, yes, but the violence is that of a storm-tossed heart, and the final shot is of a woman — I won’t reveal who — shaken by ungovernable sobs, with smiles breaking through like shafts of sunlight. Reckon you can weather all that without falling apart? Good luck.

Somehow, Wells retains control of her unstable material, and the result, though intimate, guards its secrets well.

What makes Amour so strong and clear is that it allows Haneke to anatomize his own severity.

The architecture of Pulp Fiction may look skewed and strained, but the decoration is a lot of fun. [10 Oct 1994, p.95]

The writer and director, Asghar Farhadi, has thus created the perfect antithesis of a crunching disaster flick, such as "2012," which was all boom and no ripple.

The film is a casting coup, with Blanchett’s inherent languor —plus that low drawl of hers, a breath away from boredom — played off against the perter intelligence of Mara, whose manner, as always, is caught between the alien and the avian.

Although Dunkirk is not as labyrinthine as Nolan’s “Memento” (2000) or “Inception” (2010), its strike rate upon our senses is rarely in doubt, and there is a beautiful justice in watching it end, as it has to, in flames. Land, sea, air, and, finally, fire: the elements are complete, honor is salvaged, and the men who were lost scrape home.

If I had to define The Irishman, I would say that it’s basically “Wild Strawberries” with handguns. Like Bergman’s film, from 1957, this one is structured around a road trip.

On the scale of inventiveness, Inside Out will be hard to top this year. As so often with Pixar, you feel that you are visiting a laboratory crossed with a rainbow.

Rich in settling and unsettling, Past Lives, for all its coolness, provokes us with difficult questions.

Peter Jackson has not really made a movie of The Lord of the Rings; he has sprung clear of it to forge something new. He has drawn a deep breath, and taken the plunge. [5 January 2004, p. 89]

Chalamet is quite something, but Hammer is a match for him, as he needs to be, if the characters’ passions are to be believed.

That blend of tones, with near-farce and emotional brutality blitzed together, is pure Baumbach, and he dishes it up for two hours straight.

Catch the film on the largest screen you can find, with a sound system to match, even if that means journeying all day. Have a drink beforehand. And, whatever you do, don’t wait for a DVD or a download.

The secrets unveiled in the movie’s second half are mostly wretched, and Kore-eda, in his steady and unhectoring way, is levelling grave accusations at Japanese social norms, yet what stays with you, unforgettably, is that bundle of mixed souls at the start.

If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord.

The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and f*ckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch.

One of its major virtues is what’s not there: no creepy flashbacks of prowling priests, or — as in the prelude to Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” — of children in the vortex of peril. Everything happens in the here and now, not least the recitation of the there and then.

Beyond question a return to the dark, simmering days of their best work, in “Blood Simple” and “Miller’s Crossing.”

Baker has taken an unregarded thread of American life, from the fraying edge of the land, and spun something rousing, raucous, and sad. Innocence is not utterly lost, but its bright-purple shine has gone. Who knows what Moonee knew?

Timbuktu is hard to grasp, as befits the sand-blown setting and the mythical status of the name. The more you try to define the movie, the faster it sifts away.

The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.

Spielberg wrote a poem. And all the best movies are poems. [2002 re-release]

Twenty-two years on, the picture has aged better than we have; it both feeds our hunger for sensation and scorns our impatient need to have it all right now—apocalypse is, whatever the title claims, always waiting round the river bend. Many people will continue to find it incoherent; but, frankly, given the choice between a work so laden with ambition that it nearly breaks its back and the stiff, crowing blockbusters of today, too timid to stretch their wings, I know which I would take.

Too many dramatizations of the Holocaust have left us flinching and queasy, whereas Glazer, in choosing so precisely what to show and what not to show, gives us no chance (and no excuse) to look away.

Leviathan is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and Leviathan, for all its venom, never writhes out of control.

This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play.

The Look of Silence is a simpler work than “The Act of Killing,” and a better one.

Personally, for that reason, I would have lopped off the final scene, which I simply didn’t believe in, and which, if anything, resolves too much. A movie as cryptic as “Burning” deserves to hang fire.

Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, Saint Omer... which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary.

The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice.

Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time.

The movie’s outward gaze is radical, no question, yet it refuses to scorn the comforts — of ingrained habits, and of home — that are honored by the conservative imagination. Such equipoise is almost as rare in cinema as it is, God knows, in politics, and right now, though we can’t foretell whether time will be cruel or kind to Gerwig’s Little Women, it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.

Such is the hazard of the cartoon: as a form, it thrives on elongation and excess, yet, within its vortices and crannies, who knows what moldy prejudice can breed? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

Graceful and all-embracing.

The surprising thing about this film, given its potential for devastation, is how funny it can be.

Not every rarity is a revelation, but Lady Killer strikes me as the real deal.

Seldom has our modern taste for the confessional mode been so smartly explored. [20 May 2013, p. 123]

The mocking of oppression may be steely, but the film’s an easy ride.

Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it. Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.

The movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war.

The good news about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, is that you are likely to emerge from it in good humor — bemused, or amused, or a mixture of the two.

The Worst Person in the World strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.

It is, indeed, Anderson’s happiest creation to date—blithe, easy-breathing, and expansive. The odd thing is that, in terms of space and time, it’s what Bowie would have called a god-awful small affair.

Wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up.

How could Frears and his cast rise above the sins of the miniseries? One answer is the force of that cast...The other thing that rescues and refines The Queen is one of the basic bonuses of moviegoing, more familiar of late from documentaries like "Touching the Void" and "Capturing the Friedmans": you come out arguing.

The most consuming and most exhausting of its kind since “The Dreamlife of Angels,” fifteen years ago. From the moment when Adèle first catches sight of Emma, on a busy crosswalk, the movie restores your faith in the power of the coup de foudre and yet redoubles your fear of its effect; love, like lightning, can both illuminate and scorch. The problems of two little people, it turns out, do indeed amount to a hill of beans. Some hill. Some beans.

That is the quiet triumph of American Splendor: behind the playfulness, it cleaves to an oddly old-fashioned belief that a life, even a life as mangy as Mr. Pekar’s, gains in depth and darkness when it is crosshatched with the imaginary. The nerd needs no revenge. [18 & 25 August 2003, p. 150]

His thoughts look more dramatic than other actors’ deeds, and his deeds are done with a deliberated grace. If it is true, as Day-Lewis has declared, that Phantom Thread will be his final movie, we will miss him when he retires from the game that he has crowned. He is the Federer of film.

Finding Nemo is, as it happens, the most dangerously sugared of the Pixar productions to date--how could any father-finding-son saga be otherwise?--but the threat is now one of oversophistication. [9 June 2003, p. 108]

Imagine my relief when Bob, Helen, and the kids, for all the nicety of their emotions, turned out to be--if I can risk a word that may be taboo in Pixar land--cartoons. Long may it stay that way.

Jacques Audiard’s film, which lasts two and a half hours, maintains an unflagging urgency, stalling only when the double-dealing grows too dense.

The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.

This movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies.

There is no denying the boldness of Persepolis, both in design and in moral complaint, but there must surely be moments, in Marjane’s life as in ours, that cry out for cross-hatching and the grown-up grayness of doubt.

Less fruitful is the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer as May's older cousin, the mysterious Countess Olenska, with whom Archer falls hopelessly in love. With her silly blond curls, Pfeiffer looks more plaintive than the dark exotic of Wharton's imagination.

There aren't many performers who can deliver the fullness of heart that such a plot demands, but Winslet is one of them. [22 March 2004, p. 102]

The Best of Youth takes its chance--almost unheard of, these days--to bloom and unfurl like a novel.

Thanks to Whiplash, Simmons will lend comfort to those actors who believe that, if they wait long enough, the right role — their role — will come along. Fletcher is such a part.

If there is any justice, this year's Academy Award for best foreign-language film will go to The Lives of Others, a movie about a world in which there is no justice.

You feel wiped and blinded by such ravishment, yet a voice within you asks: Come on, guys, can't you just stop for the holidays?

The film may have dated as a cautionary left-wing tale, yet it has stayed fresh as a study in the minutiae of power. [1 Oct. 2012, p.85]

She (Cotillard) is the center of attention throughout, yet what matters is her willingness to conspire in the Dardennes’ plea for justice.

Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit—emotional, social, and eventually legal—of white men.

There is plenty to inflame in this picture and nothing to corrupt. [18 Mar 2002. p.152]

That stance of hers will outrage many viewers, as Verhoeven intends it to, but the question of whether Elle is pernicious nonsense or an excruciating black comedy is brushed aside in Huppert’s demonstration of sangfroid. This, she shows us, is how to stand up for yourself in style. She’s the best.

It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

The movie is compact, coolly heartwarming, and gratifyingly uncute. Be warned, though, it also leaves you starving.

Though Cumberbatch, too, can be compelling, and though you constantly wonder what is stored in reserve behind his wintry gaze, he is at heart a master of urbanity, and not everyone will be convinced that he’s truly at home on the range. Still, you should certainly seek out the movie, and relish its central standoff.

The Artist is not just about black-and-white silent pictures. It is a black-and-white silent picture. And it's French.

The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]

Anybody hoping that The End of the Tour would mirror the formal dazzle of Wallace’s fiction, doubling back on itself like the frantically probing encounters in his 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” will be disappointed. Yet the film, despite its flatness, is worth exploring.

Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety.

Seldom, it is fair to say, does Kaufman just want to have fun, but as he lifts the spell of his gloom a surprising beauty breaks through.

Barnard's film, as if nervous of being felled by the straightforward, sinewy thump of Dunbar's writing, ducks and weaves in a series of sly approaches. [2 May 2011, p. 89]

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

Most fruitful of all is the husbandry of the gags, some of which are planted early in the film and must wait for more than an hour before they bloom.

Every gag is girded with fear. The humor is so black that it might have been pumped out of the ground.

Not since "Fargo" (1996) has [McDormand] found a character of such fibre. She doesn't pitch it to us, still less try to make it palatable; she seems to state Mildred, presenting her as a given fact, like someone unrolling a map.

The result is pure Saturday-night moviegoing: it gives you one hell of a wallop, then you wake up on Sunday morning without a scratch. (By contrast, the emotional nakedness of the Judy Garland version, poised within formal compositions, can still reduce me to rubble.)

Filmed in a hot and bleached black-and-white, it manages to swerve from culture-clashing farce to alarming suspense without losing control.

Let’s be honest: the mainspring of The Father, onscreen, is the presence of Hopkins—an actor at the frightening summit of his powers, portraying a man brought pitifully low. The irony is too rare to resist.

Foxtrot leads us a sorry dance, with irreproachable skill, but sometimes you long for it to break step, to quicken, and to breathe.

Only after the movie ends do you understand what Debra Granik, with a consummate sleight of hand, has done. Here, among the peaceful trees, without a shot fired in anger, she’s made a war film.

The barbs of wit, delivered throughout, are like the retractable daggers used in stage productions of "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar": they gleam enticingly, they plunge home to the hilt, but they leave no trace of a wound.

Here is Cruz at her least showy and yet her most adventurous, allowing a storm of confusion to sweep across her face as she sits at a café table, and guiding us through the stages of one woman’s self-possession: having it, losing it almost completely, and then reclaiming it.

Only very rarely is it not fun.

If the movie falters, it’s because, as a bio-pic, it cannot do otherwise. Even the most expert of storytellers is defeated by the essential plotlessness of the form: one damn thing after another.

While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.