A.O. Scott

Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.

The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.

It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.

The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.

The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.

It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.

Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.

in spite of its historical specificity, BPM never feels like a bulletin from the past. Its immediacy comes in part from the brisk naturalism of the performances and the nimbleness and fluidity of the editing. The characters are so vivid, so real, so familiar that it’s impossible to think of their struggles — and in some cases their deaths — as unfolding in anything but the present tense.

Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. Moving On takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars.

Shot in richly toned, wide-screen black and white, Aferim! looks like an elegant exercise in period playacting. But it casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry.

Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.

An unnerving but unsatisfying chronicle of a German village filled with hidden cruelty, set on the eve of World War I.

It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.

In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.

Mr. Trier and Mr. Lie - a quiet, recessive but nonetheless magnetically self-assured screen presence - emphasize Anders's individuality above all. Oslo, August 31st has the satisfying gravity of specific experience, and also, true to its title, a prickly sense of place.

Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.

The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.

The gravity and force of Mr. Phoenix’s performance and Ms. Ramsay’s direction are impressive, but it’s hard not to feel that their talents have been misapplied, and that there is less to the movie than meets the eye.

A Ghost Story is suspenseful, dourly funny and at times piercingly emotional.

Volver, full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either "Talk to Her" or "Bad Education," choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master.

Even though The Square depicts widely covered recent events, it still feels like a revelation. This is partly because of the immediacy of Ms. Noujaim’s approach, which often puts the viewer in the midst of chaos as it unfolds.

The result is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre.

Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.

This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it’s also a strange and moving work of art.

To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures.

It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.

Though the movie is playfully postmodern in its pastiche of styles and its mingling of sincerity and self-consciousness, there is also something solidly old-fashioned about the way it tells its story.

A giggly cocktail, though it's more foam than drink.

The star does his patented shtick, supported by a handful of blue-chip supporting performers, as the story lurches through contrived, seminaughty comic set pieces toward a sentimental ending.

From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.

A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.

Like any good work of criticism, De Palma will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain.

Mr. Legrand is skilled in the techniques of dread and suspense, and without sensationalizing or cheapening the story, he gives this closely observed drama the tension and urgency of a thriller.

Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.

An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.

The three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.

The most fascinating — and the most moving — thing about this sprawling, sincere and boisterous movie is its tone.

In some ways his (Anderson) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.

A sharply written, fast-talking, almost dementedly articulate satire on modern statecraft.

It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.

A film in which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr. González Iñárritu expands into something far more haunting.

The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.

There is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.

Delicate and altogether satisfying romantic comedy.

Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.

There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.

The cumulative effect is exhilarating and also a bit frustrating, since so many dances are included and woven together the audience does not have the chance to experience any single work in its entirety. But the power and intelligence of Bausch's approach, which at times seems more cerebral than sensual, is communicated.

The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.

The great accomplishment of Gloria, the Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s astute, unpretentious and thrillingly humane new film, is that it acknowledges both sides of its heroine’s temperament without judgment or sentimentality.

Occasionally becomes pretentious and shrill -- sometimes Mr. Wright isn't aware that his material is so good that he doesn't need to comment on his characters.

Intent on showing that Arbor and Swifty live in a world of radically limited possibilities, barely sustained by their families and failed by the state, Ms. Barnard locks them into a narrative prison. Their fates seem predetermined less by their circumstances than by the iron will and limited imagination of their creator.

The on-camera absence of its subject and its overall indifference to matters of biography make Sol LeWitt a welcome departure from most documentaries about artists, as well as a fitting and serious tribute to his art.

Mr. Chabrol's droll assault on petit-bourgeois security feels like a satire of "Ordinary People" directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.

Ms. Holland, working from a script by Stepan Hulik, a Czech screenwriter born in 1984, turns a sprawling story into a tight and suspenseful ethical thriller.

Mr. Heinzerling is an artist too. The window he has opened onto the lives of his subjects is a powerful and beautiful visual artifact in its own right.

Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but One Night in Miami is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen.

The most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.

Though it is poignant and funny in nearly equal measure, the most remarkable aspect of Private Life may be its lack of noticeable exaggeration. Ms. Jenkins is working at the scale of life, with the confidence that the ordinary, if viewed from the right angle, will provide enough drama and humor to sustain our interest.

It’s less a biography than a séance.

BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions.

A goofy and remarkable film.

Good sports movies are always about more than sports... Red Army touches on themes of friendship and perseverance, and also offers a compact and vivid summary of recent Russian history.

Mr. Toback's film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson's point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

The rigor of Mr. Cronenberg’s direction sometimes seems at odds with the humanism of Mr. Knight’s script, but more often the director’s ruthless formal command rescues the story from its maudlin impulses. Mr. Knight aims earnestly for your heartstrings, but Mr. Cronenberg insists on getting under your skin. The result is a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.

It is a truism that academic arguments are so passionate because the stakes are so small. Footnote, a wonderful new film from the American-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar, at once affirms this conventional wisdom and calls it into question.

Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.

Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.

The film makes uncompromising demands on your attention and your empathy. But it is also illuminating and, in its downbeat, deliberate way, exhilarating.

This isn’t a tight, tidy allegory of capitalism and colonialism so much as a collage of vivid images, sounds and words that punch the movie’s themes like hashtags. Williams and Uzeyman marry anarchist politics with anarchist aesthetics, making something that feels both handmade and high-tech, digital and analog, poetic and punk rock.

Creed is a dandy piece of entertainment, soothingly old-fashioned and bracingly up-to-date.

Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.

Ms. Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What’s underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself.

It’s less a biography than an extended essay, which is entirely a good thing. If you want a thorough documentation of everything Morrison has done and everyone she knows, there’s always Wikipedia. But if you’d prefer an argument for her importance and a sense of her presence, then you won’t be disappointed.

1001 Grams achieves a charming equipoise of levity and gravity, of formal rigor and soulful sentiment.

One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.

The mischievous paradox of Matías Piñeiro’s Viola is that it is at once devilishly complicated and perfectly simple.

Mr. Boyle has a knack for tackling painful, violent or unpleasant subjects with unremitting verve and unstoppable joie de vivre.

To put the matter perhaps more abstractly than such a sensual film deserves, it is about the fate of untameable, irrational desire in a world that does not seem to have a place for it.

Among the comforts Vortex refuses is the bittersweet balm of nostalgia. It’s a blunt reckoning with the inevitability of loss, including the loss of memory. We dream for a while, and then we sleep.

It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.

The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.

There is a scene toward the end of War for the Planet of the Apes that is as vivid and haunting as anything I’ve seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in ages, a moment of rousing and dreadful cinematic clarity that I don’t expect to shake off any time soon.

It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.

The history presented in The Wind That Shakes the Barley hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.

Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them.

Mr. Tsai typically uses narrative as a tool for exploring the moods and meanings that link his characters with one another and with the city that awakens, contains and frustrates their desires. They seem very much stuck in their world, but because that world is the creation of a wildly original artist coming into his own, it also feels alive with possibility.

With its swift, jaunty rhythms and sharp, off-kilter jokes, Frances Ha is frequently delightful. Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach are nonetheless defiant partisans in the revolt against the tyranny of likability in popular culture.

The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects.

In A Hijacking, his assured, intense second feature, the Danish director Tobias Lindholm turns tedium and frustration into agonizing suspense.

Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don't deserve oblivion either, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil makes both a case and a place for their band.

Despite its affection for the quirks of its characters and their milieu, the film is most memorable for its gravity, for the almost tragic nobility it finds in sad and silly circumstances.

The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.

For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.