A.O. Scott

Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.

In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.

It's a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it.

A memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Mr. Peck's gambit works, and the result is a great film and a great performance.

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

Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.

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 central plot of Parallel Mothers is vintage Almodóvar: a skein of reversals, revelations, surprises and coincidences unraveled with style, wit and feeling.

There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. The Good Girl is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself.

Tchoupitoulas does explore the border between innocence and experience. It is alive with the risk and curiosity of youth, and unapologetic in insisting that the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience.

This is not a fable of assimilation or alienation, but rather the keenly observed story of two people seeking guidance in painful and complicated circumstances.

Melancholia is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction.

Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.

Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.

You feel the weight of Chiara’s dilemma, the cost of the knowledge she demands, and the heroism of her willingness to pay it.

Bully forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children - who have their own problems, and their good sides as well - but rather the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.

Love & Mercy doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of Brian Wilson, but it succeeds beyond all expectation in making you hear where he was coming from.

More of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.

It is marvelously romantic, even though - or precisely because - it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism.

This is Kaufman’s most assured and daring work so far as a director.

The messiness of the film seems appropriate to its subject, which is the attempt to bring at least a measure of order - and even a touch of grace - to a chaotic and frequently ugly reality.

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.

Who would have expected Ms. Zellweger --- and Miramax -- to come through in a musical? And it's one of the few Christmas entertainments to run under two hours. Who couldn't love that?

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.

Rust and Bone is a strong, emotionally replete experience, and also a tour de force of directorial button pushing. Mr. Audiard is a canny showman, adept at manipulating the audience's feelings and expectations with quick edits and well-chosen songs.

It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.

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.

Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply.

It is a deeply personal piece of art that never descends into the confessional or the therapeutic, and a work of social and literary criticism that never lectures or hectors, but rather, with melancholy, tenderness and wit, manages to sing.

It is a crowded, complex crime story that is also a tale of sexual awakening and an understated exercise in kitchen-sink realism. In short - or rather at mesmerizing, necessary length - this film has everything, and is well worth a day of your life.

This Lady Chatterley, winner of five César awards in France, feels bracingly fresh, vital and modern.

Might be described as an epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story or a lyrical work of social realism. But the setting -- a windswept, sparely populated steppe in southern Kazakhstan -- gives the movie a mood that sometimes feels closer to that of science fiction.

In spite of its limited perspective on Vietnam, its churning, term-paperish exploration of Conrad and the near incoherence of its ending, (it) is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity.

Sweet Sixteen shows that he's (Loach) as capable of anger as his protagonist and just as eager to draw attention to an unchanging problem: the blight of generational poverty.

Encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.

Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.

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

The film is a cat-and-mouse game in which each player thinks he’s the cat, making it both thrilling and disconcerting to watch. It is also a nature documentary about behavior at the very top of the imperial food chain and a detective story about the search for a mystery that is hidden in plain sight.

It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.

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

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it.

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.

If The Worst Person in the World is about Julie’s indecision, it’s also about Trier’s ambivalence. Some of the suspense in the film comes from wondering what he will do with her, and whether, as much as he loves her, he can figure out how to set her free.

[A] sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis.

It is that emphasis — the earnest, critical attention to the public Mister Rogers and his legacy — that makes Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like such a gift.

I’ve rarely seen a movie about citizenship as quietly eloquent as Quest.

Something not seen in movie theaters for a long time: an intelligent, modern screwball comedy, a minor classic on the order of competent, fast-talking curve balls about deception and greed like Mitchell Leisen's "Easy Living" and Billy Wilder's "Major and the Minor."

A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.

Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.

You are not Doug Block, of course. Except to the extent - measured by the depth of your absorption in this remarkable film - that you are.

Delicate and altogether satisfying romantic comedy.

Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

The film is useful in part because it is so frankly argumentative. The critical appreciation of art is always advanced more effectively by partisanship than by neutrality.

In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.

It is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.

Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.

Maybe, beneath the stylistic flourishes and bursts of operatic emotion, it is a simple story of psychological struggle, about a man in midlife reckoning with the damage of his past. But to settle on that interpretation is to deny or discount the splendid strangeness of Mr. Sorrentino's vision - and also, therefore, of the curious corners of reality he discovers along the way.

Peculiar and sneakily brilliant.

The Kindergarten Teacher — the film as well as the character — yearns for different values, for intensity, beauty and meaning. Its sobering lesson is that the search for those things is most likely to end in madness, confusion and violence.

This movie is graceful, subtle and sure-footed, much as its English title implies.

Thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary.

Enthralling.

City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.

Leigh’s narrative is touched by the literary spirit of the later 19th century. Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens.

Art is a fairy tale we choose to believe in, and this movie, a fiction confected about real people, is too good not to be true.

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.

“Dawn” is more than a bunch of occasionally thrilling action sequences, emotional gut punches and throwaway jokes arranged in predictable sequence. It is technically impressive and viscerally exciting, for sure, but it also gives you a lot to think, and even to care, about.

Prisoners is the kind of movie that can quiet a room full of casual thrill-seekers. It absorbs and controls your attention with such assurance that you hold your breath for fear of distracting the people on screen, exhaling in relief or amazement at each new revelation

The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.

Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.

Its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.

It is to Mr. Gibney’s great credit that while he pays due attention to the outsize, cartoonish celebrity persona Thompson fell back on when his literary powers began to wane, this film concentrates on the bold, innovative journalism that secured Thompson’s reputation and assures his immortality.

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.

Neither sensationalistic nor sentimental, Ms. Berg’s film is clear-sighted, tough-minded and devastating, a portrait of individual criminality and institutional indifference, a study in the betrayal of trust and the irresponsibility of authority.

Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.

As the war in Afghanistan returns to the front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in Restrepo, at the very least, 90 minutes or so of our attention. If nothing else, this film, in showing how much they care about one another, demands the same of us.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender.

Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.

A rich, thought-provoking film.

Mr. Assayas’s method is observant and immersive. His camera moves among young bodies like an invisible friend, and his somewhat messy narrative is propelled by fidelity to feeling rather than by the machinery of plot.

The great virtue of The Young Karl Marx is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.

One of the reasons that Hereafter works as well as it does - it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between.

It’s a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force.

There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc.

The Day After, one of three films this prolific director brought to festivals in 2017 (another one screened in Berlin in February), is an especially elegant presentation of some of his [Mr. Hong’s] characteristic concerns.

Equity pulls off a difficult balancing act with an elegance that should not be underestimated. It turns its unflappable gaze on a maddeningly complex reality and transforms it into a swift, clear and exciting story.

Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.

It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.

While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.

Director Alfonso Cuarón works with a quicksilver fluidity, and the movie is fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.

This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.

Deftly swings to a spartan, engrossing climax, and the final twists spell out what the murderers are made of and the setting responsible for creating them. It is a true piece of film magic.

Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.

This sense of intimacy makes And Everything Is Going Fine both vibrant - what amazing company this man was! - and terribly sad.

The triumph of Results is that it pretends to be loose, lazy and lived-in when it’s actually disciplined, hard-working and in almost perfect shape.

This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.

The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.