A.O. Scott

Schadenfreude and disgust may be unavoidable, but to withhold all sympathy from the Siegels is to deny their humanity and shortchange your own. Marvel at the ornate frame, mock the vulgarity of the images if you want, but let's not kid ourselves. If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.

Mr. Villeneuve tells Nawal's story in a way that is both subtle and emphatic, and Ms. Azabal, portraying Nawal from hopeful youth to despairing middle age, gives a performance that is all the more powerful for the restrained, unshakeable sense of dignity she brings to it.

The movie itself, which was lost until a few years ago, is relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.

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

Ms. Kim is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a melodramatic heroine, her performance made more layered and intriguing by the intimation that she may be playing herself.

Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.

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.

What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.

American Honey, long and messy as it is, is by turns observant and exuberant, and sweet in a way that is both unexpected and organic.

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.

Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

Wickedly absorbing.

It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.

The Simpsons Movie, in the end, is as good as an average episode of "The Simpsons." In other words, I’d be willing to watch it only -- excuse me while I crunch some numbers here -- 20 or 30 more times.

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

It’s not only Mister Rogers’s kindness that hovers over “Beautiful Day,” but also his creative spirit. Paying tribute to his skills as a composer, performer and puppeteer, the movie affirms his status as a hero of the imagination.

It revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha’s students, in her belated appreciation of her mother’s paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming — in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful.

Fans will enjoy the backstage access, the home movies, the snapshots and the reminiscences, but the movie keeps you at a distance, while implying that it may be just as well not to get too close.

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.

Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

Too Late to Die Young is above all an achievement in mood and implication. Sotomayor has a way of structuring scenes and composing images that makes everything perfectly clear but not obvious.

Mr. Urzendowsky, with his dark curls, fine cheekbones and sad eyes, is a very credible first love, while Ms. Créton uncannily captures Camille's resolution as well as her almost willful vulnerability.

How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? The Old Man & the Gun kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.

There is something startling, even shocking, about the angle of vision Mr. Frammartino imposes by juxtaposing apparently disparate elements and lingering on what seem at first to be insignificant details. You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.

“Shoah” remains a heroic reckoning with the limits of collective understanding, but The Last of the Unjust is something smaller, stranger and more paradoxical: the portrait of an individual whose actions still defy comprehension, and the self-portrait of an artist consumed by the past.

Though the narrative is spotty, and occasionally confounding, there is an epic warmth in the way it's rendered.

Echoes its director's own deportment as a performer, alternating silky smoothness with burlap coarseness. Though Mr. Malkovich stays entirely behind the scenes, he creates a languorous but gripping story of people fighting to stay a step ahead of hopelessness.

There are few concert movies that were filmed were such abiding feeling and respect. It's of a potent vintage that goes down deceptively smoother with age.

There is a fine line between delving into the mysteries of life and engaging in mystification, and Mr. Gomes lands on the wrong side of it. There is something disingenuous in the way this movie disowns its own ambitions and scorns the possibility of clarity or coherence. Maybe its opacity is a matter of principle. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.

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

Even as Mr. Mungiu maintains a detached, objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to speak for themselves, he also allows you to glimpse the complex and volatile inner lives of his characters.

David Fincher’s Mank is a worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession. That it is unreliable as history should go without saying.

What Winter on Fire lacks in journalistic detachment it more than makes up for in fidelity to the feelings and motives of the participants. It’s more than just a portrait of terror, anger, desperation and resolve; it communicates those emotions directly, into the bloodstream and nervous system of the audience.

Serves up its scattershot plots as if they were lined up on a menu, moving from appetizer to entree: there are more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.

Ms. Granik’s tact and curiosity are remarkable. So is her subject’s openness.

The extravagance of the sets and costumes increases the theatricality; Chunhyang is an almost childlike delight for the eyes.

What is clear from this sober yet electrifying film is that the power of the Panthers was rooted in their insistence — radical then, radical still — that black lives matter.

J. C. Chandor, the writer and director of this pulpy, meaty, altogether terrific new film, and Bradford Young, its supremely talented director of photography, succeed in giving this beat-up version of the city both historical credibility and expressive power.

The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways.

You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.

There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.

A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are. This turn does not diminish the accomplishment of Ms. Scott Thomas's deep, subtle and altogether stunning performance, but it does alter the scale of the movie, turning it into a more manageable, less existentially unsettling drama.

May not advance any grand new thesis about the South and its history, but it turns an old house into a rich and strange repository of local knowledge.

Tsai not only gives the audience a chance to breathe but also lets us luxuriate in the mood of deadpan melancholy his movie evokes so beautifully.

Parker...is not a great movie....But Parker is nonetheless great fun. It is part of a welcome trend, or counter-trend, in action filmmaking, an effort to strip away the apocalyptic bloat and digital fakery that have overtaken the genre and return to its pulpy, nasty, mechanical roots.

In Summer Palace Lou nonetheless succeeds in finding a cinematic language that does more than summarize the important events of a confusing decade. He distills the inner confusion -- the swirl of moods, whims and needs -- that is the lived and living essence of history.

The virtuosity on display is also the director's, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of Drive, the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough.

With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness - I can't quite exclaim, "It's a knockout!" - and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.

The movie itself is an effective nightmare, and a solid piece of filmmaking, strong enough to make you wish that it could have borne the full weight of the tragedy it set out to depict.

Apollo 10½ is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which.

The curious thing about The Visitor is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way.

Once the violence starts, Green Room settles into horror movie logic, becoming steadily more gruesome and less terrifying as the body count grows. You know some people are going to die, and figuring out who and in what order feels more like a brainteaser than like a matter of deep moral or emotional concern.

Mr. Pirozzi’s film is an unsparing and meticulous reckoning of the effects of tyranny on ordinary Cambodians. It is also a rich and defiant effort at recovery, showing that even the most murderous totalitarianism cannot fully erase the human drive for pleasure and self-expression.

Regards its characters with affectionate detachment, and assures its audience that no great calamities or revelations are in store. Instead, there are a series of small crises and tiny epiphanies, all adding up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm.

Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.

In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is among Mr. Jarmusch’s most voluptuous movies — full of rare and gorgeous images and sounds, heavy with wistful sighs and sprinkled with wry, knowing jokes — but it is also thin and pale, and perhaps too afraid of daylight for its own good.

Ms. Bell, who plays Carol with a perfect blend of diffidence, goofiness and charm, has written and directed an insightful comedy that is much more complex and ambitious than it sometimes seems.

Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.

It is, of course, art rather than history - an elegant composition of dreams, memories and suggestive images - but its artfulness seems like an alibi, an excuse for keeping the ugliness of history out of the picture.

“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.

This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.

You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.

The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.

Praise will stick with you. It's more than worthy of its title.

The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.

Ms. Binoche, effortlessly charismatic and ruthlessly unvain, has no investment in the character’s likability. She and Ms. Denis could not care less what you think of her. Let the Sunshine In commits itself to taking Isabelle on her own terms. The challenge, for her and for the audience, is to figure out what those terms are.

The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes - or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all.

The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.

While France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.

Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.

Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time.

What the film makes clear, with unfailing sensitivity and wry humor, is that for Shira and her family the ordinary arrangements of living are freighted with moral and spiritual significance.

The film is much more than a biography of the Clash’s guitarist and lead singer: It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud.

The charms of Sing Street should not be underestimated. Partly because its manner is unassuming and its story none too original...it’s easy to overlook Mr. Carney’s ingenuity and sensitivity.

It's undeniably a trifle, but rarely is something like this done with such skill and, well, savoir-faire.

In the end, this is a one-joke movie — a shaggy-dog meta-narrative — but it’s not a bad joke.

The psychological underpinnings give this picture a charged emotional atmosphere. The dizzying unspoken feelings between the two men mesh so well that the movie seems to have been worked out like a perverse drawing-room comedy.

What is most impressive is the care with which Mr. Chung manages this risky undertaking. He seems to have made this film above all by listening and looking.

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

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Mr. Tsai's films are held together internally, and connected one to another, by an elusive, insistent logic that is easier to recognize than to describe. But once you do start to recognize it, each new movie offers passage to an exotic place that feels, uncannily, like home.

Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.

28 Weeks Later is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. It is brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be. It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and in its techniques.

The anomalous proliferation of scenic beauty gives Mr. Nolan irony to play with, and he uses it spectacularly. The director and his gifted cinematographer, Wally Pfister, are clearly turned on by all this wasted beauty.

You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

Though you may hear otherwise, Top Gun: Maverick is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie. But it is also, and perhaps more significantly, an earnest statement of the thesis that movies can and should be great.

What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.

Fastidious and smart, and Ms. Swinton's fixated intensity isn't ever remote; we're always aware of how deeply she's feeling. Her work is magnificent.

Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.

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.

I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.

Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.

It Comes at Night is pretty terrifying to sit through, but it may be even scarier after it’s over, when you sift through what you’ve seen and try to piece together what it may have meant.

The whole affair is pulpy, jokey, sometimes touching and frequently nonsensical: a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun.

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

A kind of murder mystery, but eventually the only victim is the audience's interest -- the picture is uncompromising and inauspicious.

Beyond the Visible bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.