A.O. Scott

Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.

One of the most purely enjoyable films ever made.

A swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects.

The rigorous honesty of Quo Vadis, Aida? is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.

As well done as it is, Wonderland feels predictable. There is no sad turn in these characters' lives that you cannot see coming about an hour before.

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.

A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

The movie he (Josh Peck) is in, The Wackness, written and directed by Jonathan Levine, makes a good-faith effort to steer clear of such clichés, and succeeds and fails in roughly equal measure.

For all of Mr. Cuarón’s formal wizardry and pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart.

This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.

Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.

It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling.

The best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq.

It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth.

The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.

At once ardent and analytical, cerebral and swooning, Carol is a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros. With sparse dialogue and restrained drama, the film is a symphony of angles and glances, of colors and shadows.

Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect.

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

In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life.

Mr. Turner is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul. But even as it celebrates a glorious painter and illuminates the sources of his pictures with startling clarity and insight, the movie patiently and thoroughly demolishes more than a century’s worth of mythology about what art is and how artists work.

A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.

The picture is more fun than it has a right to be.

Inside Out is an absolute delight — funny and charming, fast-moving and full of surprises. It is also a defense of sorrow, an argument for the necessity of melancholy dressed in the bright colors of entertainment.

Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work.

It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.

It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.

La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity.

You might think you’ve seen this all before. You probably have, but never quite like this. What Ms. Gerwig has done — and it’s by no means a small accomplishment — is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose-colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise.

This document of youthful confusion has not aged one minute. If anything, its detached, discursive and sympathetic observation of the earnest foolishness of post-baccalaureate, pre-1968 Parisians is more acute, and more prophetic, than ever.

Toni Erdmann, proceeding in a perfectly straightforward manner, from one awkward, heartfelt, hilarious scene to the next, wraps itself around some of the thorniest complexities of contemporary reality.

This is not a biopic, it’s a Coen brothers movie, which is to say a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship. To put it another way, it’s a folk tale.

If you're looking for laughs, give "Valley of the Dolls" another read instead.

To search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off. We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.

And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.

Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.

Spotlight is a gripping detective story and a superlative newsroom drama, a solid procedural that tries to confront evil without sensationalism.

Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.

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.

No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.

In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours," another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.

Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.

This movie accomplishes something almost miraculous — two things, actually. It casts a spell and tells the truth.

Timbuktu is an act of resistance and revenge because it asserts the power of secularism not as an ideology but rather as a stubborn fact of life.

The horror of The Act of Killing does not dissipate easily or yield to anything like clarity.

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.

As sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer.

The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours.

A painful, profoundly empathetic work of moral reckoning.

An intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.

Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.

Mr. Nemes orchestrates a tour de force of suspense, a swift symphony of collisions, coincidences and reversals that is almost unbearably exciting. His skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment. This is not entirely the director’s fault. The Holocaust, once forbidden territory, is now safe and familiar ground.

Like any good novelist and every great filmmaker, Gerwig isn’t afraid to let her audience work a little. She trusts our intelligence and our curiosity, and also her own command of the medium.

Mr. Kurosawa, a prolific and skilled genre master, spins this parable with a light, nimble touch, punctuating heavy passages of exposition with punchy, modest action sequences and snatches of incongruously bouncy music.

Less a sociological case study than a psychological portrait, the film is both probing and tactful.

That it is more -- a small masterpiece, perfect in design and execution -- almost goes without saying, but the film’s profundity and its charm go hand in hand.

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.

Like Mr. Panahi’s cab, his film is equipped with both windows and mirrors. It’s reflective and revealing, intimate and wide-ranging, compact and moving.

There is an implicit argument here between faith and materialism, one that is resolved with wit, conviction and generosity of spirit. Mr. Pawlikowski has made one of the finest European films (and one of most insightful films about Europe, past and present) in recent memory.

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

What makes Hit the Road so memorable and devastating is the way it explores normal life under duress.

The Favourite, with a profane, erudite script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, is a farce with teeth, a costume drama with sharp political instincts and an aggressive sense of the absurd.

If you need reassurance or grounds for optimism about the Middle East, you will not find it here. What you will find is rare, welcome and almost unbearable clarity.

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.

First Cow is fundamentally a western: It takes up questions of civilization, solidarity and barbarism on the American frontier. And like many great westerns it critiques some of the genre’s foundational myths with bracing, beautiful rigor, including the myth of heroic individualism.

Even in the most chaotic fights and collisions, everything makes sense. This is not a matter of realism — come on, now — but of imaginative discipline. And Mr. Miller demonstrates that great action filmmaking is not only a matter of physics but of ethics as well. There is cause and effect; there are choices and consequences.

The film's realism is a point of entry rather than the whole point of the exercise. Its setting is finally subordinate to the main character, as memorable and vivid a heroine as you are likely to see on screen this season.

This is not a lurid true-crime tale of jealousy and drug addiction, but a delicate human drama about love, ambition and the glories of music.

The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming.

Mr. Kechiche’s style is dizzy, obsessive, inspired and relentless, words that also describe Adèle and Emma and the fearless women who embody them. Many more words can — and will — be spent on “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” but for now I’ll settle for just one: glorious.

There's as much at stake in the hilarious, moody and cantankerous film adaptation of "Splendor" as there was in this summer's other movies of comic-book antiheroes like "The Hulk" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

On first viewing, the captivating strangeness of the mood and the elegant threading of the plot are likely to hold your attention, but later you can go back to savor the lustrous colors, the fine-grained performances and the romantic mystery that holds the whole thing together.

How did Mr. Panahi do this? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain, to tell you the truth, since my job is to review movies, and this, obviously, is something different: a masterpiece in a form that does not yet exist.

A history lesson doesn’t have to be a lecture, and at its best, Mangrove, with its clear and painful implications for the present, conveys the sense of a world in motion, as the possibility of something new comes into being.

A sizzling, artistic crackerjack and a model of its genre, pegged on a harassed man's moral decision, laced with firm characterizations and tingling detail and finally attaining an incredibly colorful crescendo of microscopic police sleuthing.

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.

Mr. Jarecki finds a way to show that denial and hope often grow from the same vine. Lives are built around the way they're harvested -- and this talented director has a feel for the soil.

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

It may get a few things wrong, but it aims at, and finally achieves, an authenticity at once more exalted and more primal than mere verisimilitude.

The easy, complacent distance that informs much historical filmmaking is almost entirely absent from this supremely intelligent, unfailingly honest movie.

Minding the Gap is more than a celebration of skateboarding as a sport and a subculture. With infinite sensitivity, Mr. Liu delves into some of the most painful and intimate details of his friends’ lives and his own, and then layers his observations into a rich, devastating essay on race, class and manhood in 21st-century America.

Her shoulders slumped, her eyes weary, her gait heavy, Ms. Cotillard moves past naturalism into something impossible to doubt and hard to describe. Sandra is an ordinary person in mundane circumstances, but her story, plainly and deliberately told, is suspenseful, sobering and, in the original, fear-of-God sense of the word, tremendous.

Thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary.

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

It’s a psychological thriller, a strangely dry-eyed melodrama, a kinky sex farce and, perhaps most provocatively, a savage comedy of bourgeois manners. Mostly, though — inarguably, I would say — it is a platform for the astonishing, almost terrifying talent of Isabelle Huppert.

Minari is modest, specific and thrifty, like the lives it surveys. There’s nothing small about it, though, because it operates at the true scale of life.

Its affection for its characters feels protective; the film is reluctant to spill any secrets or cause any embarrassment. There is admirable kindness and impressive loyalty in this approach, but it also puts a bit of a damper on the party.

It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

Never less than intriguing, coolly intelligent and flawlessly paced, Phoenix often feels trapped in the logic of its conceit.

Grace is also what defines Mr. Bahrani's filmmaking. I can't think of anything else to call the quality of exquisite attention, wry humor and wide-awake intelligence that informs every frame of this almost perfect film.

This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.

This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.

It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.

Cameraperson isn’t a work of journalism or advocacy. It’s a scrapbook, a found poem assembled out of scraps and snippets of truth. And it is, above all, an act of showing rather than telling.

A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness.

Ms. Rapace, tiny and agile, her steely rage showing now and then the tiniest crack of vulnerability, belongs to another dimension altogether. She makes this movie good enough, but also makes you wish it were much better.

Crime+Punishment advances a thorough critique of American law enforcement not by generalizing or speechifying, but by digging into particular lives and circumstances, allowing affected individuals to speak for themselves.

The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)

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.