A.O. Scott

The opening shot of Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner.

If 99 Homes is a scolding look at a society gone astray, it is also a minor masterpiece of suspense, as tightly wound as “Sicario,” Denis Villeneuve’s white-knuckle drug-war thriller, and almost as brutal.

A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.

The pleasures of this movie are abundant. The pacing is as swift as a speeding bullet. There are wonderfully evoked lived-in San Francisco locations... And there are splendid set pieces that showcase the perpetually-underrated Don Siegel's great skill a director. This film is efficient, unpretentious and much wittier and more stylish than your average cop movie.

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

From its very first scenes, Mr. Whedon’s film crackles with a busy, slightly wayward energy that recalls the classic romantic sparring of the studio era.

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

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.

There is hardly a shortage of movies about rock ’n’ roll, but there are few as perfect — which is to say as ragged, as silly, as touching or as true — as We Are the Best!.

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.

The movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.

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

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.

Each shot is a kind of sight gag, a visual and philosophical joke with absurdity in the setup and sorrow in the punchline. But this time, more of the jokes are one-liners, in which the premise and the payoff are one and the same.

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.

It’s a subtle movie, alert to the almost imperceptible currents of feeling that pass between its title characters.

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.

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.

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

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

The Dance of Reality is the work of a highly disciplined anarchist, whose principal weapon against authority is his own imagination.

A brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.

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

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.

It is the portrait of a soul in torment, all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed.

In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.

The Shape of Water is partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful.