A.O. Scott

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.

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

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.

The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness.

Cinema, even in the service of journalism, is always more than reporting, and focusing on what Ms. Poitras’s film is about risks ignoring what it is. It’s a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the “Bourne” movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film. And it is also a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.

Logan Lucky is a terrific movie. That’s a matter of skill, and maybe also of luck. But mostly it’s a matter of generosity.

With exquisite patience and attention to detail, Asghar Farhadi, the writer and director, builds a solid and suspenseful plot out of ordinary incidents, and packs it with rich and resonant ideas.

Steve Jobs is a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival.... Mostly, though, it is a formally audacious, intellectually energized entertainment, a powerful challenge to the lazy conventions of Hollywood storytelling and a feast for connoisseurs of contemporary screen acting.

A splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie. Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability, Mr. Fukunaga's film tells its venerable tale with lively vigor and an astute sense of emotional detail.

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.

It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.

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.

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.

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

Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.

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.

Rango, which may take place entirely within its hero's head - that kind of ambiguity worked in "Inception" and "Black Swan," so why not here? - is about the appetite for myths and stories, whether or not they make sense. It is about the worlds we dream inside our fishbowls, helped by the weird reflections on the walls.

The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.

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.

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.

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

The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over, you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief. Which may sound like a reason to stay away, but is exactly the opposite.

Like "Inglourious Basterds," Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.

In its time, this film represented the arrival of something new, and even now it can feel like a bulletin from the future.

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.

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.

Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, All That Breathes is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.

There are creatures fished out of formaldehyde, volumes flecked with rot, birds that have been hollowed out and stuffed, household tools battered beyond recognition. The effect of seeing all this is certainly haunting, but too beautiful to be morbid.