A.O. Scott

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

When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.

It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I've seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in.

The unapologetic, sometimes heavy-handed literariness of The Wild Pear Tree is leavened by hints of grim comedy and sharp, if subtle, social criticism.

While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen.

The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.

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.

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

Mr. Perry, a New York University graduate whose second feature, "The Color Wheel," provoked passion and puzzlement at several festivals, has a natural eye, an offbeat sense of rhythm and no great interest in conventional storytelling. This is both intriguing and a bit tiresome, as Tyrone stumbles and mumbles his way through a series of inscrutable encounters.

This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012.

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.

It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.

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.

It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.

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.

It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive.

By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable -- until we get to heaven, it's where we live -- and like no place you've been before.

Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else.

If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.

Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.

Enthralling.

The final shot, accompanied by an improbable but perfect musical cue, is an astonishing cinematic gesture, an appalling, hilarious statement about modern values, the state of the world, human nature and everything else. This is a movie that lives up to its name.

Ms. Zhao’s commitment to her craft — she knows how to take care and when to take risks — matches Brady’s. She has an eye for landscape and an acute sensitivity to the nuances of storytelling, a bold, exacting vision that makes The Rider exceptional among recent American regional-realist films.

It’s a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction.

Even as she stops at familiar stations on the road to maturity — problems at home and school, new friendships and first love — Ms. Sciamma revels in the risky, reckless exuberance of adolescence and in the sheer joy of filming it.

While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.

An instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.

It is a heartbreaking film, and cruelty sometimes seems to be not only its subject but its method. Like the child on a high cliff that is one of its recurring images, the film walks up to the edge of hopelessness and pauses there, waiting to see what happens next.