Bilge Ebiri

If we absolutely must have G.I. Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

By sticking to his impressionistic perspective, by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic — a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth.

Perhaps most importantly, The Taste of Things offers a perfect match between Hung’s artistic impulses and his subject matter.

To go with its bizarre plotting and shrill performances, the film seems to have been edited in a Cuisinart. But those are the least of its crimes.

The experience of watching this film is one of reflective exuberance. It's a movie about people who arrive sure of themselves and depart in the quiet confidence that all they know is that they know nothing.

What distinguishes Two Prosecutors is not its overall narrative trajectory (which reads more like a bitter cosmic joke than anything else) but rather how Loznitsa subtly colors in Kornyev’s journey through the halls of power.

The movie’s hectic (albeit very precise) swirl of dialogue creates a background against which the idea of slowing down and directing all your attention towards one thing feels like a genuine rebuke of the world. It’s a simple and obvious enough conceit, but Anderson and his cast have such fun with it that they render it fresh and original.

The accrual of human detail pays off masterfully when we get to the dance itself — especially when the girls see their fathers for the first time.

Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders — truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage — but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation.

That drifting, elegiac quality (which at times may recall his once-neglected, now-classic Jackie Brown) is the film’s great strength. There are several major set-pieces — some hilarious, some creepy, one absurdly violent — that will get people talking, but perhaps the most powerful is a lengthy, seemingly aimless one that comes smack dab in the middle.

I walked out of After the Storm wanting to be a better person — and further convinced that Hirokazu Kore-eda isn't just one of the world's best filmmakers, but one of its most indispensable artists.

I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.

Like much of Romanian cinema, Aferim!’s narrative and stylistic gambit doesn’t quite click until the final scenes.

Gibney’s a bit like a kid in an exposé-candy store here, and you can sense him trying to cram as much as he can into the film. Good for him: Going Clear is jaw-dropping. You wouldn’t really want it any other way.

The film never quite lets us know what to feel. It’s an unnerving little movie, one that at any given moment might deliver a burst of feeling, or a big laugh, or a jump scare. It whipsaws you this way and that, and this sense of disorientation is new for a company whose work usually feels so carefully calibrated, so perfectly put-together.

Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.

From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.

That’s part of the beauty of this film: It games out very real, very human impulses to their surreal breaking points, only to uncover even greater truths.

This is a deceptively weird movie. There’s always been an immediacy to Jacquot’s visual style; he likes to follow his characters closely, and he gets performances that are energetic but quiet.

Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.

In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.

Slowly but surely, you settle into its gentle rhythms, and before you know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has passed by.

Weiner is about as entertaining as a film about someone destroying a life and career can be. You can't turn away from the car wreck, and Weiner himself can't stop commenting on it.

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

Universal Language is a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.

Paltrow and Baumbach don't get fancy with the filmmaking. They're smart enough to let De Palma's own resonant images — his gorgeous compositions, his smooth camera moves — do much of the work.

Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

His Three Daughters is a movie about waiting, and it’s a movie that often feels like it’s waiting — for death, for reconciliation, for a confrontation, for something, anything.

The Forbidden Room is often maddening, occasionally beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable.

The film Segan has made is very much its own thing. It’s a twilight fable of a city that’s changing, whose spirit remains distinct and grand and full of mystery, much like the remarkable actor at its center.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a film born of helplessness, about helplessness, and it embodies helplessness through its very form.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

What exactly does it all mean? I’m not sure, but it does make for a disturbing and occasionally absorbing watch.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

The Guilty beautifully demonstrates how people can act with absolute conviction even when they don’t have the full picture of a situation, and the monstrousness this can in turn lead to. And if that doesn’t speak to our time, then I don’t know what does.

The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.

Avatar may be derivative, but it’s not insincere. Cameron clearly feels every beat of the story along with his viewer. He lets us discover Pandora through Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) eyes, first as a fearsome, terrifying place, then as a land of unimaginable awe and delight. [2022 re-release]

The LEGO Movie is the kind of animated free-for-all that comes around very rarely, if ever: A kids’ movie that matches shameless fun with razor-sharp wit, that offers up a spectacle of pure, freewheeling joy even as it tackles the thorniest of issues.

In its own discreet, modest way, Evil Does Not Exist leaves us with a haunting sense of personal and ecological apocalypse.

Rithy’s aim goes beyond a history lesson, however. This film is about something more alive, more present tense.

It’s alternatingly comic, heroic, tragic, horrifying, ridiculous, dead serious, clear-eyed, and confused; it shifts into moments of documentary and even essay film, but it’s also one of Lee’s more entertaining and vibrantly constructed works. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully.

Gabe Polsky's ingenious, touching documentary Red Army looks at the other side of this myth, the seemingly faceless, allegedly robotic players who made up the Soviet team. There, Polsky finds a story even more epic and powerful than the Miracle on Ice.

The Post is a tale that weaponizes nostalgia. It depicts how this long-established system of chummy collusion between politicians and press, one at times recalled with some anxious wistfulness by both Bradlee and Graham, came to be shattered. And it shows us how a strong press was instrumental in that shattering.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

Mustang breathes new life into the old trope by reconnecting it with the elemental horror that drives it. These aren’t just body snatchers; they take your soul, too.

James White looks like a simple film on its surface.... But despite the vérité-influenced stylization, writer-director Mond (whose own struggle with loss likely inspired some of this story) doesn’t seem too interested in realism or grit.

It builds a deeply moving emotional journey out of the simplest, most mundane elements. By the end, almost nothing has happened, and yet you’re a wreck.

The fact that The Lost King never quite reconciles this tension between striving for noble recognition and the fallacy of divine majesty feels like an implicit damnation of both.

Certainly for any fan of Cave’s, 20,000 Days on Earth makes for a creative, enthralling journey through the man’s world.

By the time the spellbinding and mysterious final shot rolls around, we’re left with this thought, the sad, mad truth of an authoritarian world: Nobody’s innocent, and everybody’s a victim.

We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.

It’s a drama, and it smartly uses its little moments of humiliation to open our eyes to a world of delicate, but deep, injustice.

The way he films Kiefer, Wenders finds more drama in gestures such as these than he might in biographical detail. This is art that dares to live in the world, and Anselm is itself a wonderfully alive work.

Linklater’s gentle touch is his secret weapon, and Hit Man might be a masterpiece.

Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

There’s an unflinching, near-clinical relentlessness to the picture, but therein lies its compassion and empathy.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

The effects are incredible, the action is exciting, the music is great, and Andy Serkis, once again embodying a non-human character through motion-capture technology, remains terrific. But there’s something more here.

The film returns us to a childlike gaze, marveling at a world alive with possibility, where every sight lives on a continuum of meaning.

The artistry here lies in the mutations and permutations of language and rhythm that are spoken onscreen. Bodied is uneven, but it has the fire where it counts.

It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.

The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.

Beckermann wants not so much to contextualize as to invoke — with the hope, perhaps, that placing us in the middle of this debate will create its own context.

As it proceeds, it expands its vision and compassion, even as it de-escalates the tension. It’s not about the thing it’s about, except that it ultimately is totally about the thing it’s about.

Well-researched and highly detailed in how it lays bare the empty promises of the gig economy and the ruthless techno-feudalism of e-commerce, Sorry We Missed You is a movie that will infuriate you. But what makes it one of Loach’s best isn’t just its rage (which is plentiful) but its compassion (which is overwhelming).

The Age of Adaline, for its part, delivers the twists and turns of its fantastical plot with elegance and confidence. Here, the weak romance threatens to bring everything down.

It is one of the greatest films Spike Lee has ever made.

This is a film of shifting moods and occasionally contradictory narratives. It’s as much about delusion as it is about gentrification, and as much about friendship as it is about solitude.

Anderson has a sharp grasp of slapstick and visual humor, and he uses deadpan about as well as anybody since the great silent comedians. But for all the laughs and the social resonance, Anderson and his team have first and foremost conjured a work of spellbinding loveliness.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

Who’s telling this story? you might wonder, and therein lies the radical, breathtaking beauty of this film. Madeline’s Madeline is at once intoxicated by the world and deeply terrified of it.

These are the intriguing ideas at work in Secret Mall Apartment, but the film works as a movie thanks to the sly way it’s been put together.

The scene that kicks off The Climb is by far the best thing in the entire movie, but don’t hold that against the picture — the rest of it is pretty great, too.

As further demonstration of the director’s already impressive ability to build stomach-gnawing suspense out of everyday interactions, the movie is well worth seeing. But it also represents a step back in some ways. Farhadi is one of the world’s great filmmakers, but the generosity of spirit that was so pivotal to his earlier work seems to be in retreat in his latest.

The mystery may be resolved, but the suspense and uncertainty remain. And so, Guiraudie ends his film on a cold, almost cruel note of existential solitude that just might, if you let it, break your heart.

The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.

Careful, dutiful, and beautiful, Blade Runner 2049 cannot achieve the sublime slipperiness of Scott’s masterpiece. Whether it even needs to is up to you.

My dad took me. He was a film critic and he’d already seen it for work, but then he took me opening weekend and fell asleep while I watched it. He did that a lot. But I think he liked it. I guess he wouldn’t have gone to see it again if he didn’t. What kind of idiot does that?

For most of its running time, Arrival is entrancing, intimate, and moving — a sci-fi movie that looks not up at the stars but rather deep within.

Is Weapons scary? It certainly has its moments, and the oblique structure enhances the gathering dread. But more than anything, it’s a twisty-turny hoot.

Amid all these narrative threads Fogel occasionally loses sight of what should be the beating heart of this film: Khashoggi himself, who often comes through as an ill-defined figure with relatively ill-defined politics and views.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

Shaun the Sheep might look like an exciting, no-nonsense tale for little kids — and it totally is, on one level — but beneath its pitch-perfect simplicity lies great wisdom and beauty.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

It’s wonderfully inventive filmmaking: Amirpour’s striking compositions borrow from the iconography of both the Western and the horror film — wide, evocative vistas are intercut with dark, tense city streets where shadowy figures follow one another.

It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.

Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool.

Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.

It’s a gloriously hand-animated existential fable that manages to be both genuinely sweet and thoroughly twisted.

Fluctuating between the minor daily occurrences of Kun’s life and his touching sojourns into the past and the future, Hosoda’s film privileges moments of emotion over belabored story mechanics. Thus, it gathers complexity without sacrificing any of its guileless modesty.

Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.

To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction.

She Dies Tomorrow is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

More fun are the imaginative prehistoric beasts, from land-sharks to six-eyed spider-wolves to a tribe of “punch monkeys” that has developed a language that consists entirely of, well, punches and slaps. This was one of the strengths of the first picture, too: You sensed that the filmmakers had a blast inventing crazy new creatures for this primeval fantasy land.

Giannoli knows exactly which buttons to push and for how long. He takes what could have been a fussy adaptation of a dusty tome and turns it into something hugely entertaining.