Caryn James

There are great concert movies and great socio-political documentaries, but Summer of Soul combines both in one gloriously entertaining and intellectually astute film.

American society, in all its strengths and missteps, has been a major theme for both Pynchon and Anderson, and it grounds Anderson's dazzler of a film, giving it an emphatic, unmistakable political charge.

[Mr. Gerima's] film is ambitious in its depiction of slavery and accomplished in its visual command.

Throughout, White is filled with exquisite scenes that don't press too hard...and those moments are all the richer for their understatement.

Gerwig’s smart, delightful film seems on its way to becoming a classic.

Like other love stories of the period, Gueule d'Amour has a melodramatic surface, yet it hits a nerve in anyone who has ever spent too much time thinking about the wrong person.

This may be Miyazaki's most expansive and magisterial film. If it is not the most instantly stunning, that might be because he takes the time to deliver worlds within worlds, layers under layers, to create an overwhelming experience by the end.

Haigh and his cast, including Paul Mescal as Adam's new lover, give this film about loss, enduring love and hope for the future such truth and poignance that it is easily among the best of the year.

It's boldly imaginative and his most mature work yet.

Marty Supreme has such scope, ambition and humour that its flaws, as with those off-screen Timmy exploits, are easy to overlook.

The Seventh Continent is one of the most stylish films in this year's New Directors/New Films series. With its fragmented pattern of beautifully composed and repeated images from middle-class life, it rejuvenates a 1960's style that would seem to be exhausted by now. But the Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke pulls viewers through a good portion of the film on the sheer strength of his visual flair, avoiding the classic trap of how to create a film about boredom that is not boring.

An eloquent meditation on loss, memory and how film can shape them.

Leigh's strategy of taking us into his characters' world without prelude or explanation, letting the revelations and backstory waft out, help make his films feel authentic. He seems to have a magical ability to make the everyday captivating to watch

The film takes place largely in two down and dirty rooms, the recording studio and a basement where the band rehearses, but it doesn’t feel stage bound. Wolfe finds the right balance between letting Wilson’s trademark monologues flow and shooting them in a cinematic way that keeps the film moving.

Full of eye-opening musical performances, the film also sparkles with tongue-in-cheek humor, and features contemporary interviews that are often far from what they seem. You have to go back to After Hours to find a Scorsese film with a similarly mischievous wit.

McDormand’s commanding, deeply empathetic performance holds the film together. She is so convincing and unaffected that it feels as if Fern is another non-actor whom Zhao magically gets to be natural on screen.

In poetic fashion, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt asks for interpretation, making ordinary explanations unnecessary.

The Color Purple is a big, brash spectacle, an extravaganza blending the styles of Broadway musicals, Hollywood studio movies and music videos, with a mix of gospel, pop, blues and ballads, all of that coming together smoothly in one exuberant film.

If Nobody's Fool is often heartbreaking in its sense of loss, it is also hopeful in the strength of its emotions and the sheer beauty of its performances.

The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd.

The story has its moments of suspense, especially when Nina's child wanders off from the beach. But the soul of the film exists in the small exchanges and tensions between characters.

Full of energy, wit, passion and tragedy, looking backward and forward at once, it is one of the most moving films of the year.

This is the old, old trading places gag, and while a good idea can always be reinvented, invention is precisely what Taking Care of Business lacks.

Josef Kubota Wladyka, the director and co-writer, shifts from poignant emotion to comedy to surreal scenes that take us inside Haru’s fantasies just as gracefully as the dialogue shifts from Japanese to Spanish and English.

It is a small movie with steep odds against it, but it is also extraordinarily accomplished.

Fayyad and his cinematographers and editors wield the cameras and shape the scenes in the documentary so beautifully that The Cave is both intensely real and a carefully wrought work of cinema. A kind of counterpart to Last Men, the new film is perhaps more wrenching and even more ambitious in its visuals.

[A] delicate, lovingly photographed, strongly acted coming-of-age story.

Mixing archival material and fresh interviews with Edwards and her crewmembers, Holmes creates an engaging, suspenseful story with layers of social resonance. Maiden is gripping and effective even if — maybe especially if — you have absolutely no interest in sailing.

Stolevski depicts the young creature’s journey toward humanity with sensitivity and increasing investment.

A ghostly story that’s not exactly a ghost story, Rose of Nevada is a typically imaginative film from the director Mark Jenkin.

The actors keep the film going, at times by sheer magnetic on-screen presence even when the screenplay lets them down.

Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee at his mature best, made with his distinctive, passionate voice and kinetic artistry.

While Pain Hustlers is a perfectly fine title, the film probably should have been called Liza Drake, the name of the sales rep played by Emily Blunt, who single-handedly almost saves this tone-deaf drama from itself.

Only the comic parts soar, and they fit uneasily with the pallid romance and half-hearted family drama.

Its humane message is potent even though it comes in the offbeat package of this gleeful, violent but entirely successful dark comedy.

Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

With the best material used up, That's Entertainment! III cleverly focuses on outtakes, unfinished numbers and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the old musicals. This results in a lively and funny compilation of curiosities suggesting what might have been.

Craig's performance is wily and joyful, and the film's biggest flaw is that there is too little of him, as Johnson often turns the spotlight from Blanc to other characters.

With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films. Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far.

This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.

The director and co-writer, John Dahl, keeps up perfect swift timing throughout the film, playfully loading on every suspense-genre trick he can imagine.

Cinematically modest but full of social and political urgency.

The slow-burn film features superbly understated acting and astute visuals. This is Mariani's first fiction film after having made two documentaries and shorts, but its ambition and accomplishment are fully formed.

It is funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing, with a kaleidoscope of likeable characters and actors. Director Craig Gillespie (Cruella and I, Tonya) has turned a saga that ended up before a Congressional finance committee into a breezy entertainment.

Ju Dou is an intellectually and artistically brave film. Asking for dramatic power and psychological depth as well may be expecting too much.

What emerges is an amazingly fresh visual immersion in space, and a film that works far better when dealing with inanimate objects than with humans.

The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

Running at 2 hours and 49 minutes, it is bigger than the previous films in every way ­– not better or worse, just more.

Defying any logical narrative, the film relies on poetic images and associations. It suggests that the most frightening thing in the world can be in your own mind.

You might call this the scattershot school of film making... The result of being pushed and pulled through the confusing styles of Near Dark is simple exhaustion.

For many of us, especially in the West, the film is likely to be confusing here and there. It would have been helpful, for example, if the subtitles had let us know who's speaking Russian and who's speaking Ukrainian. But it is worth a bit of confusion for a film so powerful and immediate, and made with such a lucid artistic vision.

Despite that ominous theme, The Great Lillian Hall is a lovely tribute to life in the theater, with all its personal compromises, and a showcase for Lange, who deftly shows the character as a vulnerable woman and also displays the distinct style of Lillian the bravura actress.

Perhaps no film can capture the enormity of that war, which left around 17 million dead, and generations to grieve. Director Sam Mendes wisely takes the opposite approach, personalising the experience through two young British soldiers sent on a harrowing, high-stakes, night-long mission, he creates a film that is tense, exhilarating and profoundly moving.

Through it all, Bailey’s star power shines. She holds the camera’s attention, pops off the screen and gives Anna an innocent energy that makes her ruses seem mischievous and harmless.

And as always in Peele films, clues and echoes are so detailed and carefully planted that it's hard to spot everything the first time through. He is still a master filmmaker, and even a mediocre Jordan Peele film is better than the strongest film of an ordinary director. Nope is that mediocre film.

Writer and director Sam Levinson, who also created the audacious and enthralling HBO series Euphoria, gives the familiar story a makeover with dynamic, sensitive performances from its hugely talented stars, and a story that broadens to include race and the new Hollywood.

But it takes on a quieter, more psychological tone and becomes infinitely better when Fiennes arrives.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire does manage to come up with a few witty scenes.

Hewson takes a flawed but good-hearted mess of a character and makes her sympathetic, likable and fully human.

This story of corruption and conspiracy in a small Louisiana town might have passed as a taut if familiar action thriller — if it had actually been taut.

Eloquent, understated film.

The Woman King leans toward fantasy in its heroic moments, but is rooted in truth about war, brutality and freedom. It is a splashy popcorn movie with a social conscience.

The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.

While its mystical subject defies logic, Sara Dosa’s verite film is cogent and appealing thanks to a savvy strategy. Dosa respects Ragga’s beliefs without endorsing them, and positions her activism as a metaphor for saving the environment.

Without for a minute undermining Ride’s importance, this clear-eyed film doesn’t sugarcoat her sometimes prickly personality.

There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.

After a creaky start, Egg comes through with terrific performances from Reiner and especially Hendricks, and with some scenes of piercing honesty.

The documentary rarely presses its larger points. But it calmly reveals how much journalism has changed since Ivins started out in the late 1960s, yet how relevant her observations about the blight of corporate money in politics and threats to the First Amendment remain today.

This absorbing film is likely to stay with you. It's a compliment to say that you may walk away with the off-kilter feeling that you have been in another person's dream the whole time.

The film succeeds as an astutely constructed, sensitive piece of journalism that becomes a moving account of dealing with grief and irreparable loss.

On the Rocks is practically a distillation of Coppola’s Lost in Translation style. Each scene is compact and feels lived in, without any urgent narrative drive. That elegant surface makes it seem like a trifle, but there are layers beneath.

The Iron Claw's shallowness and eventual treacliness are especially disappointing.

Although the individual episodes are gripping, the plot trajectory is obvious, especially when we arrive at an ending that's easy to see from the start. But it works because there is something quietly miraculous about the way Hanks embodies this character, making him the stirring and fresh emotional centre of a beautifully old-fashioned Western.

The film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.

Bros races along almost until the end when it embraces romcom elements, including a montage, that land as more clichéd than subversive. But that doesn't make the rest of this charming film any less entertaining and effective.

One of Lee’s brilliant choices is to refuse to put a soppy romantic gloss on the affair. He suggests instead that passion can blind lovers to a true understanding of each other as easily as it can open their eyes.

Exotica may not be as perfectly formed as some of Mr. Egoyan's earlier work. Because Thomas's subplot is not as intriguing as the scenes in the club, the stories take too long to merge. But the flaws are minor. Mr. Egoyan continues to build an important, uncompromising career.

It is impossible to separate Mr. Hartman's writing and direction from Mr. Horton's smooth, sophisticated camera work, which offers a broad view of the cluttered streets and also peers up narrow stairwells to suggest Mac's claustrophobic life. However their collaboration worked, ''No Picnic'' does not look or sound quite like any other film, and that's more than you can say about most movies of any size.

This atmospheric, expertly crafted little New England noir has droll dialogue, a female empowerment theme and a sly use of crime elements.

Candy Mountain...seems to be a small, quirky film, but it easily assumes the weight, ambition and success that many larger films aim for and miss.

It is a dark, lurid revenge fantasy and not the breakthrough, star-making movie some people have claimed. But it is a genre film of a high order, stylish and smooth.

Walker and her editors have created an absorbing narrative, so the film never feels as cobbled together as it actually is.

Mr. Romero, who adapted the screenplay from Michael Stewart's novel, wraps up more loose ends than anyone cares about, yet leaves some nagging bits of illogic.

De Wilde and Catton deliver a largely faithful and unchallenging adaptation, beautifully staged and sharply acted by a cast adept at balancing wit and romance.

Loosely based on the legend that inspired "Swan Lake," and blatantly borrowing the formula of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," this animated musical turns out to be funny and enchanting on its own. Directed by Richard Rich, who started an animation company after 14 years at Disney, "The Swan Princess" makes first-rate copying seem like a good idea.

Chalamet gives Dylan a defiant look in his eyes and through these later scenes creates a visceral sense of his restlessness, of how important it is for him to break free of the public assumptions about him, both musically and as the spokesman of a generation. You can finally feel an energy that can't be restrained and that should have been in the film all along.

Writer and director Andrew Semans puts Hall in every scene of this modest but effective thriller, and she comes through with a stunning, charismatic performance.

This is a fresh, unsentimental yet touching story.

Disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality.

A glib misreading of Men might reduce it to: "Ha! Men! They're all alike." But the film's ending emphasises how much Harper's trials and Garland's film have been about her profound tangle of love, grief and understanding.

Moving on from its cynical beginning, Materialists takes the long way around to an ending that is decidedly hopeful. It offers an unblinkered, earned romanticism that suits this moment, and bolsters Song's reputation as one of our most astute observers of relationships.

[A] solid, straightforward history of abortion rights in America.

That interplay between work and life gives the project its distinctive perspective and offers the most acute revelations. The lack of talking heads commenting on her enhances the intimate feel.

I Am Greta is a smoothly constructed view of a heroine in the making, and of how the world largely embraced and sometimes dismissed her.

The script, which he wrote with Alain Le Henry, is as confusing and tiresome as the direction. What is meant to be a touching, comic relationship between Marx and Johnny is simply flat.

A flawed little time capsule, the doc veers uneasily between kindly character portrait and shallow attempt at media studies.