Dana Stevens

The first hour and half or so of True Grit is as good as anything the Coens have ever done-a sweeping Western that, like John Ford's best films, exposes the cracks in American myths of frontier justice and self-reliance.

Despite its atmosphere of failure and melancholy, Inside Llewyn Davis is ultimately a dark valentine to both its hero and his milieu.

Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.

It is, all in all, a rambunctious and inspired ride in which the Coen brothers' voracious fascination with the arcana of American popular culture and their whiz-kid inventiveness reach new heights of whimsy.

Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.

The movie is at its best when Moodysson... lets his three rebellious heroines simply exist and interact as the overgrown children the actresses still are, collapsing in laughter during a cafeteria food fight or negotiating their first stiff flirtations with a like-minded group of punk-rock-loving boys.

Documenting war is a small, partial but indispensable step toward its eventual eradication. Mr. Frei's quiet, engrossing film is a sad and stirring testimony to this vision and to the quiet, self-effacing heroism with which Mr. Nachtwey has pursued it.

A tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.

It’s a wistful portrait of our current love affair with technology in all its promise and disappointment, a post-human "Annie Hall."

Stripped to its bones, Faces is the elegantly simple story of two equal and opposite betrayals.

Having already admired Pattinson’s post-vampire work in David Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis" and elsewhere, I wasn’t surprised to see him kill it in this role as a shambling antihero in the "Dog Day Afternoon" mode. With this movie, both Pattinson and the Safdie brothers have broken new ground in their careers.

This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.

Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism.

Wake Up Dead Man marks not just a return to form but an expansion of the series’ potential.

It bounces along at such an antic pace that its 100 minutes feel like far fewer. But there’s a quiet contemplativeness at the movie’s heart, exemplified by a long scene in which Woody and Forky make their way along the shoulder of a highway, plastic hand in pipe-cleaner hand, discussing the meaning of life as a plaything.

The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists.

The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.

If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.

Snowpiercer is its own strange, special thing, a movie that seems to have been sent back to us from some distant alternate future where grandiose summer action movies can also be lovingly crafted, thematically ambitious works of art.

Cate Blanchett’s titanic, almost fanatically well-researched performance—she switches effortlessly between English and German with a soupçon of French thrown in, does her own piano playing, and conducts a real orchestra with utter verisimilitude—thrillingly embodies both Tár’s intense charisma and her monstrous skill at manipulation.

Byrne, who played a tightly wound control freak to perfection in "Bridesmaids," here gets a chance to bust loose. In a late sequence where she frantically spearheads a multipart mission to bring down Delta Psi from the inside, Byrne makes you wish someone would write a big, broad, raunchy comedy just for her.

Sivan has accomplished something extraordinary: he has given political extremism a human face.

Unpretentious, smartly written and a lot of fun.

A package of cinematic Pop Rocks, a neon-hued, defiantly non-nutritive confection that nonetheless makes you laugh at its sheer bold novelty.

It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.

Mr. Richard's film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art.

Unlike most movies of this kind, which run out of steam and ideas as they go along, Johnny English gains momentum, nudging you along from a few stray giggles to helpless, giddy laughter.

It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.

Glatzer and Westmoreland don’t need to stack the emotional deck on Alice’s behalf or wring tears from the irony of a brilliant linguist’s cognitive decline. They just leave the camera on Moore’s beautiful but increasingly faraway face, and our tears come on their own.

It’s hard to resist Isle of Dogs’ energy and wit, the filmmakers’ evident joy in exploring the miniature world they’ve imagined.

Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.

The Weitz brothers -- notorious as the authors of the "American Pie" series -- handle the sentimentality of the story with a light, sweet touch.

The rapprochement between Rémy and Sébastien is beautiful to watch, and all of the characters in The Barbarian Invasions are played with a lusty warmth that makes them lovable even when they are being tiresome.

A passionate, angry piece of advocacy, but it is equally, and in consequence, a brave and necessary act of truth-telling.

A wise, gentle and sad new comedy by Zhang Yimou.

With the help of an ensemble that is nearly flawless, she (Troche) assembles the damaged human elements of Ms. Homes's world with patience and precision, and more often than not chooses dry understatement over easy satire or obvious sentiment.

The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about.

Soldini's amiable new comedy suggests that an older, better Italy of imagination, rationality and civility survives on the fringes of a modern nation obsessed, like most others, with consumerism, empty prosperity and easy pleasure.

A slyly effective thriller and of a deft comedy of romantic confusion. Whatever its shortcomings as a consideration of globalization and its discontents, The Edukators succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of a man who falls in love with his best buddy's girlfriend and doesn't know what to do about it.

This frank, funny, tender film both asks and receives more from its sex scenes than any movie I've seen in a long time.

At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.

Reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture.

The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly.

This Much Ado About Nothing — while perhaps not an adaptation for the ages in every respect — is as bracingly effervescent as picnic champagne.

Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.

Certified Copy isn't the masterpiece that "Close-Up" was, but it lures the viewer into a comparably labyrinthine thicket of fakeouts, doubles, and assumed identities. If you like movies that induce a pleasurable state of vertigo, this is one of the great discoveries of the year.

Streep, who has long enjoyed playing women endowed with more than the average supply of gusto, makes the character’s delusional faith in her own talent so infectious that we ache at the thought of Florence’s impending humiliation even as we prepare ourselves to laugh at it.

Mr. Boyle has hardly lost his sly, provocative perversity or his ear for the rhythms of unchecked violence, but he does seem to be maturing. It's as if, in contemplating the annihilation of the human race, he has discovered his inner humanist.

This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.

An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.

With tact and enthusiasm, Mr. Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.

Just 97 minutes long, Hard Truths is a deceptively slight movie that can barely contain its titanic central performance.

There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

A cautionary essay on the risks to democracy posed by the fight against terrorism.

This movie’s human scale, its unaffected compassion for every one of its far-from-perfect characters, is what kept me on its side throughout.

The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances.

Fukunaga's vision of Jane Eyre is refreshingly un-Gothic. Though all the story elements are in place for a thunder-on-the-moors-style gloomfest (and though there are, in fact, several thunderstorms on moors), this film is low on Romantic atmospherics and flooded with natural light.

With its restricted one-night timeframe and a setting that rarely expands beyond the walls of the firm, Margin Call can feel like a dramatized version of those ubiquitous 2008 news photos of white men staring in horror at numbers on a screen. But in its best moments, this film reminds us that every one of those pictures contained its own story of compromise, corruption, and ruin.

The film has a richer, more various visual texture than most documentaries, combining still photographs, black-and-white video and Super-8 film, sometimes with wild sound or none at all.

Hardly a work of state-of-the-art virtuosity, but rather an example of quiet, confident craftsmanship that tells a sweet, charming tale of intergalactic friendship.