Dana Stevens

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.

Among the most profound, formally complex, and emotionally overpowering documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s also, by turns and sometimes at once, luridly seductive and darkly comic and physically revolting — a movie that makes you want to laugh and cry and retch and run out of the theater, both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it, too.

A big step up in scale for a writer-director who got her start in the freewheeling world of low-budget indies. Seeing her pull off a grand period drama with such confidence, humor, and style leaves you with a sensation not unlike what Jo March must be feeling in the film’s final scene, as she watches while her first book is printed, sewn, and bound, a tiny smile playing on her lips. I can’t believe it’s all finally happening, her face seems to say. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

See it because it's f---ing hilarious.

The magnificent One Battle After Another stays true to the spirit of the reclusive author’s best books: It’s a brainy meditation on our dystopian present that’s also a whacked-out roller coaster ride.

Whatever combination of practical effects and digital wizardry went into the technique that gave rise to Anomalisa’s otherworldly yet very human narrative universe, I hope it will be used to tell more stories, perhaps by this same storyteller.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.

Parasite, maybe the best film Bong has yet made, begins as a social-realist drama about a poor family struggling to find work in modern-day Seoul. By the end of its brisk two hours and 11 minutes, it will have cycled through black comedy, social satire, suspense, and slapstick.

In the quietly devastating Amour, Haneke's cool, dispassionate gaze feels, for the first time, something like love.

Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.

Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.

The World’s End not only makes a more than worthy conclusion to the Cornetto trilogy — it stands on its own as one of the sharpest, saddest and wisest comedies of the year.

Boyhood reimagines the coming-of-age film as family album, longitudinal character study, and collaborative artistic experiment — a mad risk that paid off in a movie that’s as transcendent as it is ordinary, just like life.

The way that Redford’s character — who for all his namelessness and near-wordlessness emerges as a distinct character, a calm, pragmatic, curious man with a dry sense of humor — struggles with that ultimate question is the beating heart of All is Lost, which somewhere in its second hour goes from being a good movie to being a great one.

This devilishly funny and luxuriantly sensuous film is so successful as entertainment that it’s hard to stop and notice the extreme degree of craft that went into its construction.

After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Renner's name.

Moonlight is one of those movies that showers its audience with blessings: raw yet accomplished performances from a uniformly fine cast, casually lyrical camerawork, and a frankly romantic soundtrack that runs the gamut from ’70s Jamaican pop to a Mexican folk song crooned by the Brazilian Caetano Veloso. But the film’s greatest gift may be that flood of cleansing tears—which, by the time this spare but affecting film was over, I was also shedding in copious volume.

I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.

Fruitvale Station’s wrenching power lies in the specificity of its storytelling and the ordinary human warmth of the world it conjures. You walk out of it, not shaking your head over an abstract social problem, but grieving the senseless death of one flawed, complex, tragically young man.

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

What makes this melancholy relationship drama play out as more than a hot lesbian remake of Annie Hall is the vibrant connection between the two gifted actresses at its center.

It’s such a welcome sensation to walk out of a movie feeling properly walloped, reminded of the potential power of the big screen to seduce us, entertain us, and break our hearts.

Roma is hypnotic and transporting and sublime, everything a movie seen on the big screen ought to be.

Impressive as Burnham’s achievement is, Eighth Grade could never hit the heights it does without the right actress in the demanding lead role.

Glass has set herself a high bar to clear in one’s first feature: tackling hard-to-film ideas about faith, psychic trauma, and mental illness. Yet rather than seeming abstract or preachy, Saint Maud is visceral, sensuous, and tactile.

Even if you couldn’t care less about jazz drumming, though, Whiplash is a thrill to watch. Underneath that taut, stylish surface, it’s really a movie about the perils of pedagogy, about the relationship between a passionate (perhaps too passionate) student and a demanding (perhaps too demanding) teacher. Which is to say, a movie about a uniquely powerful and potentially destructive form of love.

This is the kind of movie you live in as much as watch. Some of its images—Hammer’s Oliver dancing with unselfconscious abandon, Chalamet’s face in extended close-up in the stunning final shot—stay with you afterward like memories of your own half-remembered romance.

I’ve always admired this director’s commitment to both seriousness and laughter, to showing the beauty and significance of ordinary human life side by side with its petty, venal absurdity.

Only in the medium of animation could a conceit as elaborate as Inside Out’s be dramatized, and only animation this well-designed and executed could bring such a story so vibrantly to life.

The rapport between Ms. Watts and Mr. Serkis is extraordinary, even though it is mediated by fur, latex, optical illusions and complicated effects. Mr. Serkis, who also played Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, is redefining screen acting for the digital age, while Ms. Watts incarnates the glamour and emotional directness of classical Hollywood.

Though it’s often cited on lists of the greatest sports movies, or horse movies, or movies for children—all citations this magnificent film deserves—National Velvet is perhaps dearest to me for its lovingly detailed and precise portrait of this very particular mother-daughter relationship, and for the intertwined performances of the dry, laconic Revere and the tremulously radiant Taylor (who was already, at age 12, a sophisticated and sensitive actress).

As it moves toward an ambiguous and haunting finale, The Banshees of Inisherin has the fanciful yet gruesome quality of a folk tale or fairytale, a mood enhanced by Carter Burwell’s harp-and-flute-heavy score and Ben Davis’ painterly widescreen cinematography.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest cameo by Lonergan himself — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The swift-moving, pulse-pounding Dunkirk reveals its filmmaker at his most nimble, supple, and simple.

45 Years is about the relationship of the present to the past and of our past loves to our present lives—a relationship that, like any good marriage, remains a total mystery.

Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.

I will say—with as much clarity as I can muster through the tears once again blurring my vision—that the final 15 minutes or so of His Three Daughters are what lifts the movie out of “impressively fine-tuned family drama starring three excellent actresses” into the stratosphere of “transcendent work of art whose insights into the meaning of human impermanence you may want to change your life to be worthy of.

Surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based.

To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.

Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.

Not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece.

Ramsay’s fourth feature operates on the viewer in much the same way. With a minimum of resources, she creates a primal atmosphere of dread, then assaults the viewer’s consciousness in a single, sharp blow.

With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.

Between the burnished sheen of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, a soundtrack full of perfectly chosen period pop music, and countless sharply observed details of place, time, and character, The Irishman establishes a world that, for all its violence and tragedy, is hard to leave behind when the last shot...finally comes.

One of the things I loved about Can You Ever Forgive Me?—aside from the radiantly perfect casting of McCarthy and Grant, a Withnail and I–esque pair of drinking buddies, except this time they’re both asocial, hilarious Withnails—was Heller’s quiet confidence in establishing the milieu where all this typing and lying took place.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.

For all its borrowing and bricolage, La La Land never feels like a backward-looking or unoriginal work. Even when not every one of its risks pays off the way that first song does, this movie is bold, vital, funny, and alive.

It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

If you're interested in the history of the human race-if you're a member of the human race-you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

It plays the whole absurd shell game for laughs, even as it acknowledges that the last and bitterest laugh is on the rest of us.

Qualifies as one of my favorite movies of all time. This 1932 masterpiece, now digitally restored with retranslated subtitles and a newly recorded score, is a silent film that doesn't feel silent at all.

Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.

For a story that's all about the harnessing of fateful chthonic forces, Paul Thomas Anderson has dug deeper than ever before, and struck black gold.

There’s an urgency to Ida’s simple, elemental story that makes it seem timely, or maybe just timeless.

Fern’s need for constant movement, McDormand implies in a performance of extraordinary depth and ambiguity, is both a search for something and an escape from something else, and not even she seems completely sure what either something is.

Just like the short time the lovers have together, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is minimal but perfect, without an image, a glance, or a brushstroke to spare.

Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.

It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate."

What Mr. Crowe has done is nonetheless remarkable. He has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see.

Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.

The movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs.

The Babadook creates tension not with jump scares or chase sequences but with judicious editing and slow-burn suspense—that is, until it descends into a final half-hour of harrowing emotional and physical intensity, an extended climax that made me gasp aloud, hide my eyes, and weep at least twice.

As the couple’s widening rift exposes the gender and class assumptions that underlie their marriage... Force Majeure morphs into a biting critique of modern masculinity, of traditional parenting roles, and possibly of the institution of marriage itself.

A clever, vividly imagined, consistently funny, eye-poppingly pretty and oddly profound movie … about Legos.

Stupendously entertaining.

Mr. Turner does resemble "Topsy-Turvy" in its meticulous yet vibrant recreation of the past and its ever-expanding thematic amplitude. This is a movie not only about one particular artist, but about art as both a field of human endeavor and an object of shifting cultural and economic value.

Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.

The director Todd Haynes and the novelist Patricia Highsmith fit together like a hand and glove - a beautifully manicured hand and a sleek gray-green leather glove, two images that figure prominently in Carol.

Since her character wears no historical costumes and suffers from no debilitating ailment, it is likely that Ms. Curtis will be overlooked when Oscar season rolls around. This is a shame, since it is unlikely that any other actress this year will match the loose, energetic wit she brings to this delightful movie.

To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.

It seems almost unthinkable that such a charismatic, generous and lively man could be gone. It also makes you understand what it means for a country like Haiti to lose a citizen like Jean Dominique.

A near-perfect piece of popular entertainment, a children's classic.

Come for the skyline-destroying radioactive dino, stay for the delicately etched portrait of recovery and self-forgiveness. Or vice versa. Just don’t miss the chance to remind yourself why the world fell for Godzilla in the first place.

By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.

A brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "Pi."

It’s the rare political satire that can sound the depths of irony as No does and still end on a note of ambivalent hope.

Though Sweetgrass has moments of great beauty, the film is never nostalgic or idealizing about its human or ovine subjects. It shows the relationship of human and domesticated animal—and the relationship of both to nature—as a productive and symbiotic yet often brutal struggle.

The Ram is sometimes--often, even--a manipulative, self-pitying man, but Rourke and Aronofsky paint his portrait with a rigorous dignity.

A work of inspired simplicity.

Taxi is a subversive piece of underground filmmaking; for all its lighthearted banter and formal playfulness, the film maintains an undercurrent of anxiety and danger.

Stringent, clinical and almost unbearably moving.

You realize you are witnessing a psychodrama of novelistic intricacy and epic scope.

Metropolis retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage cable.

The magisterial (yet also often funny) performances from virtually every member of the cast, the rigor which with it explores complex characters and ideas, and the sheer painterly beauty of its compositions make this one of the few movies this year I almost immediately went back to see for a second time.

Is it or is it not stupendously friggin' rad? And the answer is yes. For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin' rad.

It's not one of Kurosawa's great films.... But it is, within its own proportions, nearly perfect.

Craig’s adaptation treats Margaret’s religious questioning with as much curiosity and respect as it does her budding sexuality.

Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.

An exquisitely simple movie. Mr. Kim manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time, even more astonishingly, to comprehend the scope of human experience.

Remarkable for its genuine, unpretentious lyricism.

Is, in the end, a boisterous love song -- a funny valentine to London, to chaos and to human decency.

The film’s structure at first seems loose and episodic, but each scene serves a purpose.

In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.

Spy lampoons sexism without abandoning sex — a tough tone for a comedy to strike but one that Feig and McCarthy manage to accomplish with both a sense of justice and a sense of humor.

Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.