Dana Stevens

Though it’s just slightly over two hours long, The Wind Rises has the historical sweep of a David Lean picture, complete with panoramic shots of migrating populations against a background of disaster and a romantic orchestral score by Miyazaki’s longtime musical collaborator, Joe Hisaishi.

The Social Network wants to be a social satire, a miniaturist comedy of manners, and a Greek tragedy; it bites off a lot, at times more than it can chew. But even the unmasticated morsels are pretty tasty.

Based on a horrifying real-life case that took place in the Moldavia region of Romania in 2005, Beyond the Hills can be seen as both a critique of patriarchal religious systems and an allegory about the tension between secularism and faith (as well as a precisely and painfully observed portrait of one particular friendship).

Her (Reichardt's) juxtaposition of imponderably vast landscapes and regular-scale individual lives is what gives Certain Women its mood at once of delicate restraint and of moral gravity.

As an intimate chamber piece with pitch-dark subject matter, James White could only avoid bathos by featuring two actors at the top of their game, alive not only to the inner worlds of their own characters but to the shared world they both know they’re on the brink of losing.

The movie itself triumphs by similar means; it is a marvel of unleashed childishness, like a birthday party on the edge of spinning out of control.

It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.

With a neck-snapping jolt, turns into the scariest exercise in cinematic sleight of hand since "The Blair Witch Project."

Though Mildred makes many choices that are reprehensible or downright dangerous, McDormand never fails to convince us of the fundamental decency of this woman, a tragic heroine struggling to find even the tiniest scrap of meaning in a comically awful world.

An old-fashioned movie-movie, the kind that's substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.

Submarine isn't a perfect film, but it's a terrific first one.

An investigation, at once lucid and enigmatic, of exile, loneliness and the fragile possibility of friendship.

Feisty, intellectually engaging.

One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

This installment is all about the grown-up kids. The three young leads - especially Emma Watson, who can do more with a still face than any actress her age - are all terrific

The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.

It is impossible not to marvel at Mr. Suleiman's knack for turning rage and hopelessness into burlesque.

A witty and acute examination of friendship, ambition and betrayal in the Parisian literary world.

Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.

Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.

Ballets Russes does tell a marvelous story of midcentury show business, encompassing both the most exalted expressions of pure art and the sometimes grubby commerce that sustained it.

The script of Before Sunset is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling.

Revisits the San Francisco of the late 1960's and early 70's, a time and place so encrusted with legend and cliché that you might wonder if there is anything left to say. It turns out there is quite a lot -- which the filmmakers have brought triumphantly to life.

Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George with such depth, tenderness, and history that their affection for one another’s bodies (there’s no sex, but loads of snuggling) seems like a natural extension of their pleasure in being together.

The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.

The first really good spy movie about the impossibility, under present historical circumstances, of making a really good spy movie.

A movie I snickered at more than once but never stopped staring at in wonder. This isn’t Nolan’s best film by any stretch, but it abounds in the qualities that are among his strengths.

Spider-Man, while hardly immune to these vices, is, like Mr. Maguire, disarmingly likable, and touching in unexpected ways.

That the studio gave a first-time director the freedom to explore these potentially sensitive themes, and to do so in a tone that is boisterous and playful rather than handwringing or self-serious, is a promising sign for Pixar’s future.

Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.

The next two hours might not have quite delivered on that initial promise of wonder - we grown-ups, being heavy, are not so easily swept away by visual tricks - except when I looked away from the screen at the faces of breathless and wide-eyed children, my own among them, for whom the whole experience was new, strange, disturbing and delightful.

A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.

Electrifying.

Two very fine actors, Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, engaged in an intense contest to see who can give the more understated performance.

From start to finish, is pretty much a blast.

Anchors its melodramatic formula in tough, heartfelt realism.

A freshness and intensity that recall the television series "My So-Called Life."

The resulting film is an unruly, riveting assemblage of anecdotes and impressions. The larger political and military questions about the war in Iraq are kept deliberately in the background, which some viewers may find frustrating.

The feelings that this simple, deeply intelligent movie produces -- of horror, admiration, hope and grief -- are as hard to name as they are to dispel.

Perhaps it's all a bit too much, and perhaps it doesn't add up, but the loose ends give the picture a jaunty, improvised feeling that, while it leads to some confusion, is ultimately part of its whimsical charm.

The whole thing vanishes pretty quickly from memory once it’s over. But for that hour and a half of fluid, kinetic filmmaking, you are putty in the hands of Steven Soderbergh, a reliably pleasurable place to be.

Embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

The real protagonist is the family itself -- a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.

It’s a teen sex romp well suited for the summer of 2019: feminist but not preachy, raunchy but not nasty, emotionally intelligent but not sentimental.

With a woman-with THIS woman-all the invincible-spy clichés feel fresh and fun again.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On struck me as an animated film like no other I can recall. It’s a story about the difficulty and necessity of making yourself vulnerable that is itself the product of an unusually intimate artistic collaboration, literally a couple’s shared in-joke that took on a life of its—or his—own.

Because it is so visually splendid and ethically serious, the movie raises hopes it cannot quite satisfy. It comes tantalizingly close to greatness, but seems content, in the end, to fight mediocrity to a draw.

Simultaneously a thoroughly mannered, mischievously artificial confection and an acute piece of psychological realism. Whose psychology, and which reality, remains ambiguous even after the tart, delicious final twist.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Americans’ reproductive choice is again in jeopardy, making The Janes not only a crucial part of the historical record but a searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and collective action.

Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.

The Guest isn’t here to deliver an earnest social message about the state of veterans’ affairs. Instead, the way good horror movies do, it channels our collective fear, guilt, and rage by creating a monster.

What distinguishes The Low Down from movies like "The Brothers McMullen" and "My Life's in Turnaround" is its ragged edge of authenticity, its refusal to plot its characters' lives on the graph of romantic comedy convention.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

By focusing on the power of cannily staged collective action to turn the tide of public opinion, Selma achieves a contemporary relevance that few historical dramas can — especially those built around real-life figures as encrusted in layers of hagiography as MLK.

Star Trek Beyond may not go where no Trek has gone before, but it’s that very fidelity to the show’s original values that will keep fans trekking to the box office.

Feels fresh and satisfying. Maybe it's the presence of Jason Statham, the British action star who has a physicality like no other actor out there right now.

Outrageous fun.

As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.

A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.

It unfolds with the verve and clarity of a piece of music, carefully composed and passionately played.

The movie belongs to Ms. Rodriguez. With her slightly crooked nose and her glum, sensual mouth, she looks a little like Marlon Brando in his smoldering prime, and she has some of his slow, intense physicality. She doesn't so much transcend gender as redefine it.

The rocky but loving relationships Amy has with her father and sister are every bit as important to the story as the connection she shares with her (would-be) boyfriend, and all three parts of her life affect and change one another, just like in—imagine that!—real life.

Knives Out is a sendup of twisty murder mysteries with all-star ensemble casts that also loves and respects that silly tradition.

Poetry is perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Anderson's suave, exuberant balance of free-form inspiration and formal control.

The accidental poignancy of Make It Funky! comes from juxtaposing the charisma and dignity of those musicians - and the knowledge of how much great music New Orleans has given the world - with the unavoidable images of devastation from the last two weeks.

Though both highly stylized and highly stylish, Drive isn't hurting for substance. It has rich, complex characters and a storyline that's both emotionally engaging and almost sickeningly suspenseful.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Whether you find Deep Water deliciously preposterous or just … preposterous may depend on how much you miss that kind of movie. In my case, the answer is “a lot.”

Even if this Superman remains an anomaly in the superhero-movie cosmos, the discovery of the winningly un-macho David Corenswet—without a doubt the best Superman since Christopher Reeve, who like Corenswet was a hunky Juilliard graduate with a bashful, dimpled smile—is enough to lift this new version of the long-beloved character into the sky.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

The movie's sexual politics are as contrived as its plot, which veers off into one of the surprise endings of which Mr. Altman is so fond.

The film, which includes some breathtakingly beautiful images of the green, wet Guyanese jungle and a monumental waterfall that cuts through it, is driven less by narrative than by ideas and impressions.

Mr. Mantegna, who as an actor is one of the leading interpreters of Mr. Mamet's work, gives generous room to the movie's first-rate ensemble.

This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.

For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth.

Whether or not The River is, as some critics have claimed, Mr. Tsai's masterpiece, it is an excellent introduction to his oblique narrative style, his favored themes and his careful, lyrical visual sensibility.

It advances no cutting-edge ideas and pushes no cinematic boundaries. But watching it at a moment when the majority of the population is moving leftward while our institutions are held hostage by a far-right minority — and when police violence continues, unchecked and unprosecuted, in the streets — provides the vicarious pleasure of watching a bunch of hyperarticulate progressives speak truth to power, and it feels pretty damn good, even if they do all talk a lot like Aaron Sorkin.

This 21st-century installment of the Mary Poppins story depends perhaps a bit too much on our lasting goodwill for the first one. But it also provides enough pleasure on its own to leave us hoping it won’t be 54 years until that familiar prim figure makes her next appearance through an opening in the clouds.

Wargnier's sumptuous, moving new film, captures both the hope of the returning Russians and their brutal betrayal.

For people who enjoy coming out of movies unsettled, a little riled up, bursting with questions, and spoiling for a debate, see Elle.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief.

"For my vision of the cinema," Orson Welles once said, "editing is not simply one aspect. It is the aspect." According to Edge Codes.com, a wonderfully informative new documentary, what was true for Welles's cinema is true for the medium as a whole.

The world according to Mann is loud, dangerous, morally ambiguous, and more than a little greasy, but during the hours you spend there, there's nowhere you'd rather be.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

With Quitting, he (Zhang) has removed sentimentality from the theme and presented it with unflinching honesty, a quality he shares with his fearless cast.

The revelation of Hateship Loveship is the casting of Kristen Wiig, who effortlessly makes the shift from comedian to straight dramatic actress in a role full of potential ego traps that she never falls into.

Instead of prying into his soul, the filmmakers investigate his working conditions and offer a sort of backstage ethnographic study of the professional stand-up culture.

Like its humor, the film's sentiment sneaks up on you, and so does the dramatic reversal that makes it something more than a collection of wry anecdotes.

Blue Ruin is a Clint Eastwood vigilante fantasy with an anti-Clint at its center—small-statured, round-faced, nervous Dwight (Macon Blair), whose burning desire to avenge the long-ago murder of his parents doesn’t make him one whit less terrified of actually doing it.

This is a movie that traffics in deep hindbrain emotions: fear and rage and lust and, above all, the pure animal drive to go on living.

Poignant though it is, the movie is the opposite of depressing. There is too much life in it.

I say give The End of the Tour a try. Ponsoldt’s gentle, talky road movie is a sort of Gen-X update of "My Dinner With André": A movie of ideas that, far from being the pompous screed that category might imply, actually contains interesting ideas — and what’s more, allows its characters’ perspectives on those ideas to remain in productive tension with one another.

Moonrise Kingdom is fun: a gorgeously shot, ingeniously crafted, über-Andersonian bonbon that, even in its most irritatingly whimsical moments, remains an effective deliverer of cinematic pleasure.

Perhaps more than any of the M:I directors so far, McQuarrie understands the unique properties of this singular movie star — his ascetic intensity, his sometimes-scary moral certainty, his always-scary drive to excel. The result of their collaboration is a briskly paced and witty reminder of why we go see summer action movies in the first place.

Spielberg has an effortless-seeming knack for creating compositions that are not just lovely to look at but integral to the idea or emotion he’s trying to express.

Though her movie has a clear narrative line, and might even be classified as romantic comedy, it is also a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.

Waugh's dialogue, effortlessly catching the lockjaw intonations and facetious mannerisms of the British aristocracy between the world wars, is a gift to screenwriters and performers alike. The actors Mr. Fry has assembled receive the gift with gusto and grace.

It is a small, plain movie, shot in 16 millimeter in dull locations around Boston; but also, like its passive, quizzical heroine, it is unexpectedly seductive, and even, in its own stubborn, hesitant way, beautiful.

While this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears.

(Director Bigelow) piles up one nerve-racking crisis after another, interspersed with moments of ethereal, almost otherworldly beauty.

The most shocking thing about it may be its unabashed sincerity.

To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.

Happy People's images of the Taiga, while often breathtaking, come from the standard visual language of nature documentary: in between interviews with villagers, cutaways to icicles hanging from branches or dawn breaking over an expanse of snow. It's Herzog's inventive use of voice-over that elevates the film above an extremely well-researched episode of "Nature."

For all its gritty genre elements, Hit Man is at heart a cozy hangout movie, a minor but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Linklater canon.

The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

This is not to say that Gravity is a masterpiece: Unlike Cuarón’s extraordinary "Children of Men", it doesn’t quite pull off its ambitious effort to combine formal inventiveness, heart-pounding action, and intimate human storytelling. But it succeeds thrillingly at the first two of those categories, and only misses the mark on the last because it tries a little too hard — which is certainly a welcome respite from the countless sci-fi thrillers that privilege the human story not at all.

What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex.

Very much a writer's film: Mr. Schickel's elegant, occasionally knotty prose, read by Sidney Pollack, offers a clear, nuanced interpretation of the artist's work in relation to his life.

This is a small movie about a small world, but its modesty is part of what makes it durable and satisfying.

The majority of Fury Road’s effects were done without using CGI, but even so, the onslaught of action is so fast-paced and overpowering there’s little time to appreciate Miller’s analog artistry, and the feeling of being inside a video game—a sinking sensation familiar from less carefully orchestrated action movies—sometimes takes over.

The chance to see the 83-year-old Hopkins in a role that forces him to confront the tragic fact of human mortality, and his own eventual demise, with such rigor, curiosity, and vulnerability would have been reason enough to send audiences to see The Father, even if we weren’t also witnessing the birth of a major film director in Florian Zeller.

Avengers: Endgame throws in plenty of laughs along the way. In fact, in the long stretch between its appropriately somber opening chapter and an emotionally grueling finale, it may be the most lighthearted and character-driven Marvel movie since the giddy comic entry "Thor: Ragnarok." Endgame consists almost entirely of the downtime scenes that were always secretly everyone’s favorite parts of these movies anyway.

Days of Future Past is the kind of extravagant production that sweeps you up in a sense of mythic grandeur even as you struggle to follow what’s going on.

The actor's (Murray) quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism.

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

A House of Dynamite...is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.

A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.

An exemplary work of cinéma vérité that allows its subjects to speak for themselves, traffics neither in pity nor in political grandstanding.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.

Strange, intense and moving -- one of the few truly grown-up movies you're likely to see this year.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.

1917 doesn’t solve the problem that was posed 100 years ago by the historical convergence of modern warfare and modern image-making technology. No movie can provide a final answer to the question of what it means to film a war. But Mendes’ stunningly crafted entry in the genre will now become a part of a long history of imperfect representations of that unrepresentable conflict.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.

If it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action.

Rather than a birds’-eye procedural about a complex international mission, it’s a close-up of that mission from the point of view of the participant who understands it the least.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.

The Bourne Identity, like its hero, triumphs through sheer unreflective professionalism. It is, by today's standards, a modest thriller, with a self-contained storyline and with very few big special effects.

A wonderful movie, observant and hilarious and full of sad and beautiful truths.

A very funny movie, alive with a sense of absurdity and human foible.

What distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing -- which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats -- and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance. She treats the character neither as a case study nor as an opportunity to show off her range, but rather as a completely ordinary and therefore arrestingly complicated person.

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.

The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.

Wonderstruck strikes a curious emotional tone, alternating between suspense and quiet wistfulness, with sudden surges of operatic intensity as the two timelines begin to connect. Still, all the moods hang together like the movements of a piece of classical music expressing different tempos: allegro, adagio, andante.

Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.

So wrenching and absorbing that you can easily lose sight of the sophistication of its techniques.

The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller.

It aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time.

It's all too neatly staged to make for dynamic cinema, even if the dialogue does crackle with a delicious nastiness.

To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.

Above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.

It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.

Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world.

By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.

It has a familiar, lived-in feel, and if its observations of rural life at a time of political turmoil don't feel terribly original, they are nonetheless absorbing and sometimes powerful.

I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.

Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.

Captain America isn't a masterpiece, but it's a solidly crafted, elegant adventure movie that held my attention from start to finish and sent me out into the street energized instead of enervated.

The passions of "Plata Quemada" are as bold as the images.

Mr. Hogan understands both themes, and his filmmaking style is a perfect mixture of wide-eyed wonder and slightly melancholy sophistication.

In its own modest, genial terms, the picture succeeds: it never wants to be more than charming and sweet, and it invites us to imagine London as a cozy, happy small town where coincidental encounters are everyday occurrences.

The nearly flawless execution of a deeply flawed premise.

Like a dream within a dream. Its images and emotions are vivid, disquieting and also hermetic, and while it may frustrate your desire for clear storytelling and psychological transparency, it has an intensity that surpasses understanding.

This is no tale told by an idiot — on the contrary, it’s a funny, fast-moving parable about fame and ambition, laid out for us with care and craft by a gifted filmmaker, a long-missed actor, and a world-class cinematographer. But I’m left with the suspicion the whole thing may signify — well, if not nothing, at least a good deal less than the filmmakers would have us believe.

The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

This is a grippingly original work, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt, and the first hour or more achieves something like greatness.

This elegantly hand-drawn caper doesn't have a lot to it - a little girl and her cat help break up a Parisian crime ring, un point c'est tout. But it moves to a different rhythm than the animated spectacles we're used to - it's sparer, less hectic, less cute - and the difference feels welcome and refreshing.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

Jones and Redmayne are both superb as a devoted but imperfect pair of headstrong people trying, and sometimes failing, to treat each other with care and respect.

Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.

It is filmed, perhaps fittingly for the subject matter, like a TV show. But on the heels of a Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, whose women were essentially hippie-styled set dressing, it’s a pleasure to see him putting some of his signature quips in the mouths of female characters, especially one as spiky, complicated, and powerful as Lucille Ball.

Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.

For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie.

Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.

If there is heartbreak in this movie, there is also a sense of energy that makes it almost exhilarating.

What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum — even more than Nemo, Finding Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases, bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion — this new movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity.

Linklater may not have set out to make a decade-spanning triptych of poetic meditations on youth, young adulthood, and middle age, but he, Hawke, and Delpy have accomplished exactly that. The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love.

Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked.

Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.

A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.

Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.

Lincoln does sometimes get a little sappy around the edges. Though his project here is clearly one of conscious self-restraint, Spielberg can't resist the occasional opportunity for patriotic tear-jerking, usually signaled by a swell of John Williams' symphonic score. But in between, there are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.

Lee Isaac Chung’s reboot is a worthy successor to the original, a rollicking popcorn thriller with an appealing screwball romance in the eye of its fast-moving storm.

At once somber and mysterious, comical and sad. It shows just how lonely a crowded city can be.

If there were an ensemble acting award at the Oscars, Glass Onion would be a lock for a nomination. The dialogue is fast-paced and verbally dense, and everyone in the cast volleys it back and forth with as much deftness as apparent pleasure.

Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.

There is really no other way to categorize this splendid, crotchety artifact.

Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.

A slow-burning suspense thriller about a trio of eco-terrorists conspiring to blow up a dam, it’s directed by Reichardt with the concision and elegance of a chess master.

There's something old-Hollywood about Slate's dizzy-dame charm, and at the same time, something very modern about her unapologetic ownership of her own sexuality.

The tale, in any case, is so gripping, so full of improbable turns and agonizing reversals that it bears repeating, and Mr. Butler and Ms. Alexander tell it straightforwardly and well.

The movie is a gaudy, noisy thrill ride -- hyperactive, slightly out of control and full of kinetic, mischievous charm.

In its brief sojourn on the screen, A Ghost Story moves through centuries of geologic time and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.

Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.

Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening.

Your attention is rewarded by a film of surprising depth and a few deep surprises.

Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.

Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

If her films so far have ranged from very good to great, The Land of Steady Habits exists somewhere at the low end of that continuum. But that still makes it a very good movie, full of sharp dialogue and lacerating insight about the haute-suburban milieu that the script both skewers and struggles to understand.

It’s well worth seeing, both for its merciless anatomization of the country’s post-Ceausescu social order and for Gheorghiu’s stupendous central performance as a mother so monstrous she makes Medea look like a pushover.

Nobody else working in movies today can make her (Keaton) own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.

Though it’s not concerned with global politics and warfare, Seconds is a blistering assessment of the cultural politics of the mid-1960s, equally bleak in its view of the establishment and the counterculture.

The heart of Life Itself, and the part of the film that’s most instructive even for those familiar with Ebert’s story, is the long middle section dealing with his stormy, never-resolved relationship with Gene Siskel.

Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.

As sublimely warming an experience as the autumn sun that shines benevolently on the vineyard owned by the film's central character.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.

Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.

The very existence of Four Lions is an act of audacity; the fact that it's also smart, humane, and frequently hilarious is nothing short of a miracle.

Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.

At first House of Sand may seem like a stark tale of survival, but a surprisingly lush and colorful romance blossoms in its bleak and gorgeous desert setting.

What emerges from the chaos may be uneven and at times ridiculous, but it's never boring.

Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.

The director’s sometimes absurd bravado — along with Forest Whitaker’s grave, wise performance in the title role — is what gives this outsized and sometimes lumbering film its irrefutable emotional power.

An intellectually engaging movie. But Mr. Jia's careful objectivity and regard for material detail are not matched by narrative rigor.

Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.

Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.

Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.

Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.

Though a dramatic (even melodramatic) narrative eventually takes shape, what you remember is the succession of moods and observations through which it emerges.

Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.

In any case, what is on screen is a delightful respite from awards-season seriousness - a feather film, you might say, that actually tickles.

Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.

Walks the delicate boundary between politically inflected realism and costumed sentimentality.

Of all the twists in Catfish-the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

Even when Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) tries to pack too much around the edges (including critiques of record-industry sexism and the mechanisms of black political fundraising), the romance at the movie’s center remains credible and vibrant.

The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.

A charming, silly family Christmas movie more likely to spread real joy than migraine, indigestion and sugar shock. The movie succeeds because it at once restrains its sticky, gooey good cheer and wildly overdoes it.

Justin Lin, who's now directed three movies in the Fast series, knows how to choreograph and edit an action sequence so that it's more than an onslaught of chopped-up images and grating noise.

The movie is, above all, a showcase for its stars, who seem gratifyingly comfortable in their own skin and delighted to be in each other's company again, in another deeply silly, effortlessly entertaining movie.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.

The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.

It is hard not to admire the independence and ambition of The Beautiful Country, even if the film does fall short of its epic intentions.

Land of Plenty, is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Mr. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges - and his account of them may not always be persuasive - but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.

As powerful as Foxcatcher can be scene to scene, there’s something maddeningly indistinct about it at times, as if the details that would make it all make sense remain somehow inaccessible to us.

While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.

Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.

He (Ford) slips into the role as if it were a pair of well-worn loafers, the left inherited from Peter Falk, the right from Clint Eastwood, and then proceeds, with wry nonchalance, to tap-dance, shuffle and pirouette through his loosest, wittiest performance in years.

The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.

As a lifelong aficionado of sprawling, dopey disaster movies with plenty of character back story—your Poseidon Adventures, your Twisters, your Titanics—and as maybe the world’s biggest fan of Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), I was naturally inclined to enjoy Moonfall, and I did, though maybe with not quite as much glee as I vibed with the fevered conspiracy theories and lovingly preserved world treasures of 2012.

Though the film immerses us in the details of Senna's life and the world of Formula One for 104 thrilling minutes, we leave still wondering both who Senna was and how Formula One racing works.

To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.

Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.

Btter-than-average screen Shakespeare: intelligent without being showily clever, and motivated more by genuine fascination with the play's language and ideas than by a desire to cannibalize its author's cultural prestige.

A modest, restrained picture, as small and satisfying as one of Woody Allen's better recent efforts.

At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

A tour de force of grime, fluorescence and destinationless velocity, is more concerned with atmosphere than meaning.

I found The Skeleton Twins merely entertaining, but I’d love to see these two actors team up again, Tracy-and-Hepburn style, and make a string of movies together — maybe some that would venture further into the post–rom-com territory this one begins to explore.

If all this does not quite add up to a coherent movie, it does produce a bouncy, boisterous and charming one, which becomes downright thrilling when it shows the bands in action.

For most of Wild, we’re alone with Cheryl’s stark aloneness with herself. That’s a fine place to be.

Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.

The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.

Fassbender spending nearly an entire movie obscured by a giant fake head is such a had-me-at-hello idea that it’s disappointing that Frank never plumbs the fascinating questions it raises about performance, group dynamics, and mental health.