Dana Stevens

It’s Noah Baumbach’s most mature and generous work to date.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a formidable achievement: not just the rare last chapter in a trilogy that maintains the high quality of the first two, but a visually lush, heart-pounding summer action movie that dares to ask hard questions about the struggle between good and evil—both on the larger social scale and within each individual—and the fate of life on Earth.

[It] isn't quite documentary filmmaking, but it certainly (and sickeningly) isn't fiction either.

Its effects seem more like those of a poem or a piece of music than a movie. Requires the reverent darkness and communal solitude of a theater.

May be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

It’s not clear how autobiographical Lady Bird is — Gerwig is from Sacramento and graduated from high school around the time the film is set — but the little slice of universe she shows us feels deeply and lovingly observed.

The Second Mother has the texture of lived experience, with characters who aren’t political symbols or social archetypes but struggling, flawed people trying their best to lead decent lives and pave a path to happiness for their children.

I'll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim's story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals.

The animation is a marvel - all the more so because the most demanding sequences seem almost casually tossed off. The world of Wallace and Gromit is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies, a place where lumpy, doughy characters achieve a peculiar dignity in spite of their grotesque features and the ridiculousness of their circumstances.

He's (Kingsley) pure violence, a sociopath who radiates menace even while sitting perfectly still mouthing pleasantries.

A gorgeous, heartbreaking and utterly convincing work of art.

Both sharply comical and piercingly sad. Mr. Baumbach surveys the members of the flawed, collapsing Berkman family with sympathy but without mercy, noting their individual and collective failures and imperfections with relentless precision.

Like so many European pictures these days, Read My Lips seems destined to be remade in Hollywood, and it is unlikely to be improved by the addition of vainer actors, a simpler screenplay and flashier direction.

Heist is a pleasure to watch, and the greatest pleasure is to watch Mr. Lindo and Mr. Hackman steal it.

Thrillingly smart, but not, like so many other pictures in this vein, merely an elaborate excuse for its own cleverness. As you puzzle over the intricacies of its shape, which reveal themselves only in retrospect, you may also find yourself surprised by the depth of its insights.

You come away from his film overwhelmed, hopeful and, perhaps paradoxically, illuminated.

The political implications of the film are manifest, as is the quiet courage of making it.

Easy Money's big heist scene is the only action set piece so far this year that was so suspenseful I could feel my heartbeat in my ears.

Williams plays this tired, disillusioned, chronically angry woman without a trace of actorly vanity. It's a performance noteworthy not just for its intensity but for Williams' ability to communicate inner experience at a micro-level of detail.

McQueen has created a tense and satisfying action drama with a decidedly feminist bent.

May be the most necessary film you'll see this year. But if you go to the movies in search of emotion rather than edification, don't let that word necessary deter you, because this is also one of the most engaging films you'll see this year, full of vibrant, complex real-life characters whose troubles and joys will stay with you long after the movie's done.

The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.

Russell has always excelled at finding new ways to use familiar actors, and every performance in The Fighter is noteworthy if not outstanding.

One of the great movies of the 1960's, but it has been, in this country at least, maddeningly elusive. In spite of its bitter edge, Billy Liar is pure Ambrosia.

Fascinating. Anyone interested in the challenges and techniques of acting -- which is really to say, anyone interested in human behavior -- should turn off E! and head down to Mr. Almereyda's film.

Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."

Like its hero, who is brave without a trace of bravado, Overlord is unusually quiet and thoughtful. The scale and ambition of combat movies has usually been epic, but this one is disarmingly lyrical and subjective.

A brilliant satire of emotional politics.