Dana Stevens

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.

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

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.

Frances Ha feels like a collaboration between two people in love, and not always in the best way. There are too many scenes in a row that make the same point.

Sophie, in both her incarnations, joins an impressive sisterhood of Miyazaki heroines, whose version of girl power presents a potent alternative to the mini-machismo that dominates American juvenile entertainment. Not that children are the only viewers likely to be haunted and beguiled by Howl's Moving Castle - all that is needed are open eyes and an open heart.

The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.

A peripatetic comedy about two comedians on a jaunt around the north of England, alternately amuses, bores, and annoys, just like its two hilariously intolerable protagonists.

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.

It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.

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

The pleasure of watching McConaughey strut, preen, and menace his way through this Southern-fried black comedy (at least I think it's a comedy) isn't quite enough to save Killer Joe. The whole movie has something tonally off about it, not to mention a theatricality that works against it in a way Bug's didn't.

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.

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.

Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced.

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

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.

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.

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

The film is a triumph of mood and implication.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

And then comes that transcendent last scene, in which the man whose side we’ve barely left during this incredible ordeal is suddenly revealed as the best kind of hero, not super at all but ordinary and vulnerable and human.

At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.

Electrifying.

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.