David Edelstein

Master and Commander hooks you from its nifty opening salvo to its nifty closing punch line.

Even when you're able to guess the next calamity, it's still a shock in its ejaculatory intensity. The Farrellys never throw in the towel. Pretentious Sundance independents could learn a lot from such pistols.

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

I’m not crying “masterpiece” here. Locke is too contained, too well-carpentered, too self-consciously “classical.” But tours don’t come much more forceful. Once you’ve taken this 90-odd-minute drive with Tom Hardy, you’ll never forget his face.

Meehl, in her directing debut, is attuned to the rhythms of Buck, who's attuned to the horses.

It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.

Like his protagonist, Bahrani never gives up on William; his camera never stops probing. He loves West's face, and he honors its mystery.

There’s raw power in Chomko’s writing, but so much scrupulousness and craft that you feel safe when the time comes to weep.

Not enough happens in it. And yet everything happens in it.

This is finally the zombie flick as cautionary political tale, and as humanist parable. It's not the flesh-gouging zombie we have to worry about, the filmmakers suggest, but the soul-gouging zombie within.

Riveting and so suggestive that you can't consume it passively: You have to brood on it.

It strides above its crudeness like a colossus. It's smart people telling dumb jokes with a brilliant sense of irony. Anchorman gives you permission to laugh like an idiot.

The smartest, funniest, and best-looking sci-fi comedy since the movies learned to morph.

My first viewing left me dazzled but slightly confused; a second deeply impressed; a third rhapsodic. I wish I hadn't needed to rediagram it in my head to turn it into the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking the name of a Strindberg work) a dream play, and have made it once more madly, bitingly, chillingly alive.

Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.

Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.

The movie is so Burtonesque that it verges on self-parody--but it's fun and stunningly beautiful anyway.

Though mostly twaddle as history, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite is wonderful, nasty fun, a period drama (wigs, breeches, beauty spots) that holds the screen with gnashing teeth and slashing nails.

Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.

Almost to a one, the people Guest casts are virtuosos, and he lets them hit notes they can't hit anywhere else.

Demme's movie exuberantly crosses the border from documentary into hagiography and from hagiography into celebration.

Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.

Among the most enraging (documentaries) I've ever seen, and while it's fine and heartfelt and I commend it to those of you with strong constitutions, it is the film that has finally broken me.

During the ghastly, surreal climax, I had fun closing one eye and with the other watching various ashen older men stumble toward the exit.

The whole thing is irresistibly preposterous.

I wasn't prepared for the slap-happy brilliance of Shrek 2, which should ideally be seen twice--once with kids, once savored at something like a midnight show.

Ulrich Mühe gives a marvelously self-contained performance. There isn't an ounce of fat on his body, or in his acting: He has pared himself down to a pair of eyes that prowl the faces of his character's countrymen for signs of arrogance--i.e., of independent thinking.

Doubt is still overpowering; it took me a while when it was over to stop shaking. It's the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can't be reconciled, and Shanley makes visceral the notion that one can be right but never absolutely right, that doubt might be our last, best hope.

In sum, Last Days is the best kind of documentary — it ties you up in knots.

A warm, ingratiating, and fitfully hilarious epicurean road movie with a steady ache-an ache like a red-wine hangover.

The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.

Lake of Fire centers on abortion, but Kaye understands that while dead fetuses are the hook, the agenda covers the whole life cycle.

The movie is a political remake of "The Passion of the Christ," only more aestheticized: It's rigorous, evocative, and, in spite of its grisly imagery, elegant. It's a triumph--of masochistic literal-mindedness.

Experimenter is busily, thrillingly reflective. Its artificiality makes it seem even more alive, more in the present tense.

Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.

A rollicking, comic-book Robin Hood plot and more furiously entertaining fight scenes than the ones in Ang Lee's solemn martial-arts art movie.

Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece? Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.

The performances could hardly be better — with the exception of O’Dowd, who’s good but maybe needed to find just one redeeming moment. (The writers could have helped.) As for Andie McDowell, I haven’t changed my thinking about her amateurish work in almost everything but "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," but I also see that with the right material her inward demeanor can be powerful.

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

Indigènes is a stupendous work--and why that new title stinks to heaven.

We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.

Rush is a wonder. It takes bravery to convey closure, tunnel vision, total indifference to the camera that actors always know is there, however self-effacing they might want to be appear. Final Portrait is, like Rush’s performance, a miniature, but there’s a fullness to Tucci’s vision transcending every surface.

Don't dig too deep into The Other Side of the Wind: It's largely surface. But what a surface. And what a chest of toys for a man who never lost his childlike delight in playing with the medium.

Gallo’s movie is terrific, an original and disarming vision of a life that's all skids.

You should — you must — see Last Men in Aleppo to witness an ongoing tragedy. But you should also see it to learn humility. We — meaning Americans — ain’t seen nothin’. Yet.

The movie doesn't quite jell, but you'll feel its sting for hours.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.

The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn't lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.

The Other Side of Hope — which is tragic, funny, depressing, and inspiring — shows that a truly imaginative artist has resources unavailable to journalists and nonfiction filmmakers. In Kaurismaki’s work, it’s as if the masks of comedy and tragedy don’t — as usual — face away from each other, but stare each other in the face, as if they were saying, “You and me, we’re in this together.”

A brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism.

The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.

The miracle of the movie is the Bolger sisters, who are so direct and matter-of-fact that they hardly seem to be acting. But their simplicity is radiant.

The Savages is a delightful movie--the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year’s other superb convalescent-dementia picture, "Away From Her."

What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.

A grave screwball comedy. Its gags aren't just hilarious -- they have a weighty, plaintive soul.

It’s a flittery movie, too, but with soul: Gerwig has a gift for skipping along the surface of her teenage alter ego’s life and then going deep — quickly, without fuss — before skipping forward again.

So there you have it. A Prayer Before Dawn: Fine entertainment. Fine teaching tool.

Shows the dying tremors of a generation, and you might feel as if you can see every molecule, every atom give up the ghost.

Up in the Air is poised to be a smash, and Clooney--slim, dark, perfectly tailored--glamorizes insincerity in a way that makes you want to go out and lie.

A marvelously nasty revenge comedy.

Mike Mills's marvelously inventive romantic comedy Beginners is pickled in sadness, loss, and the belief that humans (especially when they mate) are stunted by their parents' buried secrets, their own genetic makeup, and our sometimes-sociopathic social norms.

The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin Macdonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions.

In the end, the point of this ridiculous, arduous, oft-interrupted odyssey turns out to be elusive — and is all the richer for it.

It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.

Loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn't much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb.

Soderbergh contrives the perfect voice for Leonard's prose--laid-back and grooving when it needs to be, but also taut, with the eerie foreboding of violence about to erupt.

I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.

One of the most inspired cases of the medium embodying the message ever captured on celluloid.

The movie has momentously disturbing ideas but a fine grain, its images suitable for framing — or hiding away in the attic.

As the ghouls evolve toward humanity and the humans toward ghouldom, we can appreciate Romero for using horror to show us How We Live Now, and How We're Living Dead now, too.

The elements in A Walk on the Moon, which is directed by the actor Tony Goldwyn (the bad guy in "Ghost") and written by Pamela Gray, feel miraculously right.

There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, Krisha, that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different — more ominous — level of reality.

Blessed is the go-for-it movie that can make room for dissonances and weirdness.

Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

Caine makes Hampton's too-literary narration work by playing it as an inner dialogue: It's the best performance of narration I've ever heard. It makes you want to hear Caine read the whole book--or read anything.

Rich, finely judged, gorgeously acted movie.

Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.

Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond.

Burnham made his name as a stand-up comedian, and if you can manage to look at Eighth Grade objectively — which isn’t easy, given the wallop it packs — you’ll see that it’s pretty slick.... But the slickness is dispelled whenever Elsie Fisher is onscreen, which is practically always.

For all its wizardry, The Incredibles isn't among my favorite animated movies. Weirdly enough, I think of it, instead, as one of my favorite live-action superhero pictures.

The German comedy Toni Erdmann makes the best case imaginable for the importance of tone.

A marvelous feat of re-imagination.

As a go-for-it music movie, Whiplash is just about peerless. The fear is contagious, but so is the jazz vibe: When Andrew snatches up his sticks and the band launches into a standard—say, Hank Levy’s “Whiplash”—it’s hard not to smile, judder, and sway.

It's a remarkable film--one to gnaw at you and keep you up at night.

Audiard's take is fevered, immediate, and hopeful--a story of a man recovering his soul. The most intense and compelling sections of The Beat are almost word for word from "Fingers" (albeit translated into French), but this beat changes everything.

The world didn't need a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. We didn't need it, but we got it anyway -- and it's pretty terrific.

I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.

Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story.

It’s worth shaking off the incongruities and getting on the movie’s wavelength. Once Transit’s bitterly ironic vision takes hold, it eats into the mind.

An entertaining, emotional, and surprisingly intimate movie--an epic saga of fauns and talking (Cockney) beavers and evil sorceresses and triumphal resurrections and massive, sweeping battles that nonetheless feels … small.

The movie is a triumph of an especially satisfying kind. It arrives at a kind of gnarled grace that’s true to this sorry old man and the family he let down in so many ways.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is an exquisitely crafted tale of woe with heartfelt early-sixties folk music — and an overarching snottiness.

Gorgeously silly.

A big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming.

Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it.

Both a masterpiece and a holy hell: Watching it, you feel you're being punished for a crime you didn't commit. Which puts you, come to think of it, in the same frame of mind as those poor Magdalene girls.