David Edelstein

Law gives a doozy of a performance: He's fond of bulging his eyes, curling his head like a gargoyle, and displaying a set of rotten yellow teeth. This is some of the most flamboyantly bad acting since Brad Pitt in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). An Oscar nomination would appear inevitable.

Ends very abruptly, at a point where you're ready to hang out with it a while. I wanted it to go on and on, but that ending is right. It leaves you the way American movies almost never do: relaxed, receptive, and happy in the moment, not even caring if your train comes in.

The movie’s take at times is fascinating. But it’s basically one long, sick joke played at half speed. It’s a ponderous, sick joke.

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.

Young Edie Martin, with her chaotic swarm of red ringlets and deadpan dutifulness (she has few lines, but they’re goodies), is the movie’s sign of eternal spring--the butterfly atop the just-opened blossom.

Guilt and alienation from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, so arty, enervated, and allegorical it might have been made by a European in the early sixties.

Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality.

I hate to damage so fragile a work with overpraise, but, gay or straight, if you don't see yourself in this movie, you need to get a life.

An aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce that mingles condescension and compassion in a manner that's disarmingly--and often upsettingly--original.

It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.

Like Pynchon’s novel, it’s a little insular, too cool for school. It’s drugged camp. Some of the plot points get lost in that ether — it’s actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It’s not shallow, though.

The director, Tim Wardle, has shaped the film as a detective story in which the more pieces of the puzzle are filled in, the more disgusted and infuriated we become.

Revenge inverts the gutbucket revenge genre without transcending it. That said, why should men have all the fun? The movie is like Ladies’ Night at a sleaze-o bar.

Arnold's first feature, "Red Road" (2006), centers on another outsider, a woman who monitors security cameras. The film is formally brilliant, but it doesn't have the breathtaking openness of Fish Tank.

Hot Fuzz is fun, and it's nice to see all the English character actors who aren't busy in Harry Potter films, but it lacks its predecessor's freshness.

Django Unchained doesn't merely hit its marks; it blows them to bloody chunks. It's manna for mayhem mavens.

Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.

As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele’s attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he’s more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

The best film of the year? Possibly …

Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.

The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

Boorman pays a price for his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect. The magic is there but below the surface.

No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

This is an amazing movie.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

Isn't just the most explosively entertaining movie musical in a couple of decades. It's going to be the most influential: the one that inspires the rebirth of the Hollywood musical.

Starred Up is an edgy, teeming thriller, brilliantly disorienting, making strange a world we thought we knew, at least from other movies.

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.

First-time director Richard Kwietniowski has fun with the collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

This is by light-years the most entertaining movie of the year. How many apocalyptic sci-fi action extravaganzas leave you feeling as if the world is just beginning?

Woman at War takes its tone not from von Trier but deadpan pranksters like the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, whose absurdities have an undercurrent of tragedy. Erlingsson has a magnetic heroine in Geirharðsdóttir, who’s lithe and athletic without being a show off, and underplays as a good soldier would.

The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.

No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.

It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games" but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is one of those showbiz docs that’s not exactly pleasurable but offers a penetrating glimpse — sometimes too penetrating — into what it means to eat, drink, and be contrary in the public sphere.

This is one of the most galvanizing documentaries I've ever seen.

Midway through, an eerier theme creeps in, all the more powerful for Herzog's lack of insistence. By the "end of the world" he means the end of the world.

The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks.

The movie isn't as world-shattering as those bouts: It's a regretful-old-warrior weeper.

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

It's hugely entertaining, it's spectacularly acted, and it pricks you in all kinds of places. Maybe the best thing is to see it and let it bug you, too.

The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing--it touches on every aspect of modern life. It's the documentary equivalent of "The Matrix": It shows us how we're living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything.

It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.

At one point, Van Damme delivers a long, tortured soliloquy about his alienating stardom to the camera in a single take. It's the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try.

Troell’s entrancingly beautiful Everlasting Moments uses surfaces--light, texture, faces--to hint at another world, a shadow realm.

It's depressing that this first movie in years to dramatize the American Revolution has so little to do with the politics of secession and so much to do with pop-culture themes of vigilantism.

For Greenfield, the Siegels are a brilliant metaphor for everything farkakte about the U.S. economy and the culture that shaped it.

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

It thaws the soul.

Nothing in Trophy shakes out neatly, because everyone onscreen has his or her own set of values and every value is in conflict. The movie is richer in every way for its tangled sympathies. It will leave you angry, sick, and confused — but not smug. Never smug.

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.

This Bond is haunted, not yet housebroken, still figuring out the persona. In Casino Royale, the reset button has been pressed in the manner of "Batman Begins."

James Gray’s space opera Ad Astra is so eerily, transfixingly beautiful that I want to purge from my mind its resolution.

Howard A. Rodman's script has a lot of juice, and the rhythms are so pregnant that the air vibrates with something, even if you're not sure what.

A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

Director Bill Pohlad (working with frequent Wes Anderson cinematographer Robert Yeoman) is extraordinarily sensitive to the amorphous nature of Wilson’s life and art, and Atticus Ross’s score creates a floating, evocative soundscape, which is Brian Wilson–esque without a trace of plagiarism.

If you think LaBeouf is a joke, you need to see him here. There’s wildness there, but acting centers him. He’s magnetizing.

True Grit isn't as momentous an event as you might hope, but once you adjust to its deliberate rhythms (it starts slowly), it's a charming, deadpan Western comedy.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.

The movie has already blown away advance-sale records, and when you go (which, of course, you will) I bet you’ll have fun — I did, mostly. But it’s the fun of seeing something fairly successfully redone, with the promise of more of the same to come.

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 becomes a nail-biter, the audience hanging on every letter. Who could have anticipated that a spelling competition would yield such a heartbreaking thriller?

Árpád Halász is the credited “animal trainer for 280 dogs,” Teresa Ann Miller the handler of Bodie and Luke — better actors than half this year’s Academy Award nominees. This is the new gold standard for nature-bites-back movies.

Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.

The final sequence dodges (or elides) many of the movie’s central logistical dilemmas, but the song (“Glasgow,” written by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith, and Kate York) and the performance are so rousing it almost doesn’t matter. Like the best country music, the movie finds its own kind of truth.

It’s intermittently very funny. But it doesn’t make the existential leap to the big screen, and it doesn’t have the density of gags or the lunatic free-association of the best episodes.

Crowe's world is an open ecosystem --transcendentally open. This movie is his boombox held aloft.

As amusing as the movie is, I think in the end that Ascher misses the labyrinth for the trees.

I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured. Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

I actually liked about two-thirds of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; I got impatient when Mister Rogers receded into the background and the film turned full-time to solving the problems of Lloyd Vogel, who’s based on the magazine writer Tom Junod.

An overpraised yet amusing satire.

The Band’s Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.

Star Maps reveals its larger (and less interesting) social intentions with a downbeat, slap-in-the-face finale, but along the way it has some good domestic grotesquerie and a layered, ironic attitude toward sex.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

Assayas’s pace is easy, his structure linear: no tricky flashbacks, no jagged cuts. There’s so little in the way of histrionics that it’s hard to put one’s finger on why the film is so terrifically intense — except that each actress is, in her own peculiar way, preternaturally high-strung, able to convey momentous emotional stakes without raising her voice above the pitch of conversation.

Selick has a great fantasy filmmaker's artistry, but he lacks that overflowing Geppetto-esque love that brings puppets to life. In Coraline, he's woozy with his own lyricism.

There's nothing like a film about wayward passions to remind you how differently people feel things.

The movie is a collision between inspiration and tastelessness, between the defiantly quirky and the wholesomely homogenized. I hated it in principle--I hate most modern Disney cartoons--but adored a good deal of it in practice.

The Murmelstein interview didn’t make it into Shoah, and Lanzmann sat on it, saying in a written prologue that he finally decided he had “no right to keep it to himself.” I wish he’d brought it out in Murmelstein’s lifetime. (The rabbi died in 1989.) He deserved the chance to be heard by the people who hated him most — who probably still would hate him but come away with ­respect.

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.

It's a good, thoughtful horror picture--and thiiis close to being a very good one.

Does Rocky Balboa deliver? Weirdly enough, it does: I was jumping out of my seat during Rocky's bout. If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ--aim for something between a baboon and a lemur--you might even think it's a masterpiece.

Unsatisfying even if, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of Nixon-bashing.

The film has a foggy cast to it--flat and insinuatingly creepy, like the actor. But then it can be lit, in an instant, by searing flash-pots of cruelty and wit. Even when it's slightly opaque, it's transfixing.

[Dano] gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.

Doesn’t have the warmth of the Toy Story pictures, but it still boasts a very entertaining slapstick-farce structure and some neat hairy, oozy, tendrilly creatures.

The briskness of The Sessions works against it: It lacks the fullness of the best films of its ilk, chief among them Jim Sheridan's "My Left Foot." But Lewin lets his eye wander pleasingly.

Remarkable.

A marvelously nasty revenge comedy.

Beat by beat, scene by scene, gorgeous...at times emotionally devastating.

It's sensationally well-made: skittery and kinetic, packed with mayhem, yet framed (and narrated) with witty detachment, so that the carnage never seems garish. The film is far from a work of art, but it marks the emergence of a great new action superchef.