David Edelstein

At times, the picture evokes such stylized musicals as "The Band Wagon"; at others, it seems to whirr every kung-fu movie ever made into the most luscious action smoothie you'll ever imbibe.

Meru is a packed 90 minutes. And I guess it is inspiring, in the sense that if human beings can endure this kind of risk and punishment, they could colonize Mars or breed a super-race to carry our species to the ends of the galaxy. All the familiar critical adjectives (harrowing, etc.) sound especially lame in this context. The movie is sick.

Crowe gets to use his real Aussie voice, which works better with that poker face, and his underplaying at times has a psychotic intensity. But Ryan looks dopey when she's supposed to be stressed-out.

But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.

In The Town, he (Renner) doesn't signal that Jem is a sociopath... It's a deeply unnerving performance, beyond good or evil.

In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.

The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career. His pet theme is here: man tested against nature, his sanity more precarious than his body.

You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.

Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.

It’s romantic, tragic, and inexorably strange.

It's hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical, sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.

This world is ravishingly beautiful, but there’s also something oppressive about its exoticism. The color doesn’t just saturate the frame; it thickens it.

Women deserve their own gross-out movies, and, in Wetlands, the punk force is strong. If your taste runs thataway, you should see it in a theater with one eye on the audience — and hope that a few people will think they’re going to see a documentary about threatened ecosystems. Talk about all wet!

I don't know what Pollock is supposed to be about, but as it stands—by default—it's the most blood-freezing Jewish-mother nightmare ever filmed. Pollock would give Woody Allen the willies.

Whatever the style, the point is blunt, reductive: Civilized humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. Not exactly an original thesis, but as a source of movie fodder, it’s scarily entertaining.

If you have a penchant for mood pieces that flirt with genre but are too pretentious to deliver the full climactic payload, Personal Shopper is for you. I loved nearly all of it, disposed to forgive Assayas his arty withholding for the pleasure of watching Stewart through his eyes.

There are a lot of stale -- and nefarious -- clichés in 8 Mile, but most of the time they're overwhelmed by the pulsing, grinding, hopped-up camerawork and the soulful star turn of Eminem.

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.

The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.

The surprise is that, given the number of female college presidents, professors, and students, victims are still so reliably blamed, punishments so reliably weak, and serial offenders (responsible for 91 percent of all sexual assaults) so reliably undisturbed.

The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of "The Heartbreak Kid."

What a mind-bending odyssey ensues--a tale of good old-fashioned American free expression at war with good old-fashioned American capitalism.

Despite its downbeat context (a plague at its height), the movie is a crowd-­pleaser — graceful and funny enough to distract you from its gaps and elisions.

The actors playing parents and spouses (among them Steve Buscemi, Halley Feiffer, Portia, and Kevin Hagan) are stunningly believable. I'm not sure how Morton made sense of her character's ebbs and flows, but I never doubted her. She's a mariner in uncharted seas of emotion.

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.

It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.

Grandma marks a new era in gay cinema — one’s that confident and mature enough to acknowledge regret.

I, Tonya is not by any means a weeper. It’s a black comedy, and parts of it are too broad, like a second-rate Coen brothers movie.

Nunez's movies go places, but with no acceleration.

The fun is in the one-thing-after-another delirium the movie induces, and in our breathless anticipation of what they'll hurl at us next.

In a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do — it dissolves every boundary it meets.

Director Dennis Dugan knows his way around shin-whacking slapstick, and Sandler is mesmerizing.

You come away from Jim & Andy wondering — not for the first time — about the cost to great artists of what they do, envious of their talent and thinking, “I’m glad that’s not me.”

Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right.

Those shots are in contrast to those landscapes, which are craggy, primordial. It’s meant to be a haunting combination, and I have colleagues who’ve found it just that, who came out of the movie ashen, devastated. But I found it bludgeoning — I think it gives new meaning to the phrase hammer of God.

Coppola’s The Beguiled doesn’t have the southern-gothic kick of its predecessor. It’s not a horror movie. Its power is in its undercurrents, in the sense that what we’re seeing isn’t inevitable but a sort of worst-case scenario of genders in opposition. No one is wholly good or bad. Both sides are beguiled.

The Mustang brought the sensation back of having to slow down and breathe with a horse and in the process leave yourself behind. Any movie that makes leaving oneself behind so tactile and enticing is a horse of a different color.

The movie is overcalculating and occasionally coarse, but it has a gentle spirit. We should count its existence as a blessing.

It’s richer than anything onscreen right now. It’s worth the pain.

Bigelow and Boal don’t bring much moral complexity to Detroit. They don’t illuminate the psyches of the cops or suggest the fundamental feeling of weakness that drives people to violence. They don’t shed much light on Dismukes’s inaction or subsequent thoughts about what he didn’t do. What Bigelow does — incomparably — is put us in that room with those people at that moment.

For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

The film is stunningly bleak and staggeringly violent. Major characters go down in showers of blood and gore. I’ve seen worse and so, probably, have you, but never from such an essentially wholesome corporate enterprise with a target audience so young and hopeful.

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

This mad prophet says it will die in a week.

When the groom's enormous procession fights its way through the hard rain and muck to the bejeweled bride, Nair's chaos downright sparkles.

Pain & Gain gives you a rush while at the same time making you queasy about how you’re getting off.

The captain narrates in a punchy, journalistic style that gives Elite Squad an air of sociological realism--it bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like "The French Connection."

The Disaster Artist is primarily a pedestal for the ultimate James Franco performance — it’s his "Lincoln." Whatever my queasiness about laughing at a head case, I couldn’t help myself from thrilling to Franco’s timing, his relish, his swan dive into an egotism that has no bottom.

This movie is utterly irresistible.

Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne ("La Promesse," 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life.

The movie substitutes milky, washed-out color and funereal music for insight. The murders are purposely un-fluid: When you see Mohammad or Malvo take a shot, you don’t see the impact of the bullet. When you see the victim struck, you don’t see the shooter.

Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite gel, but it’s very enjoyable, and it has a solid emotional core.

What makes the movie such an unexpectedly potent little number is that Adventureland comes to stand for Stagnationland; the real roller coaster (i.e., life) is just outside the park.

Should you ever be tempted to wax nostalgic for an age in which wars were fought according to the laws of cause and effect and for reasons that may confidently be labeled “rational,” pick up Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir Testament of Youth or steel yourself for James Kent’s mournful, very fine new film starring Alicia Vikander as Brittain.

Like Someone in Love has rather simple, sentimental, melodramatic underpinnings, but the vantage changes everything. It opens up this world — and the next. It’s an enthralling journey.

August Wilson knew that, which is why his plays resonate far beyond melodrama. So does Lady Macbeth. It eats into the mind with its vision of evil as a contagion that transforms victims into oppressors.

Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.

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

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.

As Ben Wade, gang leader and murderer, he gives an ironic performance, but Crowe’s irony is more intense than other actors’ obsession. He turns the idea of having so few emotions--of being beyond caring--into a bloody joke. He upstages everyone with his laughing eyes.

Wasikowska's Jane is as watchful as only a damaged soul can be, and, when challenged, frighteningly fast.

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

The comic high point in Shaun of the Dead comes when Lucy Davis, from the great BBC sitcom "The Office," teaches the band of survivors how to lurch like zombies so that they can pass among the undead.

A grim, twisty international conspiracy picture that challenges the audience on every level, political and aesthetic. The aesthetic part is a bit of an obstacle, though. I can't remember a time I had as much trouble--at a movie I admired--just figuring out what the hell was going on.

I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay. Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay.

I hope the film inspires a new generation of amateur sleuths. Maybe — thanks to movies like The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — a wish-fulfilling fictional scenario will come to pass in the real world, and the injustices of history will stand plainly in the living present.

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

Bahrani’s casting of Dern is genius. She’s such a profoundly unaffected actress that you instantly buy her aversion to her son’s lucre. She has a moral and aesthetic problem with that tacky mansion on the waterway. She wouldn’t fit in there.

My favorite rock-concert movies, Jonathan Demme’s "Stop Making Sense" and "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," are organic: They chart a miraculous path from sound to soul. Scorsese stays on the outside, as befits his temperament and his subject. Yet there is, amid the whirligig spectacle, a spark of connection.

Might be the most perversely agreeable stalker picture ever made.

It's fun to see actors doing what they do and to see them through the eyes of a director.

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

The even-tempered, exceedingly rational “El Doctor” seems more laudable than Eastwood and Bronson combined, especially in light of the Mexican government’s notorious ineptitude and corruption.

Whatever his foibles, An Honest Liar depicts a great American original — a man who has taught a generation of scientists, magicians, and even certain film critics that our senses must be trained to detect the smell of bullshit.

The movie makes you empathize with the rage that drives these young men to violence--but it also makes you see how manly action wipes out their individuality, their uniqueness, and turns them into archetypal meatheads.

By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.

Nichols’s mythic aspirations are still a puzzle to me; I’m not sure he has connected all the dots in his psyche yet, or that he fully brings off his finale. But I love watching his movies.

Hideously depressing but also enraging documentary.

The tony cast emotes like mad, but polished Brits are so temperamentally unlike Russians that every four-syllable patronymic sounds like iambic pentameter.

A hell of a picture. And shrewd.

A central figure who’s all bad is even more boring than one who’s all good. He has no dramatic stature. He’s a case study. The audience should be paid to listen up.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.

The film is, finally, a brilliant tap dance over a void: There’s no real drama when the inner life of the female lead is so shrouded, even if that’s the point.

Admirable and wondrously strange--as well as gorgeous, funny, dreamlike, mesmerizing, squirmy, and occasionally annoying.

If this turns out to be his final statement (he’s 87), it’s an appropriately ragged one, half-formed but gesturing toward meaning. Every edge bleeds.

It's not a flawless adaptation, but it's a gutsy and deeply affecting one: The filmmakers manage to jazz up Smiley's tempo without losing her melancholy tone; and they find a way--without being untrue to the book--to make the stubbornly recessive protagonist seem a dynamo on the screen.

I think The Revenant is, on the whole, pain without gain, but it’s certainly a tour ​de force — literally, a feat of strength.

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

The beauty of Obvious Child is that there’s nothing obvious about it.

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

Clement and Waititi are intimate with the conventions of vampire movies and reality TV and must have had a crazy-great time blending the unblendable in the best SCTV tradition. But it’s the absence of camp that I keep coming back to. They scale it down and play it real. They’re undeadpan.

10 Cloverfield Lane does what it needs to do: make you sit and squirm and want very badly to know. It has the appeal of suspense radio plays from the '30s and '40s and even a touch of Orson Welles’s most infamous Mercury Theater broadcast.

That wordiness coupled with Cronenberg's classical restraint is part of the splendid Freudian joke at the movie's center.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.

This is a rhythmless, stupefying work. A person with no discernible pulse ought not to be directing a movie about disco.

For all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It’s like "Scarface" drained of blood, at arm’s length from the culture that spawned it.

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.

It’s hard to believe Nichols thinks he can get away with all this and harder still to believe he does. It’s the quality of the attention that he brings — his focus — that makes his work so engrossing.

After a few minutes you know everything about Louis you’re going to know; the only surprise in Nightcrawler is the level of grotesqueness it achieves. There’s more insight (and entertainment) in an average sketch from the old SCTV series; I kept imagining Joe Flaherty’s horror host Count Floyd climbing out of his coffin and chanting, “Oooh, that Louis, he’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!”

If, like so many conspiracy-mongers, Brügger is in this to make his name, whatever the social consequences, his comeuppance should be swift. But I want to believe that this isn’t a stunt and that his first-person meta nonsense — his desire to call attention to his floundering — is a sign of honesty, not obscurantism.

Relatively speaking, Catching Fire is terrific. Even nonrelatively, it's pretty damn good.

Is Death of a President plausible? As political prognostication, perhaps. As a TV documentary, no way in hell. What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair--in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?

The soundtrack is extraordinary. Songs from the Shangri-Las, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Portishead, and many others drift in and out, sometimes taken up by Strayed as she heads into the scrubby landscape toward a mountain a long way away. The fragmentation is remarkably fluid. The pieces are all of a piece.

Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.

Matt Damon can't quite piece together a compelling poseur.

Beautifully made and unsurpassingly creepy, it's the rare remake with something contemporary to add.

It’s our sense of adventure that matters in the end. We must cultivate confusion and dare to be disoriented.

Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has made a very smart movie about a very dumb idea.

Greenberg would be a heckuva movie if we could just get Greenberg out of there.

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.

One word springs to mind after 15 minutes of Loveless: Getmethef**koutofhere. The chill eats into you — the cold burns and cuts. But it turns out Zvyagintsev has more on his mind than emotional cruelty to kids.

I’d liked him to have asked the judge specifically about the MySpace girl, whose case led to his comeuppance. But it’s a huge story, and Kids for Cash provides a measure of justice.

I’m not wholly clear on the link between a jellied green thing wriggling along a tree branch and the oneness of life, but Shinto Buddhist ruminations sound good in almost any context, and the film is entrancing.

Mistress America is hit-and-miss. It’s not as burdened by blame as other Baumbach films — Gerwig leavens him. But it’s labored.

Calculated to enrage and pulling it off like gangbusters, Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal pits the legacy of the late Albert C. Barnes’s Barnes Foundation (which boasts arguably the world’s finest collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art) against the social-climbing, philistine, downright Nixonian machinations of Philadelphia’s wealthiest--who gamed the system and pried the collection loose in defiance of Barnes’s legal will.

Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.

A slender thing, with a perversely undernourished color scheme: grainy blue exteriors and old-time sepia interiors. The fullness comes from the faces of its two protagonists.

Blaze’s best scene features Kris Kristofferson as Foley’s once-abusive, now near-senile father and Alynda Segarra as his sister, who escaped the old man’s malevolent influence by finding Jesus.

Anton Chekhov's The Duel is convincingly-yes--Chekhovian.

This is another of those dead-kid dramas in which the terrible event is handled like a striptease--tantalizing flashes until the climax.

The non-ending turns the whole movie into an elaborate tease, too creepy to dismiss, too shallow to justify its "ambiguities."

Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

As befits its settings, The Trip to Italy aims higher than its predecessor — maybe too high — and isn’t as fresh. I enjoyed it, though.

Cornish, like Edgar Wright (who directed "Shaun of the Dead" and was an executive producer here), can parody a genre in a way that revitalizes it, that reminds you why the genre was born in the first place. The movie is in a different galaxy than "Cowboys & Aliens": It has, in both senses, guts.

A veritable orgy of immorality, each scene making the same point only more and more outrageously, the action edited with Scorsese's usual manic exuberance but to oh-so-monotonous effect.

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

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

Thor: The Dark World gets a lot more entertaining in the second hour, when the shape-shifting Loki is sprung from his cell (for complicated reasons) and immediately begins trading bitchy insults with his forthright, manly brother.

By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya’s fragile, unguarded soul through Harley’s eyes, and the film’s discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Tumbleweeds is gorgeously nuanced.

Gorgeously silly.

Squirmily funny documentary.

On its own terms, Bernie is smoothly made and reasonably entertaining, Linklater doing his Austin-based best not to condescend to the locals - at least the East Carthage locals.

With her swanlike neck and ever-flushing complexion, Felicity Jones has a perfect nineteenth-century look, but there’s something forward and modern about her physiognomy, her huge eyes and strong nose and overbite. As she gazes down in enforced modesty, you feel her soul about to burst. The performance is startlingly vivid.

The title character in Tully, the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, doesn’t make her entrance until well into the film, after it’s established that the protagonist, Marlo (Charlize Theron), is moving from postpartum depression to postpartum desperation — and that’s when the movie enters uncharted territory and comes to life.

The movie's approach makes for juicy melodrama.

Moverman is attempting something hugely ambitious with Time Out of Mind: a socially conscious, existential-displacement art movie. I think it would have worked better with a little less rigor and a little more intimacy.

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.

It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.

An unassuming gem: an impishly funny, melancholy, absolutely delightful English ensemble drama.

What saves Zatoichi is that it ends -- for no clear reason -- with a foot-stomping ensemble dance number that is both delightful and unhinging: It sends you home with spasmodic giggles, convinced this Japanese imp has discovered a new path to your unconscious.

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.

Feig keeps throwing so much stuff at you — gross-out gags, chases, brutal violence, not to mention actors working their heads off — that he finally wears down your resistance. In the end, I admired him for keeping this ramshackle construction together, casting performers I adore, and proving that Melissa McCarthy can, indeed, hold a gun. A mixed victory. A definitively mixed review.

What makes An Unreasonable Man so compelling is its perfectly fluid line. Simply put, the private Nader and the public Nader are the same: There are no contradictions with which to grapple, no byways to explore.

The movie is a cunning piece of storytelling, but it’s thin.

Here's what's depressing: that, given the millions spent on defense by multinational conglomerates, our last best hope isn't the courts but the fickle attentions of glossy magazines and the noblesse oblige of celebrities.

For a movie so visual (how many shades of blue can you count?), John Wick: Chapter 2 has quite a clever script. Derek Kolstad anchors that abstract action with good, spiky passages of dialogue.

Excitingly convoluted.

The film has a kamikaze comic spirit that's spectacularly disarming.

Soderbergh’s alleged last theatrical film is paranoid and hopeless, but he leaves the field with a bounce in his step.

Cameron has never been known for his dialogue, but Titanic carries some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of a "Days of Our Lives" script.

This is the rare “profile” documentary that is also a transcendent work of art. It raises questions we’ll be trying to answer for as long as there is art.

An unusually powerful mess, a broad satire of suburban self-indulgence with little in the way of a consistent style, and with a character who's serious business: a convicted child molester.

This vital documentary gives you a world of hurt, prescribes nothing, and calls the ultimate questions you can ask as an American.

The best way to think of Captain America: Civil War is as a toy box in which the sheer quantity of toys partly makes up for the lack of anything new. But the big takeaway is worrisome. Marvel has created a universe teeming with superheroes who simply don’t have enough to do. They’re all suited up with nowhere to go.

It’s engrossing, and Mueller-Stahl’s mix of Old World chivalry and murderousness is scarier than Jason and Freddy combined.

A breezy hoot, and it's gorgeous to look at.

Some people are finding it difficult to live with the idea that Kaleil could put his employees through hell, lose $60 million of other people's money, and wind up a movie star.

The laughs are fuller when they're rooted in authentic desperation, and the premise is yeasty enough to keep the film from sinking into facile hopelessness.

I think Levinson missed a chance to get something unique and audacious on screen.

Succeeds in dramatizing the resentment and guilt on all sides without just adding to the noise.

Feels more like The Bill Clinton Story than "Primary Colors" (1998). It's a paean to naughty boys who dream of potency and become enraptured by their own scams -- a great American archetype.

He’s (Singer) reborn — deft, elegant, spring-heeled — in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The special effects don’t bog him down: They lift the movie to a surreal and more emotional dimension.

Delicate, wrenching, occasionally vexing.

The last hour is like a night at the comedy club after the headliners have left and the room has the smell of stale beer and flop sweat.

If you’re an Amy Schumer, you’ll be ecstatic to see her strut her stuff on the big screen in the mostly (about four-fifths) delightful sex comedy Trainwreck — and maybe a tad disappointed when the playbook turns out not to be entirely hers.

I confess I don't fully understand Danny's (or the movie's) zigs and zags, but I was glued to the thing anyway -- it has an inexplicable inner logic -- and I admire Bean for refusing to settle into any easy groove.

It's irresistible, damn it. Mainstream comedies should all be this funny and tender and deftly performed.

A heartbreaking vérité documentary by Jennifer Venditti about a misfit Maine teenager--a film that makes you think about (and question) what fitting in really entails.

The best reason to see Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish-born actress passing easily as a British spy named Ilsa.

Owen is a hugely engaging screen presence.

I think of Waitress as an overstuffed, overcooked pie--too ungainly to eat all of, too generous to pass up, too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.

The climactic interaction between Rachel and the film that Greg has made for her is so ecstatically weird that it gets points for its audacity. It’s almost inspired. But the coda — an ode to Greg’s self-sacrifice — is unforgivable, a testament to the ego - and power-trip that is the movie’s ultimate reason for being.

Sicko is Moore’s best film: a documentary that mixes outrage, hope, and gonzo stunts in the right proportions; that poses profound questions about the connection between health care and work.

Apart from Theron and Christina Ricci as her lover, there's nothing in Monster that rises above the level of doggedly well-meaning, although the film is worth seeing for the acting and as a sort of palate-teaser for Broomfield and Churchill's documentary.

Tabloid is candy for voyeurs. We laugh like mad at a nut whose only mistake was being born in the last century, too early to have made real money.

The film is wrenching all the same, and subtle enough in its portrait of the four major grown-up characters to qualify as Jamesian.

The unexpected element is a series of letters (some never before heard) Joplin wrote to her family back home in Port Arthur, Texas, read by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) in a voice that captures the cadences of Joplin’s speech without being an imitation. The letters are heartbreaking in their own way.

The movie is charming even when it’s stilted, and it’s often stilted.

Lynn Shelton's marvelous chamber comedy Humpday butts up against the same sort of taboos as "Brüno," and in its fumbling, semi-improvised way, it’s equally hilarious and even more subversive.

As for Bardem: How can I do him justice? He is normally the most robustly physical of actors, with a plummy voice and an insolent sensuality. To see him immobile, ashen, his hair gone, de-bodyized: It's agonizing.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.

I mean Serenity no disrespect when I say it's enjoyably junky.

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.

Hanks and Zemeckis (and writer William Broyles Jr.) are so intent on making an epic of the spirit that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the comic, narcissistic side of their desert island fantasy. And so on simple, human terms, the picture gets all gummed up.

As both men lie to loved ones to keep their exchange alive, the tension builds and becomes unbearable.

The movie is mechanical, but machines can be elegant, even inspired.

The chronology is confusing at times, but the film is never not fascinating.

Quite pleasant.

Araki is trying to work from the inside out; and he captures feelings about sexual exploitation that I've never seen onscreen--not all of them negative.

Bully is repetitive and not especially artful, but children who allow themselves to see the world through the eyes of the film's victims will never be the same.

The music ties together all the pretty pictures, gives the narrative some momentum, and helps to induce a kind of alert detachment, so that you're neither especially interested nor especially bored. Perhaps that's a state of Buddhist enlightenment.

Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.

Thelma is both more mysterious and more accessible than his other films. The spell it casts transcends the silly plotting. It puts you in a zone all its own.

Disobedience isn’t packed with surprises, but that’s not why you go to a movie like this. You go to watch humans with wayward emotions labor to make peace with (or opt to war against) a formal, ritualized way of life.

This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.

The cast functions brilliantly as individuals and as a unit, each in his or her own world but linked near-telepathically to the movements of the others. Like, come to think of it, a family.

Psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque.

The greatness of Golden Door is its tone; sympathetic but always wry.

In outline, In Darkness is a standard conversion melodrama, but little within those parameters is easy. The darkness lingers into the light.

Hanks and those scenes in the cockpit make the movie worth seeing, in spite of the dumb melodramatics. But only just.

In his florid sci-fi opera Interstellar, Christopher Nolan aims for the stars, and the upshot is an infinite hoot — its dumbness o’erleaps dimensional space. It’s hugely entertaining, though.

Because of its convolutions, Howl's Moving Castle isn't quite as transporting as "Spirited Away." But it's a moving bridge between his lyrical fancies and his outrage. Miyazaki is like a soulful cartographer of the soul, mapping our inner landscape, leaving us bedazzled.

There's too much miserable reality and not a lot of transcendent dance, and the director, Stephen Daldry, doesn't cover the action from enough angles.

This is a movie that sends you out shuddering, chuckling nervously, wanting to tell the people in line for the next show, "It's the feel-bad movie of the year!"

If I didn't believe that the experience of watching Domestic Violence would change the world for the better, I wouldn't believe in the power of movies. And I wouldn't do what I do.

I like — as always — what Chandor attempts: not just to denounce capitalism but to explain in detail how people go wrong. But the overcomposed, sedate A Most Violent Year lacks the one thing it most needs: violence.

The movie is brilliant and infectious, much like Bennett's voice: English-deadpan but never snide, and generous to a fault.

The movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a POLICIER , although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly.

I was utterly gripped by The Italian. The only problem is that I was rooting for the bad guys.

In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love.

Rivette has aged into one of cinema’s most ingenious minimalists. In The Duchess of Langeais he uses intertitles--bits of literary exposition--with cheeky understatement.

Although Paltrow is radiant (and she nails the character’s ditzy sense of entitlement), it's Phoenix's movie. He is, once again, stupendous, and stupendous in a way he has never been before.

I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it.

The band's implosion and reassembly makes for one of the most marvelous rock documentaries of all time.

It's a crackerjack ride, shot and edited for maximum discombobulation.

You can be of two minds about the movie’s climax without shame. It’s galvanizing and, after all the accumulated tension, longed-for. And it’s too easy. And it’s rousingly well done. And it’s cheap. And that’s what makes the vigilante myth so vexing.

This one is probably my favorite, being the most unlike the others.

Cooper's performance is outlandishly great, but Phillippe’s knocks Breach down a peg.

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.

This isn't just the most riotously inventive movie of the year, it's the raunch anthem of the age.

Betts has succeeded in capturing a watershed moment in the life of the Catholic Church — a push to adapt that is, in important ways, at odds with its very origins. Her irresolution makes for excellent drama.

With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.

The Party is breathlessly well shot — and, even better, in lustrous black and white. The look conveys an unspoken message: Even playing fools, these actors are pure class.

Any war picture in which the heroine stalls the villain with a quiet, painstaking tea ceremony until the wind shifts direction and the good guys can firebomb the bad guys into oblivion is too ineffably Zen not to love.

Rust and Bone doesn't come together, but it's a triumph of non-actorish acting.

Inland Empire is way, way beyond my powers of ratiocination. It's the higher math.

Shallow but satisfying, largely because of Meryl Streep and her big fake English teeth and gift for using mimicry as a means of achieving empathy.

Too often, it’s the MOVIE that isn’t there. What’s meant to be archetypal comes across as superficial.

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.

The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.

The sequel is simply a tour-de-force of thriller filmmaking.

His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.

What’s on display here is a great actor at his absolute peak — damn it all.

Viewed under quarantine, Spaceship Earth has a visceral kick.

Although the resolution to the mystery wouldn’t do credit to a third-rate thriller, it’s crazily powerful — sudden and bloody but with no real catharsis, just a sense of waste and a feeling of, “What now?” I’m not sure how Sheridan would answer that — not that an artist really needs to.

This is a star-making performance, as fresh and funny as Christopher Reeve's in Superman (1978).

The movie should by rights be a “Wow!” But it feels bloated, self-conscious, and pretentious, with long waits between its few dazzling fights. Evidently, it’s hard to build on a premise that’s basically so vacuous and dumb.

A gratifyingly slick and fast-moving Flemish thriller, directed by Erik Van Looy, with superb acting.

Has a soft windup, but along the way are some of the best-constructed slapstick sequences since "There's Something About Mary."

One of the more lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies.

Super-entertaining, super-disgusting documentary.

Le Week-End is a marital ­disintegration–reintegration drama that opens with a dose of frost and vinegar and turns believably sweet—and unbelievably marvelous, in light of what had seemed a depressing trajectory.

If you’ve never seen a Johnnie To crime picture, Exiled is a simple, stylish, and utterly delightful introduction.

Good, sometimes thrilling, but it's less a war epic than an evocative romantic melodrama with a patchy first hour.

This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness.

It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s (Eastwood) not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered.

[A] compelling film touching on the perils of being young - that's it, merely young - in a culture without justice.

It proves that male action stars can triumph not only over space but, more important, over time.

The breeziest, most convivial Marvel movie in ages.

The movie is ludicrous, but Eastwood’s consistency is poignant. He has an agenda and sticks to it.

Roberts has her most galvanic role, and she's sensationally appealing.

Frank's writing is razor-sharp, his filmmaking whistle-clean. As a fan of sharp razors and clean whistles, I enjoyed The Lookout--yet I did feel let down by the climax, which ought to have been blunter and messier and crazier and more cathartic.

Beyond the Mafia-like code of silence, it comes down to this: The guys at the top reserved their compassion for priests like Father Murphy in the belief that the boys were young and would get over it. No one of true faith will get over Maxima Mea Culpa.

If Battle of the Sexes is unsurprising to a fault, it’s by no means a double fault. The movie is very entertaining.

The movie is wonderful, nonsensical fun.

Before you quite know what’s happening, you’re swerving into another sort of movie altogether. And then another. You might not buy them all, but what a great ride.

This is an absolutely miraculous movie.

A tender, even-tempered elegy to a writer who at his peak could ingest staggering (literally) amounts of drugs and alcohol and transform, like Popeye after a can of spinach, into a superhuman version of himself--more trenchant, more cutting, more hilarious than any political journalist before or since.

The comic surface of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is all polished brilliance, with surprisingly few dull patches...The movie doesn't deliver in the kiss-kiss department, though.

The Camden 28 is slapdash: more talking heads, reunion footage with the mother reading from her own testimony, newscasts of the day. But the editing supplies some urgency, and the subjects remain radiant yet down-to-earth--too good-humored to be beatific.

Too long, too sexist, and too--shall we say--flaccid. But it has its moments.

It's one of the best kinds of documentaries--not calculated but serendipitous.

The bad guys have all the money but at least we have indie filmmakers and movie stars like Ruffalo (who vigorously and successfully campaigned to keep the frackers out of New York that caused havoc across the Delaware from him in Pennsylvania). Dark Waters is hardly a cure, but it keeps the issue aboveground.

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

The movie's evolution from somber spiritual torment to icky body horror to fetishistic sex to wild lyricism (vampires pogoing off buildings) to Grand Guignol splatter is exhilarating.

Anyone who loves live-wire acting will gasp in awe at Blanchett, more emotionally exposed than ever, and, most of all, at Dame Judi, who’s so electric she makes you quiver.

It all adds up to one of the most brazen pieces of blame-shifting in exploitation-picture history.

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.

Casey Affleck has never had a pedestal like the one his brother provides him, and he earns it. His Patrick is pale and raspy, with a slight grogginess that gives him an astounding vulnerability--and makes his bursts of temper shocking.

Part of the film is a crackerjack courtroom drama. What’s dull is the trajectory. The Insult is so schematic that it shrinks to the level of a painfully scrupulous newspaper editorial. Which is fine — for a newspaper editorial.

In Where Is Kyra?, Michelle Pfeiffer is stunning as a desperate, near-destitute woman whose life is shrouded in darkness.

It's better to think of Magic Mike as arty but energetic soft-core porn, with no pickle shots but plenty of juice. You should see it if only for McConaughey, an underrated leading man who finally gets a chance to use his strange timing.

Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made.

As the father-in-law, Langella has one of those thankless antagonist roles — the rigid, killjoy patriarch — that older actors take for the paycheck and almost never pull off. As usual these days, he’s remarkable.

Living with Mason and his parents over time you feel an intimacy, an empathy, a shared stake. I’m not saying Boyhood is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but I’m thinking there’s my life before I saw it and my life now, and it’s different; I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.

Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence.

It’s a real transformation. I’ve never heard this diction from her (Michelle Williams) before — sharp, with a hint of North Shore (i.e., old money) Long Island and perhaps a Kennedy or two. (The real Gail grew up in San Francisco but was well acquainted with the cadences of the East Coast rich.) Through the tension in her body and intensity of her voice, Williams conveys not just the terror of losing a son but the tragic absurdity of bearing the illustrious name Getty when family ties confer zero power.

The comedy in One Week and a Day comes from confusion, ineptitude, and alienation. It comes from people’s defenses being way, way down. It doesn’t cheapen the tragedy. It grounds it, sometimes in the mud.

Is it scary? Not especially. But there are enough gory surprises around every bend to keep you laughing/screaming/cringing.

It has strong moments and fine, unsentimental performances, but it doesn't jell as a story.

It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings. Not DiCaprio, though.

The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled-as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse.

Pure misery.

Something appalling about the way he turns to the camera with a look of sorrow: Michael Moore as a suffering Christ. It's an insult to his own movie, which at its considerable best transcends his thuggish personality.

On balance, I admire the hell out of Collaizo for choosing to tell a more emotionally convoluted story, even if it sometimes kills the momentum.

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.

Little here is new, but the archival footage is well chosen, the interviewees are illuminating, and Gibney, as usual, potently synthesizes what’s out there.