David Edelstein

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

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.

If Timbuktu has a “takeaway,” it’s a deeply humanist one and so, in this context, political: that there’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim culture; that the threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.; that ideology is deaf and blind and anti-life; and that cinema (and all art) can blow it to what I’d once have called Timbuktu.

Sheridan’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged--and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had.

Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.

Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.

The revered Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki has hit on a way to give you grim social realism and movie-ish sentimentality in one fell swoop.

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

Most love stories are bland and generalized. This one takes you deep inside the dance.

This isn’t his smoothest film, but it’s his fullest and most original. It’s also his most urgent, which is really saying something. It’s one of the most urgent films ever made.

No filmmaker I know has gotten as close to a professional athlete as James Toback gets to Mike Tyson in his new documentary.

Remarkable.

Hot-dog Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To has never achieved the cult status of John Woo in this country, but his explosively entertaining — and startlingly splattery — Drug War should win him new fans.

In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.

The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.

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

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.

What keeps Sicario from cynicism is the nature and depth of Villeneuve’s gaze, not childishly wide-eyed but capable still of feeling pain. He’s a terrific director. You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground.

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

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.

The story of the "accidental" death of a peacenik politician (Yves Montand) and the investigator (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who unravels a right-wing conspiracy remains as fresh as a head wound.

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

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

This is Kent’s first feature — an astonishing debut. Not perfect, though.

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

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.

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

The ending is madly unsatisfying--yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.