David Edelstein

Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture.

As Nash gets closer to Crowe's own age (and level of dissipation), the performance settles down and becomes first credible and then overwhelming. This is a stupendous piece of acting.

Whatever else you say about Jurassic World, its amazing special effects — not just hurtling dinosaurs but flying killer pterodactyls — make it one of the most rousing people-running-away-from-stuff movies ever made. At its best, it’s good enough to take your mind off its worst, which is saying a lot.

Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe.

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

The script by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher is one of those high-speed, ping-pong-banter marvels in which you're still laughing from the last great line when you're hit by the next.

It is filmed with simplicity, a purity of intent, and I wanted to watch the faces of these men in their last seconds of life--not for the sake of history, but because of Wajda's imperative to put his father's death onscreen. He needed to do this. And somehow, sanity is restored.

I still don’t know how a gore-meister like Park Chan-wook could have made the year’s most irresistible romance. Maybe it’s that he hates oppression — chauvinist, colonialist, Sadean — so deeply that in hoisting his old boys on their own petards, he has discovered the wellsprings of love.

Think "In the Mood for Love" with hookahs instead of chopsticks.

The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.

For all its missteps, Mystic River gets the big things right: It turns you inside out with grief, and it builds to an act of vigilante murder that is nearly impossible to endure.

If nothing else, Training Day is a gorgeous pedestal for Denzel Washington.

Blistering and nihilistic--a vision to reduce you to a puddle of despair.

It's madly funny--a treat for moviegoers who don't mind gnawed-off limbs with their high jinks.

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 camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.

Manito is the rare little movie that gets bigger as it goes along--so big that it can hardly contain its own emotion.

Most of all, I enjoyed the picture's subtext, which is that Smith has become so sensitized to Internet abuse -- that the cathartic climax consists of tracking down bellicose posters (all of whom turn out to be adolescent dweebs) and pummeling the crap out of them.

There is a special kind of pleasure in hearing jokes that have no redeeming social value. I'd like to think that this IS their social value-an invitation to free the mind.

The Kill Team, an essential film no matter what your political convictions. The setting is Afghanistan, but it might be Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere with occupying forces. It might be Gaza. This map of hell is timeless, placeless.

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.

This is lovely, momentous piffle.

A fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.

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.

The Unknown Known is a worthy addition to Morris’s body of work, an epic search that demonstrates the limits of language, the ease of sidestepping truth.

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

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.

For all the movie's pixilated transitions, fisticuffs, and hyper-alert climaxes at the roulette table, there's a kind of temperamental evenness that's perfectly in sync with the protagonist.