David Edelstein

It’s the damnedest thing how the longueurs of Loving have such a cumulative power. I was still crying as the credits ended.

The movie is impressive.

Philippe Claudel's direction is both probing and delicate, and Scott Thomas's face, even immobile, keeps you watching, searching for hints of her character's past, unable to blink for fear of missing something vital.

Brown explores a potentially enraging subject--rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama--but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised.

Moving Midway is thrilling.

A wrenching elegy to the "greatest generation"--a film with enough breadth and spectacle and poetry to transcend some clunky storytelling.

Broadly, this is a coming-of-age movie in the "Diner" mold: Trier tracks Phillip and Erik and a few of their pals as they stagger into a world that can't be attuned to their (male adolescent) expectations--especially in regard to women.

Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.

This is a bleak, unresolved film, with no release. What keeps it from being a mortal bummer is the music-exquisite sacred choral works, plus Mozart.

Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s haunting, a sort of one-stop shop for a range of cultural anxieties — plague, environmental catastrophe, big government threatening the sanctity of home and family.

The movie has so much texture that once it gets you, you're good and got.

Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep Beasts of No Nation only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level.

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.

The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest.

Gojira is no masterpiece, but it has the power of a masterpiece: It's the most emotionally authentic fake monster movie ever made.

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.

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

Do I detect a note of self-satire in Jarmusch’s undead? I’d like to think he’s poking fun at his own stylized, white-boy cool. But underneath, of course, he’s deadly serious. A ruined metropolis, a snatch of dialogue about coming water wars, a poisoned blood supply: The garden of Adam and Eve is despoiled beyond remedy. This is a charming dirge, though.

It’s sensational in the open air and subtle in smaller, enclosed spaces. It has sweep and intimacy. And, yes, we need this movie now.

Even given the spate of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films that rule the multiplexes, this is the bleakest “franchise” in human history, and I’m curious if there will be any balm whatsoever in the next close encounter of the furred kind.

Faithless is almost entirely insight-free. Bergman gives no indication that he understands the link between his alter ego's "retroactive jealousy" and compulsive womanizing.

This seesaw of shame and self-justification might not speak for the most murderous segment of the German populace, but it's a peculiarly eloquent representation of the silent, obedient majority.

An affectless piece of moviemaking.

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

Pi has designed his own terrarium to keep from staring directly into the abyss. It's not denial. It's faith in something else: the transformative power of storytelling. The film is transcendent.

The poetic Swedish vampire picture (with arterial spray) "Let the Right One In" has been hauntingly well transplanted to the high desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and renamed Let Me In.

It’s not cinematic enough to make you forget you’re watching something conceived for another, more spatially constricted medium, but it’s too cinematic to capture the intensity, the concentration, of a great theatrical event.