David Edelstein

This is lovely, momentous piffle.

What begins like your basic police procedural becomes more and more choppy and diffuse. To a point, that’s intentional: Zodiac was never caught, and Fincher aims to creep you out with the lack of closure.

It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.

This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.

As drama, Hilary and Jackie is merely sketchy and superficial. As a portrait of the artist, it's puritanical crap.

Schamus is the former head of Focus Features, and seeing how he directs (this is his debut, though he has been Ang Lee’s collaborator for decades), I suspect he chose the company’s name. His vision is 20/20 plus.

This is one of the last Gandolfini performances, and it’s the ultimate proof that he could change his look and sound and rhythm without losing the source of his power: the connection to that inner baby ever starved for love and nourishment.

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

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

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.

Above all is Langella, achingly vulnerable under layers of flesh. In one scene, alone, he eats peanut butter intensely, thoughtfully, and nothing he could do as Hamlet would seem deeper or more poetic.

It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away

Sleeping With Other People is a rare American non-homogenized rom-com, and it’s delightful even when you’re not sure what you’re watching.

Head-On doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but it keeps you on edge, laughing nervously, appalled and, against all odds, entertained.

Swinton is good enough to take your mind off the not-too-compelling ambiguities.

There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.

People are calling Fifty Shades Darker the worst movie ever made, but it’s really not that terrible. It does, however, misrepresent itself, which is true of most mainstream American films about sex. The movie’s real subject is wealth.

The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.

Gloria Bell is best when it’s least definite, when the conversations are full of awkward holes and the relationships are in flux.

It’s amazing how skilled he (Allen) is in making his old ideas seem fresh, lively, even urgent. His new drama Blue ­Jasmine comes this close to being a wheeze. But he sells it beautifully.

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.

The best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after "Hancock" suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism.

Holofcener’s plotting can seem casual (many characters, no speeches pointing up the themes, no conventional climaxes), but her dialogue is smart, an oscillating mixture of abrasiveness and balm, of harsh satire and compassionate pullback.

High Flying Bird is an unshapely piece of storytelling — there are gaps in the plot, and it never locks into a rhythm — but that mournfulness and resentment seep into you.

Grady and Ewing use music as scary as in any horror film. They had no interest in making an “objective documentary,” although I doubt the Hasidim would have made themselves available to two women with a camera and their own hair. In such cases, they usually say, “If you want to understand us, read the Torah.”

The whole movie is like that: gleaming, but with a whiff of the charnel house. Dirty Pretty Things doesn't quite cut to the bone, but it gets as far as a couple of vital organs.

I found it exquisite. In part I responded out of sheer amazement: I've never seen anything like the sequences in which Sandler, in his boxy, sea-blue suit, charges around his warehouse to the rhythm of Brion's harsh drums.