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.

Endlessly enchanting.

Pitch-perfect -- not just the most enjoyable movie of the year but the first (after Crumb) to get the tone of a certain strain of "underground" comic right.

The power of Little Men is in how the characters resist the melodramatic flow (which is, come to think of it, how Chekhov works, too).

A haunting, morbidly romantic melodrama with obvious links to "Vertigo," but from a reverse angle.

Ends very abruptly, at a point where you're ready to hang out with it a while. I wanted it to go on and on, but that ending is right. It leaves you the way American movies almost never do: relaxed, receptive, and happy in the moment, not even caring if your train comes in.

We’re not so much watching Woodcock the rarefied designer as Day-Lewis the rarefied actor, his immersion so uncanny that he can illuminate a soul at once titanic and stunted.

As he proved in his Iraq-centered "No End in Sight," policy wonk turned documentarian Charles Ferguson has no peer when it comes to tracking the course of a preventable catastrophe.

A disgusting piece of work; I still can't believe how much I loved it.

You could never call Solondz a humanist, but he achieves something I've never seen elsewhere: compassionate revulsion.

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.

Best in Show has an uproarious wild card in Fred Willard, who plays a hack commentator convinced that he's the most amusing fellow on television

As in the most unnerving satires, the glibness adds to the horror. Even the most absurd deaths have a sting.

Árpád Halász is the credited “animal trainer for 280 dogs,” Teresa Ann Miller the handler of Bodie and Luke — better actors than half this year’s Academy Award nominees. This is the new gold standard for nature-bites-back movies.

Howard is the summation of the Safdies’ culture, in which the drive for life collides head-on with the drive for death, and the upshot is cinema.

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

The movie’s singular acting triumph is Nathan Fillion’s Constable Dogberry, one of Shakespeare’s simpler buffoons made poetic by understatement. Fillion speaks softly, with ­uninflected sincerity, a brilliant departure from the standard gregarious-­hambone Dogberry. It’s his insularity — his imperviousness to the interjections of more observant people — that makes him such a touchingly credible clown.

It’s the 48- and 13-year-old Jenny sitting side by side, spent, against the wall of a women’s restroom, together in their helplessness, with little to show for their pain except this extraordinary movie.

Downey found a way to channel his working-class audience’s anger against liberal shibboleths and not incidentally take down both his dad and his surrogate dad — Teddy ­Kennedy. It’s a ­riveting Oedipal tragedy.

McKay does no editorializing in En el Séptimo Día. He’s a simple, graceful storyteller — so graceful that we don’t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through José’s eyes.

BPM is vital for the history it depicts, but it’s also important in the here and now, as a testament to public action — even messy, not-always-effective public action.

I came out giddy, feeling lighter--by about five-sixths--than I did when I went in.

It's the tone of the picture that's most striking. This is nothing less than a superhero's lament--Spidey Agonistes, a comic-book spectacle in which the primary struggles are behind the mask.

The coup de grâce is especially graceless because everything we know is already visible in Marinca’s eyes. The actress is extraordinary.

This is an absolutely miraculous movie.

In his late seventies, Robert Redford has never held the camera as magnificently as he does in the survival-at-sea thriller All Is Lost.

The Edge of Heaven is powerfully unsettled--it comes together by not coming together.

The ensemble is stupendous--howlingly great--and the music goes deep.

Very entertaining (and doesn’t overstay its welcome) but it’s a little depressing to contemplate.

Truly, this is manna from hell.

A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.

The new Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is shockingly good.

It takes some time to realize we're in a maelstrom--going down down down into a saga of obsession, sadism, masochism, and codependency that was and remains one of the great, sick tabloid stories of all time.

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.

I urge you not to pass up Black Book, especially on a wide screen. It's a marvelous movie-movie, with a new screen goddess. Van Houten has a soft, heart-shaped face on top of a body so naturally, ripely beautiful it has its own kind of truth.

In Married Life, Ira Sachs aims a bit lower than Green but obliterates his target: The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad--they’re all splendidly of a piece.

I think this tale of woe can principally be seen as a plea for a heightened sense of community. It takes a village to keep us all afloat.

Loveless is about a state of mind, a lament, an indictment of crimes against the human spirit.

A pungently funny and heartfelt piece of wish fulfillment.

It’s Moss who takes the film to a higher, scarier level. After years of playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men", she knows how to smile and nod and say one thing while obviously meaning the exact opposite, and when at last she unleashes the truth, it’s with demonic intensity. She turns subtext into horror-poetry.

You get a bad feeling early in Project Nim, the brilliant, traumatizing documentary by James Marsh (Man on Wire).

What makes Phoenix’s performance especially exciting is that you’re watching not just a character go from chaos to self-possession but an actor, too.

Woman at War takes its tone not from von Trier but deadpan pranksters like the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, whose absurdities have an undercurrent of tragedy. Erlingsson has a magnetic heroine in Geirharðsdóttir, who’s lithe and athletic without being a show off, and underplays as a good soldier would.

Has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film. The mix is insanely powerful.

The movie suffers from having no obvious endgame, and it’s not as fun as the recent, less tony shut-the-hell-up horror movie Don’t Breathe. But it’s aggressively scary.

This one is alive with discoveries--of locations, characters, the actors who embody them, and even the medium. In The Go-Getter, filmmaking itself feels like Manifest Destiny.

If high-toned futuristic time-travel pictures with a splash of romance float your boat the way they do mine, you'll have yourself a time.

This is a rare case in which Marvel has freed a director’s imagination instead of straitjacketing it.

The tagline for Tiller Russell’s riveting new documentary, The Seven Five is “Meet the dirtiest cop in NYC history,” which I suspect does a profound disservice to a lot of other NYC policemen, past and present — although none of them are likely to write letters of complaint.

If you can get past the craven concessions to formula, though, it’s rather underful--I mean, wonderful. Taking his cues from John Tenniel’s famous illustrations, Burton indulges his delight in disproportion.

This Merchant of Venice comes roaring to life--when it stops, in effect, apologizing for its terrible anti-Semitic worldview and just gives itself over to some of the most furious courtroom drama ever written.

What the film does have is coruscating anger, impish wit, and a breathtaking style.

Transcends its murkiness and eats into the mind. Cure is what ails you.

Venus in Fur is both kinky and can pass as a form of self-flagellation. One additional, not-small thing: It allows him to demonstrate, with a minimum of means, his superb craftsmanship.

Say what you will about Mad Mel Gibson, he’s a driven, febrile artist, and there isn’t a second in his war film Hacksaw Ridge — not even the ones that should register as clichés — that doesn’t burn with his peculiar intensity.

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

The movie works smashingly, especially if you haven't seen its Hong Kong counterpart and haven't a clue what's coming. But for all its snap, crackle, and pop, it's nowhere near as galvanic emotionally.

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.

I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.

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.

The movie ends abruptly-too abruptly for my taste-but the gaiety lingers through the closing credits. Not even apocalypse can dispel the sexy vibes.

A minimalist exercise in maximalist suspense.

The arty but suspenseful drama The Strange Ones is a perfect demonstration of how the craft of storytelling is also the craft of withholding — of revealing as little as possible in carefully parceled-out amounts.

Vigalondo demonstrates that even the dumbest genres can be used to profound ends — not cheapening serious things but kicking them to the next metaphoric level. A woman finding her inner strength is inspiring. But a woman finding her inner giant monster who kicks butt — that’s just so cool.

No wonder Hawke was so hot to pass the script onto Linklater. He's superb, by the way.

Movies don’t always have to be “how things are.” When they’re as warm and rousing as Creed, they can be “how we want to make things.”

Leigh has been giving actors their tongues for decades, and of all his films, Happy-Go-Lucky is the easiest, the least labored.

The movie is painstakingly well made and murderously hard to sit through.

The first half of The Yellow Handkerchief is the half-movie of the year, and the rest isn’t bad--just more sentimental, more ordinary.

The Band’s Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.

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

The result, however clichéd, is spectacularly unnerving: hair-trigger horror.

At its midpoint, the film could go either way: toward "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" psychosis or something more hopeful and humanistic. It’s a testament to Saavedra’s tough performance that even with a happy ending, you wouldn’t want to leave her with your kids.

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

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.

The whole movie, of course, is a setting for its jewel, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria: With her clear, round eyes, long dark hair, and radiant transparency, she brings to mind two of the loveliest ingénues of the last quarter-century -- Meg Tilly and Jennifer Connelly.

In the flawless cast, Williams is the most affecting.

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.

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.

For Greenfield, the Siegels are a brilliant metaphor for everything farkakte about the U.S. economy and the culture that shaped it.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

Powerful and then some.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

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.

The bad news is that Before Sunset is not as delirious an experience as its predecessor. The good news is that it's wonderful anyway, and in ways that tell us something about our romance with "Before Sunrise."

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

It thaws the soul.

An extraordinarily potent brew.

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

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

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.”

True Grit isn't as momentous an event as you might hope, but once you adjust to its deliberate rhythms (it starts slowly), it's a charming, deadpan Western comedy.

I'm looking forward to buying Blades of Glory on DVD so I can get my head around the phenomenal skating routines. Obviously, there were wires and lifts and computer-generated effects, but for my money it looked like the lumbering Ferrell and nerdy Heder were Olympic-worthy stylists.

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

It’s everything a mainstream rom-com should be but no longer is — literate, unpredictable, full of bustling tangents.

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.

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.

A nutty, zany, wacky, unruly, spastically hilarious hodgepodge that hits at least twice as often as it misses—which is a big deal, since there are more gags per square foot of celluloid than in any film since Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990).

In Beirut, Hamm still doesn’t have the outsize personality we associate with major movie stars — a lot of whom are lesser actors. But he has focus. He can think onscreen. He can make you watch him closely, trying to keep up with the wheels churning in his head. I think he has fully arrived on the big screen.

Guilt and alienation from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, so arty, enervated, and allegorical it might have been made by a European in the early sixties.

It’s better to have a well-made, unapologetic action-adventure like this one than a creepy stab at replication.

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.

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.

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

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

An uncommonly well-crafted historical feminist tearjerker--both anti-patriarchal and a monument to motherhood.

Being a puckish Swedish, the writer-director Ruben Ostland slips into a tone that makes Force Majeure almost seem like a deadpan — frozen — comedy.

The first two thirds are gangbusters, with marauding bands of tarted-up young witches who look only slightly less scary than Lindsay Lohan and her pals on an average night.

As splashy as Killer Joe is, it's also, beat by beat, meticulously orchestrated, with no shortcuts to the carnage. When it comes to mapping psychoses, Letts and Friedkin are diabolically single-minded cartographers.

If I seem cool, it might be because I came in hoping for the same level of blood-and-thunder as in the Evangelical scenes of "There Will Be Blood," whereas The Master is a cerebral experience. But Anderson has gone about exploring fundamental tensions in the American character with more discipline than I once thought him capable.

I was alternately delighted and irritated, though mostly a very happy camper.

If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

A wonderful breather from reality, from which you come back more conscious of — and dismayed by — the hate that more than ever runs the world.

The movie has none of the smugness of "­American Beauty": You could dream of living in a world like this.

Before it loses its fizz--maybe two thirds of the way through--Volver offers the headiest pleasures imaginable.

For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown."

Though slow, it’s intense, and you’re hooked from its first scene — Angel’s final meeting with the detention authorities — to its last, wrenching image. Spiro is a real filmmaker.

The Host packs a lot into its two tumultuous hours: lyrically disgusting special effects, hair-raising chases, outlandish political satire, and best of all, a dysfunctional-family psychodrama--an odyssey that's like a grisly reworking of "Little Miss Sunshine."

Unexpectedly delectable.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

The Gatekeepers doesn't play like agitprop. The storytelling is strong, the images stark. The camera roams among multiple monitors showing multiple satellite views while an ambient score works on your nerves.

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.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

Somehow, Assisted Living jells. Maggie Riley is astoundingly convincing, and she and Bonsignore's Todd have an unforced chemistry that catches you off guard.

A senseless blast.

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

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

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

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

It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.

Gives off the same vapor of impending tragedy—of a fate neither just nor unjust but ineffably, wrenchingly right.

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

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece.

A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.

In dramatic terms, Osama couldn't be much simpler. The director is aiming for a sort of tone poem of repression, the girl robbed first of her childhood, then of her burgeoning womanhood.

I hate to damage so fragile a work with overpraise, but, gay or straight, if you don't see yourself in this movie, you need to get a life.

I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured. Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

In spite of its standard biopic gaps and simplifications, Walk the Line gets the big things right.

Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only concentrated and heightened.

Part of the movie’s fun — and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms — is how it forces you to share Lazarro’s go-along-to-get-along ebullience.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

It’s romantic, tragic, and inexorably strange.

The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

After warming up with "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," Malick has succeeded in fully creating his own film syntax, his own temporal reality, and lo, it is … kind of goofy. But riveting.

It’s quite a mix: Far From the Tree throws so much at you that you’ll want to pick up the book and read (or reread) it. You might be surprised that one of Solomon’s subjects is the accomplished composer Nico Muhly, who’s on the spectrum. Muhly (along with Yo La Tengo) composed the movie’s music, which, like the film and book, doesn’t settle for easy harmonies.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

Belongs to that most promiscuous of genres -- the go-for-it sports melodrama -- but transcends it and then some.

In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games.

A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

Knocked Up feels very NOW. The banter is bruisingly funny, the characters BRILLIANTLY childish, the portrait of our culture's narrowing gap between children and their elders hysterical--in all senses.

I confess that I had a hard time reconciling McDonagh’s madcap incongruities with the horror of the original crime and the grief of a mother struggling to cope with so primal an injury. Are the people who love the movie less rigid in their tastes? Or has McDonagh succeeded in so thoroughly psyching them out that they’re afraid to call foul?

A thriller that isn't kinky isn't much of a thriller. And Cellular has the best kinky phone gimmick since "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948).

Gooses you even in its barren patches and gets fresher and funnier as it goes along. It builds to a shriekingly funny (and scary) revelation and a dénouement so brilliant it's almost demonic.

The first real Jackie Chan picture crafted for the American market, is a terrific piece of junk filmmaking.

Tumbleweeds is gorgeously nuanced.

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.

It’s smoothly written and smartly paced, and Michael Douglas is riveting.

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.

The movie is phenomenally well made and the three actors who fall apart on our watch suffer magnificently.

A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

I've heard it said that Le Carré's work lost its savor with the end of the Cold War, which is as dumb as discounting "Coriolanus" because Romans and ­Volscians are no longer killing each other. Le Carré's subject was the national character and what happened to it under threat and in the absence of public scrutiny. It could hardly be, mutatis mutandis, more contemporary.

I reckon 90 of the movie's 106 minutes are thriller heaven. The windup, alas, isn't in the same league: Both humdrum and confusingly staged, it pales beside the volcanic climaxes of Franklin's "One False Move" (1992) and "Devil in a Blue Dress."

Before Midnight counts on our previous investment to keep us riveted. We are. And we want them back in spirit on that train to Vienna as much as they do. What’s next — After Sunrise?

Garbus brings off something extraordinary in a film that sets out to leave us sad, enraged, and profoundly unsatisfied. Lost Girls makes us want to rethink our need for a certain kind of closure in a world that has so little of it.

Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.

The documentary could hardly be more timely or essential.

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

It's rich, but slow, and children younger than eight (like mine) might get restless. But this big kid was lost in admiration.

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

For all the artfulness, the feel of the film is rough-hewn, almost primitive. It’s a fabulous tree house of a movie.

That title would suit a melodrama with an emphasis on doomed love, which is not what Loach has crafted. There is a (chaste) love story and plenty of bloodletting. But what engages him and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, is the growing tension between brother Irish rebels.

There is a long and honorable tradition of broad intermarriage comedies (from the Romans to Abie's Irish Rose to La Cage aux Folles), and this one comes at least shoulder-high to the best. It has been directed by Joel Zwick in a happy, bustling style and acted with madcap ethnic relish.

Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.

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.

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.

It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.

Fey's comic gifts mesh with Wiseman's first-hand research, and the wit becomes dazzling.

James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A giddy ballet in which the women whirl around a still, clueless man.

Ted runs out of invention in its last act (the bear is coveted by a chillingly deadpan sociopath, played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the villain's fat son), but I can't think of a better movie to see if you're male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence.

Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.

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.

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.

Each film in Nicolas Winding Refn's mesmerizingly brutal Pusher trilogy can stand on its own, but it's fun to see all three and observe the way the bad guys in one become the sympathetic heroes (or anti-heroes) in another.

On its own terms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a farrago of genius.

Each film in Nicolas Winding Refn's mesmerizingly brutal Pusher trilogy can stand on its own, but it's fun to see all three and observe the way the bad guys in one become the sympathetic heroes (or anti-heroes) in another.

The movie got me where I live, but I think that even non-Park Slope real-estate owners will have a blast at Duplex: It's one of the most unnerving slapstick extravaganzas I've ever seen.

Slattery adapted the book with Alex Metcalf and gets the tone just right. The film is damnably amusing.

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

The movie, believe it or not, gives pleasure. It’s a stark, violent, cynical but thoroughly entertaining caper picture.

The Square is inner-world-shaking.

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

I Love You, Man is totally formulaic, but the formula is unnervingly (and hilariously) inside out.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is sometimes frozen by Herzog's awe. But it's hard not to love him for always trying to look beyond the surface of things, to find a common chord in the landscape of dreams.

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

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 most miraculous thing about Man on Wire is not the physical feat itself, 1,350 feet above the ground, but that as you watch it, the era gone, the World Trade Center gone, the movie feels as if it's in the present tense. That nutty existentialist acrobat pulled it off. For an instant, he froze time.

Sachs hits notes we've rarely heard in gay cinema, in which the hedonist bleeds into the humanist, the ephemeral into the enduring.

A sharp-witted, visually layered, gorgeously designed, meticulously directed piece of formula pablum.