David Edelstein

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 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.

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."

What Steven Spielberg has accomplished in Saving Private Ryan is to make violence terrible again.

The film is superbly acted (especially by Macdissi, who makes the father a borderline hysteric), but it's hard to know what to feel except, "How can any girl navigate this oversexualized culture?"

This haunting movie transports you to another world — and redefines home.

Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it.

For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter's Bone is the year's most stirring film.

The Queen is the most reverent irreverent comedy imaginable. Or maybe it's the most irreverent reverent comedy. Either way, it's a small masterpiece.

The brilliance of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is that, without a shift in tone, the film begins to seem like a tragedy populated by clowns, its males clinging to ancient laws to compensate for feebleness of character.

It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.

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.

The movie goes on for three hours without an emotional letup — it’s finally overwhelming.

The film isn't in the same key as Pekar's comic: The tempo is buoyant, puckish, and even more "meta" than the original.

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.

The exhilaration is slow to build. It doesn't come from any one thing but from countless crosscurrents, tiny bits of color that fill out the portrait.

In totalitarian societies, artists have found all sorts of ways - some brilliantly imaginative - to disguise their political protest, but Panahi has no subterfuges left. This Is Not a Film ends with a whimper that is a bang. He must be freed.

Of all the great vocal characterizations...the showstopper is Brooks, who hasn't had a part this good since "Lost in America" (1985). His Marlin is tender, cranky, hysterical, yet somehow lucid.

A monument to process -- to the minutiae of making art -- Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.

Everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real.

For all its wizardry, The Incredibles isn't among my favorite animated movies. Weirdly enough, I think of it, instead, as one of my favorite live-action superhero pictures.

Rahim is an exciting, unpredictable presence, and Arestrup’s César has a stature that’s nearly Shakespearean.

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

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

Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.

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.

I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.