David Edelstein

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.

Jenkins’ writing underlines the fundamental instability at the heart of all our lives, while proposing that most universal of remedies: empathy, love.

It's hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical, sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.

Watching the opening of A Hard Day's Night is like getting a direct injection of happiness.

The sci-fi chamber drama Marjorie Prime is exquisite — beautiful, intense, shivering with empathy.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

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.

Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.

What a cast Pride has — some of the best famous actors in Britain and lesser-known younger ones that will (soon) take their place in the firmament.

At her best — which is more often than you can imagine — Hogg convinces you that incoherence is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity. She spoils you for the overshapers, the spoon-feeders.

Master and Commander hooks you from its nifty opening salvo to its nifty closing punch line.

Even when you're able to guess the next calamity, it's still a shock in its ejaculatory intensity. The Farrellys never throw in the towel. Pretentious Sundance independents could learn a lot from such pistols.

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

I’m not crying “masterpiece” here. Locke is too contained, too well-carpentered, too self-consciously “classical.” But tours don’t come much more forceful. Once you’ve taken this 90-odd-minute drive with Tom Hardy, you’ll never forget his face.

Meehl, in her directing debut, is attuned to the rhythms of Buck, who's attuned to the horses.

It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.

Like his protagonist, Bahrani never gives up on William; his camera never stops probing. He loves West's face, and he honors its mystery.

There’s raw power in Chomko’s writing, but so much scrupulousness and craft that you feel safe when the time comes to weep.

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

This is finally the zombie flick as cautionary political tale, and as humanist parable. It's not the flesh-gouging zombie we have to worry about, the filmmakers suggest, but the soul-gouging zombie within.

Riveting and so suggestive that you can't consume it passively: You have to brood on it.

It strides above its crudeness like a colossus. It's smart people telling dumb jokes with a brilliant sense of irony. Anchorman gives you permission to laugh like an idiot.

The smartest, funniest, and best-looking sci-fi comedy since the movies learned to morph.

My first viewing left me dazzled but slightly confused; a second deeply impressed; a third rhapsodic. I wish I hadn't needed to rediagram it in my head to turn it into the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking the name of a Strindberg work) a dream play, and have made it once more madly, bitingly, chillingly alive.

Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.

Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.

The movie is so Burtonesque that it verges on self-parody--but it's fun and stunningly beautiful anyway.