David Edelstein

That's the beauty of Mafioso: that what begins as a comedy of disconnection becomes a tragicomedy of connection -- of roots that go deep and branches that span continents.

Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.

Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.

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.

The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.

Poetry in motion: It's eggsquisite.

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

This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.

You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as shitty as the original "Friday the 13th." Heads should roll.

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

Brooklyn doesn’t quite capture Brooklyn, but its ambivalence about being Irish is gloriously epic.

Pure and universal.

The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.

A glorious, visceral mess -- The film is, by most criteria, an ungainly piece of storytelling. Yet it sweeps you up and hurtles you along like water from an exploded dike.

It comes together neatly, perhaps too neatly to be … poetry. But it's not prosaic, either. It has a lucid grace.

Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.

Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting—the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh.

Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.

Mulholland Drive isn't a "puzzle" like "Memento," in which the pieces (sort of) fit together. There are some pieces here that will never fit -- except maybe in Lynch's unconscious. And yet -- and yet -- this distinctly Hollywood nightmare makes a deeper kind of sense.

His sixth Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, isn’t the best of the bunch (that would be number four, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol), but it’s easily the second-best and certainly the Cruise-iest, meaning it’s nearly as entertaining as it is strenuous. Which is a mighty high bar!

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

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.

Morgen gets a little Terrence Malick-y for my taste, too, as he revs up for the big finish.

An absolutely magical fusion of deadpan Ealing comedy and Gothic horror.

It’s breezy, then suspenseful, and gradually, crushingly sad. On its own terms, it’s a perfect film.

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.

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.