David Edelstein

Burnham made his name as a stand-up comedian, and if you can manage to look at Eighth Grade objectively — which isn’t easy, given the wallop it packs — you’ll see that it’s pretty slick.... But the slickness is dispelled whenever Elsie Fisher is onscreen, which is practically always.

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.

The German comedy Toni Erdmann makes the best case imaginable for the importance of tone.

A marvelous feat of re-imagination.

As a go-for-it music movie, Whiplash is just about peerless. The fear is contagious, but so is the jazz vibe: When Andrew snatches up his sticks and the band launches into a standard—say, Hank Levy’s “Whiplash”—it’s hard not to smile, judder, and sway.

It's a remarkable film--one to gnaw at you and keep you up at night.

Audiard's take is fevered, immediate, and hopeful--a story of a man recovering his soul. The most intense and compelling sections of The Beat are almost word for word from "Fingers" (albeit translated into French), but this beat changes everything.

The world didn't need a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. We didn't need it, but we got it anyway -- and it's pretty terrific.

I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.

Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story.

It’s worth shaking off the incongruities and getting on the movie’s wavelength. Once Transit’s bitterly ironic vision takes hold, it eats into the mind.

An entertaining, emotional, and surprisingly intimate movie--an epic saga of fauns and talking (Cockney) beavers and evil sorceresses and triumphal resurrections and massive, sweeping battles that nonetheless feels … small.

The movie is a triumph of an especially satisfying kind. It arrives at a kind of gnarled grace that’s true to this sorry old man and the family he let down in so many ways.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is an exquisitely crafted tale of woe with heartfelt early-sixties folk music — and an overarching snottiness.

Gorgeously silly.

A big, overlong, and rather unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking melodrama--it will get people fuming.

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

Both a masterpiece and a holy hell: Watching it, you feel you're being punished for a crime you didn't commit. Which puts you, come to think of it, in the same frame of mind as those poor Magdalene girls.

If I didn't believe that the experience of watching Domestic Violence would change the world for the better, I wouldn't believe in the power of movies. And I wouldn't do what I do.

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

Mike Myers is like a rich 12-year-old who rents out F.A.O. Schwartz, upends every toy in under two hours, and brings in strippers. He can get away with this privileged romp because he grooves on what he does in a way that none of his contemporaries -- can comprehend.

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

Please don’t bore me by complaining that the characters are “unlikable.” The defense admits that the movie is indefensible. Just breathe in the aroma of decay and howl like a banshee.

A hilarious, poignant, lovingly ironic celebration of (Tammy Faye Bakker's) rise and fall and her refusal to be broken.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

It's like an Ingmar Bergman film with the loss of religious faith replaced with a sort of socioeconomic nebulousness.

It’s a near masterpiece.

Went down like a slice of warm pecan pie topped with two scoops of Ben and Jerry's Bovinity Divinity.