David Edelstein

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.

The whole thing is irresistibly preposterous.

Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece? Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.

Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.

Soderbergh contrives the perfect voice for Leonard's prose--laid-back and grooving when it needs to be, but also taut, with the eerie foreboding of violence about to erupt.

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

Children of Men is a bouillabaisse of up-to-the-minute terrors. It's a wow, though.

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.

As I watched American Movie, a lot of it struck me as untranscendent misery. But in hindsight it seems less hopeless.

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

It left me bemused instead of moved, but true Andersonites will likely float away in a state of nirvana.

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

Profoundly different from the others. On the cusp of their half-century mark, Apted's British subjects have accommodated themselves to what they were, what they are, and what they will be.

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.

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

Anderson says that as a child she dreamed of making something that had never been made before, and, with the help of some gifted artists and editors and camera-people, she has done it again — with bells on. The only thing that would make it more pleasurable would be Anderson narrating it in person.

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe’s empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture — woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.

Chill to the core, Haneke presents human cruelty not to make us empathize with the victims or understand the oppressors but to rub our noses in the crimes of our species. He thinks he’s held on to the subversive ideals of punk, but all I smell is skunk.

Crosses the blood-brain barrier like … like … whatever the drug is, I haven't tried it, thank God. The movie eats into your mind - ­slowly.

To my taste, the movie finally feels rather one-dimensional, basic. But there’s no disputing its awful power.

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.

The Other Side of Hope — which is tragic, funny, depressing, and inspiring — shows that a truly imaginative artist has resources unavailable to journalists and nonfiction filmmakers. In Kaurismaki’s work, it’s as if the masks of comedy and tragedy don’t — as usual — face away from each other, but stare each other in the face, as if they were saying, “You and me, we’re in this together.”

Against a radiant backdrop of decay and rebirth, nothing needs to be said; everything in this lovely film is crystalline.

Even at its most self-conscious, there’s something lovable about A Ghost Story.

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

The Square is inner-world-shaking.

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