David Edelstein

It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.

It’s a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. It’s sui generis. It’s the damnedest thing.

His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.

It’s funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing. It’s steeped in existential dread. I don’t know how Birbiglia pulled it off, but he gets the minutiae of an improv-comedy show thrillingly right while using the form to build a kind of allegory of the corrosive effects of capitalism.

You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.

The best American movie of the year. Has a subtext so powerful that it reaches out and pulls you under. Even when the surface is tranquil, you know in your guts what's at stake.

For all its portentousness, this is the best Harry Potter picture yet. In some ways, it improves on J.K. Rowling’s novel, which is punishingly protracted and builds to a climactic wand-off better seen than read.

The Avengers is both campy and ­reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.

For grown-ups, the film will touch something deeper: the heartfelt wish that childhood memories will never fade.

By the climax, we can hardly breathe -- The outcome is less important than our utter and complete empathy with this man. As we await what he does, we breathe with him, in and out. This is an astonishing movie.

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

The best film of 2002.

An unassuming gem: an impishly funny, melancholy, absolutely delightful English ensemble drama.

Assayas’s pace is easy, his structure linear: no tricky flashbacks, no jagged cuts. There’s so little in the way of histrionics that it’s hard to put one’s finger on why the film is so terrifically intense — except that each actress is, in her own peculiar way, preternaturally high-strung, able to convey momentous emotional stakes without raising her voice above the pitch of conversation.

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

Pantheism, Cameronism: In Avatar, what's the diff? Now he's king of a world he made from scratch.

The band's implosion and reassembly makes for one of the most marvelous rock documentaries of all time.

This teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.

The best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating.

What’s extraordinary about Tangerine is that it’s everything an entertaining, old-fashioned, mainstream Hollywood comedy should be but no longer is. That nowadays you have to get this kind of stuff via Sundance from directors using iPhones is a drag — the wrong kind.

Fashioned by a buff, The Lord of the Rings is a banquet for the buff in us all. I left exhausted, happy, intoxicated.

Living with Mason and his parents over time you feel an intimacy, an empathy, a shared stake. I’m not saying Boyhood is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but I’m thinking there’s my life before I saw it and my life now, and it’s different; I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.

Osder has made a documentary that’s astonishingly in the present tense.

The movie is as cornball as all get-out and — once you discern the narrative arc — as predictable. But then there’s the part that’s — as we serious cinephiles like to say — infuckingcredible.

This is by light-years the most entertaining movie of the year. How many apocalyptic sci-fi action extravaganzas leave you feeling as if the world is just beginning?

Igby Goes Down got a reaction from me: I think it's the movie of the year. I squirmed, I laughed a lot.

As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it's phenomenally gripping - an unholy masterwork.