Glenn Kenny

Burnett creates an insistently poetic, devastatingly ironic world and work.

[An] exemplary documentary.

Although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.

Here the fellows seem to be getting along reasonably well. And director Maben’s frequent close-up views of guitarist David Gilmour’s cosmic-blues fretwork will make axe wonks happy, especially given the dimensions of the screen.

The movie reminded me of what Peter Bogdanovich said of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: that it "is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career." The wisdom and poetry here are just as real and just as thoroughly felt.

I haven't been crazy about a lot of Van Sant's recent work, but what he does here is simply astonishing. [November 2003, p. 25]

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far.

One leaves Vortex feeling cleansed by fire.

The plot is pretty convoluted, but Miyazaki has a very good handle on it and lavishes his customary heart, humor, and inventiveness on every situation he depicts.

This is spectacular, exhilarating entertainment. One might be moved to say, corny as it sounds, “All hail King Hu.”

There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core.

Make no mistake: this is a horror film; as you stare at the screen, the abyss it represents stares back at you.

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

One of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.

A thoroughly remarkable and disquieting film from Mali’s Abderrahamane Sissako, Timbuktu is also a work of almost breathtaking visual beauty, but it manages to ravish the heart while dazzling the eye simultaneously, neither at the expense of the other. It’s a work of art that seems realized in an entirely organic way.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

For all its seeming simplicity, this is an emotionally and intellectually complex film that holds the viewer in a grip as tight as any classic thriller you can name.

Ms. Martel’s attention to period detail is impeccable without being show-offish about it. But Zama is not the kind of period piece that aims for suspension of disbelief.

If you’re someone who treasures the music of Led Zeppelin more than you’re interested in the legend—or the gossip, or the dirt, or whatever you want to call it—of Led Zeppelin, this movie is absolutely for you. I’m one of those people, and I ate it up.

An exhilarating switchup: A comic fable that’s both deftly clever and irrepressibly goofy.

A picture that certain Brits and connoisseurs of British colloquial English might call "a grower" … more moving and funny the more I think about it.

It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 "L'Age d'Or."

Like the Maysles brothers, like Shirley Clarke, like D.A. Pennebaker at his heights, Wiseman has created a body of work that proves him a great filmmaker, period. His latest picture, National Gallery, is a typically lucid, graceful and unobtrusively multi-tiered work.

This intense film, a mix of horror, fantasy, and history that convinces on all those levels and mixes them up with dizzying brio, is a searing cinematic experience, a beautiful, terrifying vision from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.

Both inspiring and upsetting, Democrats is, finally, a film that deserves to be called “necessary.”

One of the funniest, smartest, most moving pictures of the year.

Despite its general tenor of quietude (which breaks in a confrontation scene that reminds you why yes, Schrader is also the writer of the film “Rolling Thunder”), Master Gardener is, among other things, a terrifically emotional film.

Bigelow’s ability to take a series of hypotheticals and render them into narrative actuality has never been more pinpoint accurate or merciless.

As sad as Garcia’s end is, Long Strange Trip remains an exhilarating and inspiring movie. For a not inconsiderable period, Garcia, Weir, Hart, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and various fellow travelers saw the possibilities that their talents and the times offered them, and made hay of them.

Like his prior film, 2015’s “Mountains May Depart,” this new picture from master Jia Zhangke is a three-part drama spanning decades. To this critic Ash is Purest White is a much more successful attempt at depicting a changing China through the lives of not-quite-tragic characters and their sufferings.

The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality.

Mr. Trengove shoots the film in intimate wide-screen, getting in close to the performers as their characters tamp down explosive feelings, often letting the spectacular landscapes behind them break down into soft-focus abstractions. His direction is perfectly judged up to and including the shudder-inducing ending.

Lee and company handle the particulars of the tale with the requisite meticulousness and exquisite taste that marks all the director's films.

The slapstick-comic set pieces involving Remy and Linguini's cooking struggles might solicit the admiration of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati.

The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of “The 400 Blows,” “Kes,” and “Vagabond,” one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.

It's also that he's really, honest-to-God, got one of those movie faces that doesn't even come along once every generation. It's astonishing.

The Other Side of the Wind is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time.

As is customary in Mr. Baumbach’s pictures, the acting is spectacular.

A remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism.

I'm glad that 2046 is different from "Mood" even while being strangely of a piece with it. Like "Mood," it’s a movie of utter wonder and ravishment. But the key here is different.

It’s as comprehensive and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one could hope for. And while the film, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a greater degree than any other account I’ve come across, it maintains the artist’s enigma.

I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.

As tough a life as Preston had, the music that buoys this chronicle is a constant source of joy.

This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.

This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.

Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.

The confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home.

Mr. Porterfield’s evenhanded direction doesn’t try to pull the viewer’s sympathies one way or another. Within his realistic mode he crafts some startling effects — a strip-club brawl that spills out into broad, embarrassing daylight is eye-opening.

It has an uncommonly strong ensemble cast...but the movie belongs to Mr. Trintignant.

Obviously, this is not a film for viewers unfamiliar with Mr. Tsai’s work. But its insistently austere format does suggest a purpose beyond its immediate context.

This is a potent, vital film.

This documentary makes a powerful case that the city’s lost dead are due more honor than what Hart Island currently extends.

With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.

With uncommon stealth, Let Him Go morphs from a drama about loss and grief into a terrifying thriller.

This is an angry, vivid, passionate film.

The film is relentlessly eye- and ear-filling, sometimes to the point of irritation. It’s a puzzle of strange pleasures, a nerve-racking way of recalibrating how to look at the screen and the world outside the screen. Go if you’re feeling super adventurous.

Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.

This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.

There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.

Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.

The moral rot and callous corruption depicted in Angels Wear White has a particularly bracing effect in part because, cultural specifics aside, the inhumanity on display is hardly alien.

The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.

Day of the Fight is an unabashed genre picture that manages to be both the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make like they used to, and also something bracingly fresh. It’s anchored by the lead actor, Michael C. Pitt, here ferocious and heart-stabbingly vulnerable in equal proportion.

This consistently striking and deeply sad picture is the directorial feature debut of Na Jiazuo, who executes it with an assurance that makes him more than merely promising.

The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.

Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And Faith is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.

The movie so upends the traditions of documentary and narrative filmmaking that “dramatizes” may be inaccurate — the filmmakers followed the real pilgrims for a full year, after all. But the movie is so well made and engaging that such distinctions will make little difference to the viewer.

You may believe you know Turner’s tale. And you may be right. It is retold well here, but the most moving portions — and they could bring tears to your eyes — come as Turner, almost 80 at the time of this interview (and as beautiful as she has ever been), wearing a tailored black suit, sits and discusses where she’s at now.

What plays out is a cinematic experience of life as performance, performance as life, reality as a construction and reality as someone else’s construction impinging on your own. The pace, which picks up and slows down throughout, is not some kind of perverse challenge to the audience. It is intrinsic to the inescapable atmosphere of the work.

An actor before he was a screenwriter, Mr. Sheridan clearly spent a lot of his time learning about filmmaking on movie sets; his direction is assured throughout.

Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.

Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.

There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.

A moving account of music as a way of coping with war, as well as keeping it at bay.

[A] cogent, fascinating portrait of the artist.

Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.

Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And it’s both heartbreaking and heartlifting.

As concert films go, “You Got Gold” is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that. Prine’s songs are full of wisdom, drama, laughs and heartache.

The accretion of detail — narrative, visual and verbal — gives the movie an unusual density. The depiction of human cruelty is appalling, but the way “Graves” makes the viewer feel the necessity of its filmmaker’s calling is profoundly moving.

The revelation of Andersson’s method, his painstaking use of trompe l’oeil both painterly and cinematic, is fascinating enough. But the chronicle takes an unexpected turn.

While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking.

The Plagiarists does skewer its characters, but where it goes from there is more genuinely bleak than what mere finger-pointing can achieve.

It’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.

At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.

The movie exhilarates.

In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.

While, in many respects, it is conventional in form, alternating archival footage from the late 1970s and early ’80s with newly shot interviews, the movie has a momentum (aided by an exemplary soundtrack of songs from the era) and a rare interrogatory spirit.

Ms. Jacir is a thrifty filmmaker; there’s nothing frilly in this movie. But she is also a sensitive and imaginative and resourceful one.

Wife of a Spy is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated.

The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.

A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.

There are moments in which this film, written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.

An excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz.