Glenn Kenny

Despite the urgency of the situation the musicians face, when they’re not doing their work, the movie is quiet, observant, taking in the austere beauty of the land and the people.

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.

The masterly Panahi concocts a spellbinding, often corrosively and/or warmly funny story in which love of both country and sport tries to, but doesn't quite, transcend dogmatic and ingrained difference.

Mr. Rodrigues ultimately delivers an intriguing, daring film that is likely to surprise both his fans and moviegoers unfamiliar with his work.

More often than not laugh-out-loud hilarious.

A triumphant revisiting of territory in which Scorsese is an unchallenged master -- the crime drama.

Beautiful, lyrical, but not in the least bit wimpy. [May 2004, p. 18]

Influences aside, the movie so teems with delightful detail and has such an exuberant sense of play that it feels entirely fresh.

For an ostensible action hero, Henry Golding in the title role does an awful lot of standing around and looking tense. The mayhem is frantic yet forgettable.

The direction is efficient and coherent. Arterton has been lately choosing roles that emphasize flinty self-determination over movie-star charisma, and she’s getting better at them all the time; this is one of her most credible and engaging portrayals yet. James Norton is equally impressive.

Hero is one of the most beautiful and involving films of the year.

The filmmaker’s poetic logic is inextricable from his consciousness of race and community, and of his function and potential as an artist grappling with his own circumstances and those of the people he’s depicting. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is not a long film, but it contains whole worlds.

The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually.

Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.

A tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism, and while director Lee never abandons his things-as-they-are approach, he tells a love story by letting magic in at unusual angles.

While Loznitsa’s films, particularly his documentaries, often have a terrifying epic sweep, “Two Prosecutors,” as its title implies, is an altogether more intimate undertaking. And no less terrifying for all that.

This film, directed by Zhao Liang (acclaimed here for his 2009 “Petition”) is a kind of poetic documentary. It’s all images and sounds, no interviews, no talking heads.

Wang and Zhang's film ends with an explication of a new “two child” policy, a celebration of the one-child-policy’s overall success. The propaganda for his policy is as cheesy as that for the old one. A sense of dread as to how this policy will be enacted intermingles with a strange feeling that a true reckoning with the old way is still very far off.

To elaborate as Chatwin did, Herzog implies, is a legitimate response to places that can’t help but exert a strong pull on the imagination. And of course, the truth-and-a-half principle figures heavily in Herzog’s own art — of which this film is a particularly outstanding example.

It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.

The settings are handsome, the cinematography accomplished, the performances first-rate.

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.

When the movie isn't being scary, it's crazily funny, so much so that critical watchers will wonder if Bong might tilt the balance of the picture too far in a comic direction and water down the scares. He doesn't.

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

Directed by Madeleine Gavin, Beyond Utopia is a bracing and frequently jaw-dropping look at, first and foremost, the discontented people of North Korea who attempt defections doggedly. It’s a more difficult trip than you’d probably imagine.

We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them.

Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.

Against the Tide, a documentary directed by Sarvnik Kaur, depicts environmental disaster with an intimate lens.

The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.

It's terribly strong -- in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty.

The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.

Whatever “Flipside” ultimately “means,” it’s ninety minutes well, and often amusingly and movingly, spent.

Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.

The sobering note on which the movie ends recalls a stone-cold classic from a sadly long-gone era of moviemaking. The homage actually functions as a token of this movie’s integrity and heartfelt sadness.

The movie makes canny use of non-linear editing, moving backwards and forwards with engaging fluidity, and it keeps this up throughout.

A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.

Nancy exhibits a seriousness of purpose that’s rare in American movies today.

This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.

It’s a movie best received in a relaxed frame of mind. Because much of it is a slow burn, if there’s indeed a burn at all.

The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.

Kaurismäki makes these bigots look ridiculous, but he also takes very seriously the damage they do, and the movie’s finale takes that into account.

Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.

But the movie is, for all its accomplishment, sketchy, tentative. And there’s something about the conception of Yoav that smacks of self-aggrandizement.

If you’re a big booster of any of the lead actors (I’m something of a Cannavale partisan myself), this will be worth your time.

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.

Perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's "White Hunter Black Heart": how violence--real violence, not movie violence--perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul.

The situations in this scrupulous, compassionate, and quietly captivating picture, written and directed by Maryam Touzani, are tense, to be sure. But the movie itself doesn’t surrender to the tension. It depicts unruly passions as they stir the lives of circumspect characters.

Lo wants to make a point, obviously, but I came out of this picture with some questions. And I also thought of an observation made by the music critic Robert Christgau, a metaphorical point addressing a type of artistic preciousness: “If I found a cat trapped in a washing machine, I wouldn't set up a recording studio there—I'd just open the door.”

Once Palpatine's machinations set the cogs in motion for the creation of Vader, and the Clone Wars start getting bloody, Sith commences to cook in a way that no Star Wars movie has since "Empire."

This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.

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.

The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.

An excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz.

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.

While the movie’s multiple images are never less than numinous, and its rhythms sometimes skirt the strangely seductive, this astonishing movie is the opposite of hypnotic.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

My own taste runs to different modes of poetic cinema, but I credit The Girl and the Spider for the seemingly paradoxical clarity of its mysterious vision.

Mike Wallace is Here, a documentary about the legendary and influential television interviewer who defined a particular kind of broadcast journalism, feels different from other documentaries about such figures, because it features no contemporary talking head interviews.

The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.

Even if you can sense the fun Crowe is having with the camera setups in certain scenes, Poker Face is simultaneously a lot and not all that much.

There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.

Evil Does Not Exist is something different, starting out as a character study cum eco parable and morphing into an enigmatic nightmare.

Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings.

Superbly acted and confidently shot, Who We Are Now delivers substantial dramatic pleasures while posing pertinent questions.

This is a movie of head-spinning richness.

Imelda Staunton is absolutely astonishing.

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.

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.

The film is beautifully acted by all, but Nora-Jane Noone, as the sloe-eyed orphan Bernadette, is first among equals here, and a genuine find.

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

This isn’t a film that makes a big deal of its contemporary authenticity; it wears its carefully measured elements lightly, the better to shine a light on its intriguing characters.

The movie does a superb job showing the mental and physical preparation and effort required. And for all that, doubt and a little bit of fear persist, souring Honnold’s first try at a climb.

This movie won an award in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes last year, and was also Finland’s entry for consideration for a 2016 Academy Award. For all that, I should warn some readers that this is a movie that’s laid back to what many would consider a fault.

The result is one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years. The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease.

In the end, Locke is a cinematic stunt that engrosses as it unspools, and pays dividends after it’s been accomplished.

The moviemakers are accomplished enough to make something coherent out of this tonal mishmash, but I was left with a "was this trip really necessary" feeling for all that.

In part because of its political blind spots, Cuba and the Cameraman is captivating. (Whatever you think of Mr. Alpert’s perspective, it’s interesting.) But it’s mostly worth watching because of human stories like these.

Dear Comrades is a fascinating, irony-steeped portrait of a soul who’s been hardened by her trauma, to the extent that she embraces its architects.

The movie is relentless in how it poses questions about our culture’s way of dealing with the power of female sexuality (and it wouldn’t work without Robinson, whose appearance and performance is impeccable for the job) and acknowledges that there’s not only unease in these questions and their answers but also mordant hilarity.

The movie has a lot of good bits and terrific performances, including a too-perfect Keanu Reeves as a mystic orthodontist.

A domestic comedy-drama that starts off from a fairly pat premise but builds strength over the course of its careful, empathetic, and crafty unpeeling of its characters.

An informative and overdue documentary.

It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.

Wenders chooses to illuminate indirectly, and to compel the viewer to concoct questions of their own.

Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, Afire draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise.

This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.

One leaves Vortex feeling cleansed by fire.

With almost palpable anger, Meirelles hammers home the point that crushing poverty is only one problem for Africa that the West needs to do something about.

Viewers looking for a tidy narrative and gratifying conclusions will come up short with this movie. But if you can roll with atmospherics that are their own reason for being, “Grand Tour” has plenty, and they’re all beautifully realized.

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.

In the meantime, this movie means to make us notice the marvelous in the everyday, in much the way that a great James Schuyler poem does.

More than just a shaggy dog story, Grand Theft Hamlet is a pointed, entertaining and moving examination of interdisciplinary conductivity at its most surprising.

While it keeps a sharp, neo-realist-influenced eye on the everyday lives of its characters, Joyland often gets so intimate as to discomfit the viewer to the point of exasperation. But the movie itself never judges.

It's a film that approaches greatness and then fumbles.

It's a rare film that can be convincingly tender, bitterly funny, and ruthlessly cutting over the course of fewer than 90 minutes. The Squid and the Whale not only manages this, it also contains moments that sock you with all three qualities at the same time.

In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.

A thoroughly engaging, terrifically moving family story that's rich in beautifully observed and lovingly conveyed human detail.