Glenn Kenny

Murina is a slow burn of a movie, one that doesn’t end in a detonation but with an enigma. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more coherent and satisfying narrative releases of the year.

Proceeds at a very stately pace, hoping the otherworldly mood of its detailed recreation of the old West might seep into the viewer's bones. This viewer did, as it happens, fall under the film's spell.

The wisdom of this meticulously crafted film is in its genuine irony, which amplifies steadily throughout until culminating in a moment of real heartbreak that, ironically enough, only sets the stage for a cycle of deceit to begin again.

The Duke is not his all-time-best picture, but it’s a very strong one, and it showcases his varied strengths as a filmmaker rather nicely.

The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder. So full that one is loathe to sum up with the phrase "Close, but no cigar." But there is something, finally, kind of pushy about the film's desire to be a masterpiece.

von Donnersmarck delivers something extraordinary and rare: a thriller that's entirely adult in both its concerns and perspective which manages to be as thoroughly gripping as any finely tuned albeit adolescent Hollywood nail-biter.

As much as I enjoyed much of it, I hope Grindhouse doesn't start any trends. Exploitation cinema is combustible stuff that only highly trained professionals should be permitted to play with.

So breathtaking is the action.

Limbo is entirely engrossing as it brings its discomfiting points home.

“Copperfield” is a grand, long novel, and in reducing it to 120 minute scale, Iannucci has hewn it to something almost anecdotal.

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

Margot is a fleet, strangely enjoyable film, animated by the acuity of Baumbach's perceptions and -- this helps a lot -- the frequent laugh-out-loud wit of his dialogue.

Yes, The Death of Stalin is a kind of farce, but it’s a mordant one. It never asks us to laugh at cruelty; it does make us laugh at the absurd pettiness and ultimate small-mindedness of the men perpetrating that cruelty. And Iannucci is a superb ringmaster.

With 2008’s “In Bruges,” and now “The Banshees of Inisherin,” the Irish actors, under the writing and directing aegis of frequently pleasantly perverse Martin McDonagh, display a chemistry and virtuosic interplay that recalls nothing so much as the maestros of the early 20th-century Comedy of Exasperation.

An observation that when you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you’re running to as much as it matters where you’re running from. “Compartment No. 6” has an always energetic sense of place even when it’s keeping to the confined space of its title room. Combined with the committed acting, it makes for a worthwhile journey.

Wang’s non-adherence to narrative lines deliberately prevents the sense of sustained drama. Still, every sequence has some emotional or dramatic hook to make it engaging.

I generally resist calling any actor's work "brave" or "fearless" or any such thing, but Bosco's work here made me reconsider that self-imposed ban. It's incredible, harrowing, precise stuff.

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.

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.

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.

The way Philippe organizes the hundreds of clips provides more startling and exhilarating moments per minute than most movies about movies can muster, although I can’t say that aficionados of ostensibly realistic cinema aren't going to be too thrilled. Which is too bad, because among the many things this picture captures is how the fanciful worlds of “Oz” and Lynch illuminate the pain and splendor of the world we have to inhabit once we leave the magic realm of cinema.

As for this film's esteemed director, I don't remember getting such sheer pleasure out of an Altman movie since . . . hmm, lemme look at the filmo . . . hmm—"The Player"? Not so much . . . "O.C. and Stiggs"? I wish . . . Um, "Popeye"? More likely, but . . . Ah-"A Wedding." Yeah, that’s it, "A Wedding." Whoa. That was, like, almost 30 years ago.

By turns harrowing and stirring, it’s a shame-inducing history lesson that never feels like a lecture.

David Strathairn, playing Murrow, follows his writers' lead beautifully, delivering a performance that's all understatement on the surface and searing fire underneath.

As magnificent as the movie looks, sounds, and feels, this cut expands upon and unpeels the movie’s weaknesses both as story and meditation on Vietnam.

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.

One of the more striking and effective horror pictures of recent years.

Exiled brings To back to lighter ground, and it’s one of his most assured, enjoyable pictures, refreshing fun that’s sure to satisfy anyone’s action jones.

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

Terrifically charming and energetic film.

A work of exceptional, undeniable craft, but it’s also a movie that’s meant to stick to you a little bit.

Ripstein, who began his long career working with the maestro Luis Buñuel, has his one-time mentor’s post-idealistic anger but doesn’t adopt an insouciantly ironic mode to filter it through; his perspective is determined but never detached.

A smart, sweet, and thoroughly disarming ensemble comedy that isn't afraid to wear its humanism on its sleeve.

It’s delightful and almost miraculous the way this movie manages to work as a comic heist picture on a huge scale, and with a comic science-fiction picture blended into it…while managing to cohere to the whole, you know, Marvel thing.

A modestly scaled character comedy-drama that winds up exerting an almost shockingly strong emotional force by the end.

These caretakers are all too human. The movie somehow turns that into a reason to admire them all the more.

This is a remarkably assured movie, through and through. Walsh and cinematographer Guy Godfree have taken care to make every individual shot a thing of beauty. But the artfulness always acts in service of the emotions, which in the end become both inspiring and heartbreaking.

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

Utama sounds a warning even as it casts a spell, and the spell is one of life and death and eternal returns and never-ending struggles, and the rest we can try to take when the work is done for the day.

All of these actors are incredibly fine, and as a confirmed Beckinsale non-fan, I'm obliged to say that she really knocked me out here.

If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich.

As much as Eastwood finds to condemn in the movie’s designated villains, he does not deliver any comeuppances to them in the end. Which is merciful in the context of fiction, and kind of the mordant point in the context of fact.

As forceful as its title suggests, and sometimes unbelievably ballsy.

An intense New York-set thriller that manages to be both commercial and contemplative, kick-ass and quietly, disturbingly insinuating.

It makes for a daringly different kind of thriller -- cerebral, meticulous, haunting.

By the end the movie has pretty much ceased taking itself at all seriously, devolving into a nonchalant giggliness of the stoned variety that's completely apropos.

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.

[Miller's] mastery makes the movie eye-popping; his freedom and audacity make it surprising and unsettling.

Not that Diamond skimps on the social commentary; far from it. But it makes its points without too much breast-beating, caching its polemic within a tough-minded entertainment.

Ira Sachs is one of American cinema’s most reliable crafters of human-scaled cinematic dramas. That description doesn’t sound too terribly exciting, so I should assure you that Passages is some kind of time at the movies—a briskly-moving, turbulent, emphatically sexy, deliberately exasperating love triangle in crazy times.

A dynamite thriller.

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

The picture sometimes plays as an amalgam of Soderbergh’s “Che” and Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” only—and this is the crucial point—with the volume turned down from 10, or 11 for that matter, to about 4.

This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller, and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith.

Costner’s uncanny evocation of Gary Cooper masculinity and Gregory Peck compassion in the role of coach Jim White is the glue that holds it together, but the rest of the cast is equally inspired.

Whatever your movie plans, you miss Tracks at your aesthetic pleasure peril. It’s a truly outstanding cinema experience.

The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.

Chasing Trane streamlines the story of the jazz saxophonist, but it does so in a way that doesn’t feel like cheating. Scheinfeld’s approach is to give the viewer the forest, point out a few trees and get out, confident that those trees will inspire the viewer to spend more time in the forest.

Against very steep odds, writer-director Billy Ray and company have, in telling the real-life story of fictionalizing "New Republic" writer Stephen Glass and his downfall, produced the most entertaining inside-journalism movie since "All the President's Men."

The one constant of life is change, and our own individual relations to the place we grew up, or came of age, in are invariably complicated not by just the alterations in the landscape but the way our perspectives shift...The Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho understands this feeling just as well as I and maybe you do, and he’s made a lovely, enveloping film about it, called “Pictures of Ghosts.”

Once the picture gets into Hollywood's bloodstream, it could well prove to be as influential as John Woo's 1989 crime thriller, "The Killer."

A War, as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience.

Fun, fun, fun. [July/Aug 2003, p.26]

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.

One of the things that makes this movie such a great rush is that while you’re watching it, it seems a good deal more subversive than it really is.

What comes across most vividly in this movie, ultimately, is the fact that what happened almost half a century ago is a trauma that still weighs heavily on the people of Vietnam. And many Americans.

Haynes's picture may not be perfect -- hell, I'm not even sure that perfection is a state it even aspires to -- but it's bold and individualistic and accomplished. A reason to take heart for the state of current American moviemaking.

This cool, unhurried movie is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated performance by Caillee Speeney.

While the themes here are, of course, redolent of neorealism, the filmmakers don’t make ostentatious nods to cinema past. Their voice is their own; the camera is mobile when it needs to be, but stands still much of the time, letting the excellent cast build their characters as the events of the film test their endurance.

In addition to serving up heaping helpings of suspense and action, “Fuze” abounds in twists.

But after surveying pop and rock hybrids, Akin and Hacke go deeper. You will be very happy indeed to make the acquaintance of such Turkish music luminaries as Orhan Gencebay and Sezen Aksu, whose stories and personalities are as fascinating as their music.

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

It really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging, but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be "American Horror Story."

Post-Holocaust discourse frequently used the phrase “Never Again” as a slogan, specifically referring to persecution of the Jews but also denoting a prohibition against barbarism; the events under consideration in these films are dispiriting reminders that human progress in this area has been meager at best.

The movie biz inside jokes eventually yield to fairly merciless plumbings about the construction of the self, resulting in a kind of philosophical discomfort that's much different from the run-of-the-mill humiliations this sort of thing usually trucks in.

Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.

Casta and Garrel generate wary warmth as a couple rediscovering each other, while Depp and Engel provide the comedic ballast.

The finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century.

An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.

This movie grabs you by the heart quickly and doesn’t let up the stress for any significant amount of time.

Those who aren't inclined to lambaste will surely have some stimulating conversations after the film is over.

Catherine Keener is remarkably subtle and soulful as Capote's friend and helpmeet Harper Lee, who delivers a shocking verdict against him at the end, but the movie, as you probably will not be surprised to learn, is owned by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

One of the more tough-minded and effective war pictures of post-American-Century American cinema.

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.

Appears at first to take a more macro perspective on gay rights. But it tells a big story indeed.

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

These small events transpire in beautifully shot, unhurried scenes. This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. Mike pieces his ruined life back together in a sense. He finds pleasure in being of service to a community. The professed agnostic takes Marta’s hand when she prays to begin a meal, and likes it. The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.

It’s always a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a movie. And it’s even more of a pleasure to see Blythe Danner in a good movie. No, not a good movie. A really good movie.

I’ll always love Lynch’s “Dune,” a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie IS “Dune.”

Magellan, about the titular Portuguese explorer, clocks in at a relatively tidy two hours and 45 minutes, making it practically an ideal starter picture for those curious about Diaz’s work.

The movie is at its most fascinating in its depiction of Lennon as a pragmatic activist.

If you go in for allusive British humor that builds slowly from dry to uproarious, as executed by two absolute masters of the form, The Trip To Italy will work for you, I believe. I also think the film, directed, like the prior one, by the astute Michael Winterbottom, is a somewhat smoother trip than the first.

This is filmmaking that's as rousing as it is strange.

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."

It's distinctly Morrisean, as it were, and seeing his style applied to subject matter with which one is already somewhat familiar makes one... well, question the style a bit.

Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly create characters that live and seethe with absolute credibility, and Ron Eldard’s Lester is a subtle portrait of a good man who lets himself go bad, first out of boredom, then out of erotic fixation.

While I have no problem enthusiastically recommending writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy, I'd also heartily discourage all but the most rabid crime-movie nuts from consuming the whole thing in one afternoon or evening.