Glenn Kenny

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.

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

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

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.

Every performance here is wonderful, and the movie abounds in moments so true as to be cringe-worthy.

Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.

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.

A phantasmagorical slab of epic entertainment that satisfies on every conceivable level.

The most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet.

The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.

In the end, "TÁR" is not a diatribe or parable, but an interrogation, one that seeks to draw the viewers in, and compel them to consider their own place in the question.

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.

A fantastical examination of man’s inhumanity to man, and as replete as it is with persistent visceral disgust, it also pulses with intelligence, a mordant compassion, and yes, incredible wit.

No Bears is a picture that’s in keeping with his recent work—circumstances deemed that it just had to be—but one that breaks away from it in ways that yield a work of, yes, astonishment.

The often-tense mother-daughter dance of recrimination and forgiveness is spectacularly acted.

Every performer in the international cast -- Seigner, de Bankole, von Sydow (magnificent as Bauby's father), and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few -- completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.

As stomach-churning a suspense exercise as the cinema has seen since the salad days of Hitchcock.

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.

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.

Tsai’s motives for stretching his shots become clear after a while, and the film builds an uncanny mood.

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

“Blizzard” is almost immaculately shot and edited, but its good-taste approach to warfare, along with its treacly music score by Lolita Ritmanis, underscores what seems its main reason for being: a relentless “Go, Latvia!” agenda — which has extended to its marketing here.

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.

This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.

This is one of the year's most subtly moving films, and a strong affirmation of Coppola's substantial talent.

This is a terrific document and a testament.

Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.

Vacancy could have been some sort of satirical masterpiece had this whole scenario been finally revealed as an extreme form of couple's therapy designed to get Beckinsale and Wilson back together.

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.

Panahi’s latest act of defiance is entirely commendable on a number of levels, but I regret to say that from my own perspective, Taxi is the weakest of the films he’s made since he was enjoined from making them.

The compassion expressed here, and the rich complexity of everything the movie takes in, make this Poitras’ best film.

Yep, this movie is basically a yakfest, but an incredibly fluid and involving one, and if you have any kind of affinity for either of the characters, you’re bound to find the picture a kind of miracle.

Like “Kaguya,” it functions as a highly sensitive and empathetic consideration of the situation of women in Japanese society—but it’s also a breathtaking work of art on its own.

Green’s approach as the narrator is sometimes a little too “gee whillikers” to suit the tastes of this grumpy old man, but 32 Sounds hit my sound and vision sweet spot just fine most of the time.

I Called Him Morgan evokes times and places, and the sorrows and joys of the jazz life in those times and places, with real integrity.

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

The movie is, of course, beautifully made. Anderson’s visual style is remarkable. Shooting the picture himself, reportedly, with the collaboration of lighting cameraman Michael Bauman, he frames in a Kubrick-inflected style but cuts with a Hitchcock-influenced one.

[An] exemplary documentary.

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.

I don't think we're going to see a better--a funnier or more genuinely heartwarming, for that matter--comedy this year.

The movie’s protagonist, played with spectacular attention to detail and what feels like a genuine sense of affinity by Adam Driver, is named Paterson.

While avoiding specious bromides about universality, Persepolis insists on communicating with its audience, and insists that communication and empathy are the keys to our survival.

The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed.

A wildly imaginative, hugely entertaining tour de force that asks big questions about life and love and fate while never ceasing to fully engage the viewer.

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.

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.

All told, while the goods that Daggers offers are choice, the movie ultimately demonstrates that too much can be, well, more than enough.

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.

Throughout the picture, Bernstein interacts with genteel folk who quietly deplore what they see as the American perception of art and art-making.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is both very simple and head-spinningly confounding, a thing of endless visual beauty that seems to partake in a kind of pictorial minimalism but finds staggering possibilities for beautiful variation within its ineluctable modality. It’s a true work of art.

While it’s inevitable that some, maybe many, viewers will find the dual role a distraction, those who hunger for De Niro in mobster mode will get more than their fill.

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.

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.

Its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.

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

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.

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.

Writer-director Mike Leigh is 81 years old, and his movies consistently have a fire that's practically adolescent while imparting a wisdom that's possibly ancient. "Hard Truths" is a tragi-comedy character study of near-febrile vitality. And, entering the sweepstakes rather late in the game, it's one of the very few great films of 2024.

The movie is relentlessly fluffy.

This movie struck me as both Ceylan’s plainest, and perhaps his finest.

This is a movie of visuals first and foremost; it’s no fluke that director Warwick Thornton shared cinematography duties with Dylan River. In addition to capturing stunning images, Thornton has a sleight-of-hand maestro’s joy in shuffling and fanning them. Lightning-fast cuts to flashbacks and flash-forwards keep the viewer on his or her toes in a bracing fashion.

“A complete and utter love affair with your blackness.” That’s how one of the interviewees in this incredibly enjoyable documentary describes the tenor of Soul! a U.S. public television arts and chat show that ran from 1968 to 1973. Mr. Soul!, as the title indicates, is not just about the show, but about the visionary that created it and, a little reluctantly, hosted it, Ellis Haizlip.

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.”

The mood Mr. Weerasethakul conjures is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the movie’s premise, in the hands of almost any other director, would be used to build some kind of horror movie.

Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.

People have spoken about how understated and old-fashioned Brooklyn is, to the extent that it might come across as a pleasant innocuous entertainment. Don’t be fooled. Brooklyn is not toothless. But it is big-hearted, romantic and beautiful.

One of the most diabolical things about this psychological thriller is just how open to interpretation it is.

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.

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.

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.

As much a joy as this movie . . . is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.

The intercutting between vintage footage of the Jones/Zane company and the student production, as well as footage from another contemporary production of the piece — shot with an onstage intimacy that recalls the in-the-ring segments of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” — make for an unusually lively documentary experience.

As laudable as the movie is, it does not quite achieve greatness. That’s the fault of both its indirectness and its obviousness.

Herzog not only tells an incredible story but implies a dark metaphysic of the natural world that makes this film unsettlingly larger than its human subject.

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.

The “endlessness” of the film encompasses a lot of absurdity and disappointment, but its notes of grace sound the loudest.

This is more than just the best animated comedy of the year--it's the best comedy of the year, period.

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.

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

Strickland’s film is a daring, atmosphere-soaked piece of kink hypnotherapy that pays explicit homage to the films of Franco, down to the casting of former Franco regular, formidable femme Monica Swinn, in a sinister role.

The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.

The key to this movie’s winning emotional delicacy is its formal sturdiness. Every shot has a specific job to do and does it well. The performances are measured and restrained.

A remarkably appealing success story full of heart and humor and poignancy, with Swank as winning as she’s ever been.

Dawson City now enters that time line as an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.

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

The action is violent, messy, and threaded through with dark humor. This is a movie for grownups, for sure, but it has a mulish kick that most such pictures consider themselves to tasteful to aspire to.

By putting the garrulous, sometimes cranky Hersh on film, “Cover-Up” reveals, in the behavioral sense, the obsessiveness that makes an investigative journalist.

Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.

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.

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.

Sibling rivalry is a consistent subtext but only that — Mr. Adrià’s main concern is to create. As it happens, in this generally likable film he is at his most endearing when fixing himself a simple (but indeed delicious looking) grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

Most thrillers of this ilk have no qualms about going past the 120-minute mark, but I think Greengrass and company understood that overdoing it would turn mass excitement into massive headache.

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

Serra’s meticulous shooting and cutting relate to phenomenology; that is, it delivers an account of subjective experience. It implies that Rey’s “personality” is superfluous to his being.

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.

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