Glenn Kenny

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.