Glenn Kenny

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.