Joe Morgenstern

What's so remarkable about their decadeslong campaign, though, is how desperation led to inspiration - to the inspired notion that they, as nonscientists, could still take their fate in their own hands.

The kind of movie they don't make any more -- a seriously beautiful, deliberately paced drama that meanders for a while at the pace of a summer romance, then explodes with phenomenal force.

More than anything, Of Gods and Men is a drama of character, and warm humanity.

This is not a drama of shadings, but of ever-increasing intensity.

Deliver Us From Evil has its flaws. Certain passages are diffuse, others are argumentative, and there's a discomfiting staginess to the climax... Yet the film's concern for the victims, and their families, is one of its strengths.

In contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic -- oh, and sexy -- the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander.

It’s an emotional investment with rich returns. Pedro Costa’s hypnotic drama, shot superbly by Leonardo Simões, follows its heroine through a dark night of the soul into the light of a new life in a new land.

Ms. Gyllenhaal might have chosen conventionally entertaining material for her first time behind the camera, but she and Ms. Colman turn “The Lost Daughter” into something memorable. It’s a study of repression expressed with heartbreaking poignancy, a lost mother’s search for herself.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

The results are nothing less than sensational.

Much of Summer Hours, which was shot by the excellent Eric Gautier, feels like a Chekhov play and resonates like a Schubert quartet; it’s a work of singular loveliness.

Beautiful (sometimes sublimely so), daring (sometimes outrageously so), seriously crazed and terrifically funny.

Paul Thomas Anderson's remarkable sixth feature addresses, by extension, the all-too-human process of eager seekers falling under the spell of charismatic authority figures, be they gurus, dictators or cult leaders. Or, in the case of this masterly production, a couple of spellbinding actors.

Whether the truth sets anyone free is unknowable at this point, but the city that was being slaughtered silently has been heard, and its suffering has been seen.

The explosively combative young hero, Liam (a brilliant performance by Martin Compston), has only the illusion of a fighting chance. Yet Sweet Sixteen is powerful because of the searing honesty with which it strips Liam of his illusions.

This tale of forbidden friendship between a bear and a mouse is so winning that audiences will cherish it as the classic it's sure to become.

Grapples with eternal questions of faith, to be sure, but confronts just as powerfully, if not more so, the urgent matter of how to live a good, useful life in the turbulent here and the terrifying now. First Reformed has its steeple in the clouds and its foundation on solid ground.

Sensationally entertaining.

There's no trace of calculation, only artistic ambitions and hopes that have come to fruition in the year's finest film thus far.

The film, newly streaming on Netflix, pulls together disparate strands of an untold saga into something thrillingly new.

What Mr. Hou has done is borrow power and some gentle intimations of a state of grace from one of the most enchanting images in movie history.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

Part 2 of The Deathly Hallows, is the best possible end for the series that began a decade ago.

A dazzling piece of filmmaking, and much of the dazzle - as well as the anguished darkness - comes from Adam Stone's cinematography, which expresses the swirling state of Curtis's mind with richly varied flavors of light.

His new film, in Persian with English subtitles, is of a piece with his best work — tightly focused, rather than broad-gauge brilliant, and another instance of this superb filmmaker turning elusive motivations and the mysteries of personality into gripping drama.

Astonishing visually and problematic dramatically.

Get Out starts with a great title and a promising idea — a black man’s fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb. Then it delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance.

This is hardly a film to recommend as entertainment. As an act of remembrance, though, it is singular and, in its way, soaring.

Mr. Spielberg’s film is a revelation. He has seized the moment by rethinking and reworking the source material. The results aren’t perfect. The production suffers from a heart condition of sorts, a flaw in the love story that’s flagrant but not life-threatening. Altogether, though, this pulsing, exultant musical connects a classic of American entertainment to a contemporary audience as never before.

Song of the Sea was made primarily, though not exclusively, for young children. Its unhurried pace will serve as an antidote to, or even an inoculation against, the mad rush of most contemporary animation. This is a film made by the other crowd, people who care about helping children to care about the medium of film for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Akin's film is so full of life that it leaves you breathless.

I can't begin to count the ways in which The Savages pleased me, but the very best of them is the way Tamara Jenkins's comedy stays tough while sneakily turning tender.

The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade.

This tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom is thrilling --for the radiance of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, who's wonderfully smart and perilously tender; for the grace of Lone Scherfig's direction, and the brilliance of Nick Hornby's screenplay.

Never before, not even in the claustrophobic submarine epic "Das Boot," has a physical point of view so completely dictated a philosophical point of view.

No one makes movies like Mr. Jia does. He’s a dramatist with the eye of a documentarian and the instincts of a historian, even a geographer. But he’s also a romantic poet, and his heroine, a strong woman with a pure heart, is driven by love as far as it can take her.

A marvelous story.

This poetic, laconic and ineffably beautiful drama has an unerring feel for its subject, a young cowboy struggling against his implacable fate in the American West. That’s notable in itself, and all the more so since the film was written and directed by Chloé Zhao, a Chinese woman born in Beijing.

Poignantly funny, wrenchingly wise and meltingly beautiful, Eighth Grade is a not-so-small miracle of independent filmmaking.

This faux-documentary is droll, aerosol-thin and ultrameta.

A remarkable though sometimes frustrating film.

The delicately subversive Mr. Panahi makes his subjects perfectly clear -- the stupidity of authority, and the hypocrisy of discrimination. Offside is surprisingly entertaining, and edifying to boot.

Judd Apatow's high-density, high-intensity comedy of bad (and good) manners is a cause for celebration -- the laugh lines are smart, and they come faster than you can process them.

A cry of anguish for the youngest victims of every war.

The screenplay, by William Monahan, is simply sensational. Scenes play brilliantly. Feelings flow like molten lava. The dialogue overflows with edgy wit and acidulous arias of imprecation.

This beautiful -- and beautifully controlled -- film is also an object lesson in how to hypnotize an audience.

This version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy turns on the presence of Mr. Oldman, and he is an actor of great experience and accomplishment who has finally found a film that fully deserves him.

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

In one sense, Neil Young: Heart of Gold is just a simple concert film -- no cutaways during the music for interviews, no cameras swooping and soaring on giant booms. But simplicity in this case also means no barrier between us and the people on stage, as they sing some of the most soul-stirring pop songs I've seen performed in a very long time.

Magical is not an oversize word for this exquisite film.

Mr. Vasyanovych’s approach is literally and figuratively visionary.

Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note.

The pursuit is manipulative and repetitive.

Toward the end of this loose-jointed and endearing new film, a freshman says to her boyfriend, “It’s kind of beautiful that we get to feel passion in this world—about anything.” She and he, and everyone around them, have passion to burn, and we get to feel great about them.

The Past plays out within narrower bounds than "A Separation," and often at lower velocity — a few moments feel almost Chekhovian. Yet the film is commanding in its own right, another exploration of a volatile situation — an estranged husband returning from Iran when his wife requests a divorce — in which flashes of insight or understanding lead to new mysteries.

In a literal sense this delightful film, in Norwegian with English subtitles, is about retirement and the prospect of loss. But Mr. Hamer, a poet of the droll and askew, sends the aptly named Odd--it's also a common Norwegian name--on a cockeyed journey from regret through comic confusion to a lovely eagerness for new adventures.

Shocking as it may be, One Child Nation needs to be seen. It’s a document that deepens our understanding of the totalitarian state that China was, not that long ago, of the enormity of the inhumanity that the central government visited on its most vulnerable citizens.

A singular achievement -- romantic, sensuous, intelligent and finally shattering in its sweep and thematic complexity.

Daring in concept, occasionally daffy in execution and ultimately unforgettable, Mr. Malick's film offers a heartfelt answer to the question of where we humans belong - with each other, on this planet, bound by love.

This movie will stir your heart and open your mind. It's a group portrait of practicing patriots.

The film is an improbably thrilling work of art by virtue of its physical beauty and its relentless intensity of feeling about people — not only Iya and Masha — who would prefer in their heart of shattered hearts to feel nothing.

This beautiful film celebrates a deeply good man with a great gift for repairing.

Kelly Reichardt's marvelous, minimalist epic, amounts to a master class in the power of observation.

At the age of 27 Mr. Coogler seems to have it all, and have it firmly in place a clearsighted take on his subject (no airbrushing of flaws or foibles here, just confident brush strokes by a mature artist); a spare, spontaneous style that can go beyond naturalism into a state of poetic grace, and a gift for getting, or allowing, superb actors to give flawless performances.

The life that swirls around Kym before, during and after her sister's densely populated, wonderfully detailed wedding seems to have been caught on the fly in all its sweetness, sadness and joy. (In its free-form style the film constitutes an elaborate homage to Robert Altman.)

It's astonishing, and moving.

A magnificent documentary.

A stunning drama about the desperate state of women in Iran.

Before and after plot mechanics, a drama of family tension and warmth.

Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece.

Density of detail and intensity of experience are the twin distinctions of A Christmas Tale, a long, improbably funny and very beautiful film.

It's a new and inspired vision of a familiar state of being -- teenage anomie amidst the crumbling wreckage of a middle-class American family. In the space of 78 minutes, Mr. Van Sant and his cinematographer, the peerless Christopher Doyle, manage to suffuse that state with haunting sadness, ubiquitous danger, pulsing power and flickers of hope.

Terry Gilliam's darkly funny and truly visionary retro-futurist fantasy is a mess dramatically, and its turbulent history echoes the battles fought by Orson Welles against studio executives bent on recutting or scuttling his films.

This magnificent documentary, directed by David Sington and presented by Ron Howard, rises to the occasion by interspersing its interviews with NASA footage that evokes the grandeur of the whole Apollo adventure.

It’s rare that a film mixes joy and melancholy with such ease, and to such lovely effect.

Bloated adaptation of P.D. James's thoughtful, compact novel.

The film, directed by Shaka King from a script he wrote with Will Berson, is a special sort of twofer—a powerful, and candidly sympathetic, political biography with contemporary relevance, and a morality tale set forth as an exciting action adventure.

Mr. Spielmann's film is full of surprises and, in its distinctive way, full of life.

As one might expect from Mr. Tarantino’s previous films, his new one is violent — extravagant violence is visited on men and women alike at several points — as well as tender, plus terrifically funny. Yet this virtuoso piece of storytelling also offers intricate instruction on the pervasiveness of violence in popular culture.

[Kore-eda's] latest film, though, has a special warmth and grace. It unfolds slowly, sneaks up on big questions about intertwined mysteries of family and personal destiny, and pretty much answers them, though the biggest question for Ryota is whether he’ll be changed by what he learns.

Beguiling and endearing.

A magnificent concert film of Latino jazz.

Nothing funnier, smarter, quicker or more joyous has graced the big screen in a long time. Every performance pulses with wit, whether drawing-room-precise or burlesque-broad. Every joke fires infallibly, whether blithe, barbed or raunchy. Every fresh face conceals a surprise. It’s a thrilling achievement by any measure, an AP course in the exuberance of youth.

It's one of the best surprises of the holiday season.

Yet dramatic energy is in short supply. The actors move about this elaborate movie museum in a modified dream state, as if living in the present while rooted in the past. But the strategy doesn't work. It's an imitation of lifelessness.

A deeply serious and seriously hilarious fable of the lunacy of war.

It’s film as a fugue state, a Buddhist flow, a collection of memory fragments that drift together into a haunting evocation of Lola’s and Laurie’s intertwined lives.

As Woody struggles to resolve his fears and feelings, Toy Story 4 transcends toydom. It feels exquisitely alive.

This autobiographical meditation is seductively funny, as well as deliciously strange, and hauntingly beautiful, as well as stream-of-consciousness cockeyed.

Beyond being entertained, I was delighted by the movie's outpouring of slapstick invention (one crazed sequence in a pet store has all the pawmarks of a classic), and the genial energy of its star, David Arquette.

A severe and eerily beautiful German-language drama.

The energy feels authentic, and endlessly renewable. The cultural matrix is specific, yet the passions are universal. This grand and welcoming entertainment is exactly what’s needed to bring movie audiences back into the fold.

If the story’s psychodynamics are familiar, Mr. Eggers makes them seem newly discovered. The intensity of his writing and direction, as well as the eerie austerity of Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography, Craig Lathrop’s production design and Mark Korven’s music, all conspire to create a film of exceptional originality.

So what's left for the audience to hook into? Only pounding action, elegant style, steady-state suspense, marvelous acting and, despite that droll pooh-poohing every now and then, haunting explorations of youth, age and personal destiny. It's a lot to claim for a sci-fi thriller, but I was blown away by Rian Johnson's Looper.

A quietly transfixing drama.

The first and last things to be said in this limited space about Kubo and the Two Strings are that it’s a showcase for some of the most startlingly beautiful animation in recent — and not so recent — memory.

There are mysteries here, not the least of them being how such a modest little movie can evoke such profound feelings.

This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue.