Joe Morgenstern

This clearly qualifies as a heist film, and a hugely entertaining one, notwithstanding a few plot perforations and a running time of two hours plus that might have been trimmed a bit.

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

One word for Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, a movie with a hero obsessed with words, is astonishing. Other words apply to this Israeli feature, in subtitled French and Hebrew, that’s set in Paris. They include, in no particular order, fascinating, infuriating, frightening, lyrical and befuddling. Plus deadpan funny and frequently stunning as a bittersweet ode to contemporary France, one that’s suffused with New Wave verve.

Working on a scale that's minuscule by studio standards, the Dardenne brothers have made yet another movie that does what Hollywood used to do - keep us rapt, and leave us grateful.

A hugely entertaining and scarily edifying documentary.

Rarely has a contemporary movie taken in so much life and revealed it with such depth of feeling.

However inward the hero may be, the movie around him is thrillingly outward, not to mention poundingly onward and relentlessly upward.

I thought "Topsy-Turvy" was perfection, a spirited evocation of the partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, plus a blithely definitive depiction of the artistic process. Happy-Go-Lucky is perfection too, assuming you go along with its leisurely pace, which I did quite happily.

This beguiling fable, with its darkly distinctive look, does DreamWorks proud.

The comedian has had his ups and downs recently, but the film is pure up, a wonderfully genial and inclusive record -- not that the music is devoid of anger or social protest -- of a day-long, freestyle show.

Ever since the movie made a brief appearance late last year to qualify for Oscar consideration, Mr. Caine's performance has been hailed as the best of his career, and surely that's true.

Weiner, an extraordinary documentary feature about the disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner, has it all — the surreal spectacle of contemporary retail politics, the sizzle of media madness and the mysteries of psychodrama.

A documentary of stunning immediacy and marvelous images.

If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.

A narrative that mixes, not always successfully, stirring moments and sensational action with angst and grim conflictedness on a galactic scale.

The film makes its case graphically, to say the least, yet muddies its bloody waters with an excess of artifice and a dearth of facts.

The stuff of heroism is always mysterious. In this case it’s also marvelously strange.

Everything that was modest, soundly grounded and therefore horrifying about the 1971 rodentarama that starred Bruce Davison is now insistent, Grand-Guignol-intense and therefore shrug-offable when it isn't downright awful.

Terrifically funny and remarkably wise, a comedy that speaks volumes, without a polemical word, about the tension between rigid politics of any stripe and the imperatives of life and love.

No need to belabor the awfulness of this film, a romantic comedy devoid of romance - instead of chemistry there's the flow of reverse magnetism - and lacking in comic timing, let alone comic content.

Right makes might in Takashi Miike's excellent-and exceedingly violent-remake of a 1966 Japanese classic by Eiichi Kudo.

This one is both demanding and extremely rewarding, because it's really a meditation on violence.

Crazy Heart is blessed with so many marvelous moments, lovely lines and vivid characters.

Provides a reminder of the power of unadorned drama and language -- whole torrents of eloquent words -- in the service of a nifty idea.

Suffice it to say that the film is a must-see for fans of the man (who, like many of his gifted colleagues, has given up on what’s left of the Hollywood studio system) and a should-see for anyone who cares about how movies are made, as well as how, in certain near-miraculous cases, really good movies get made.

For all its rich trappings, A Little Princess is impoverished at the core. [18 May 1995, p.A14]

Adaptation, like "Being John Malkovich" before it, is far from a well-made film, even on its own flaky terms. But it's a brave, sometimes brilliant one, with a phantasmagoric ending, full of love and hope, that defeats prose description. Never was an adaptation more original.

One-third wonderful, The Place Beyond the Pines weakens as it unfolds for lack of what makes the early part so good.

The scenery, effects and balletic, iconic combats are perfectly wonderful, but there's an emotional black hole where the hero should be.

Quite remarkably, though, its clear-eyed view of an unprecedented American tragedy leaves us with emotions that audiences of those earlier days would readily recognize -- love of country, bottomless grief, an appreciation of life's preciousness and fragility. A film that can do this and also teach is to be cherished. And seen. It's time.

Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.

What's on screen is a gorgeous grab bag of notions: ardent love, a salute to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," a bit of "Camille" and a lot — I mean a lot — of nuts-and-bolts stuff about nuts and bolts.

A captivating entertainment for the holiday season and well beyond.

I think Soul will become a classic, but we must be patient too, because this stretch of the film is mostly illustrated notions, heavier on explanation than action. It’s very pretty—Klee-like figures and lots of pastel translucency—but not, perhaps inevitably, all that lively.

One of the great films of our time, or any other.

Recreates the Taliban era with chilling details and startling beauty, and follows its terrified heroine on a journey that no child should have to take.

Stunning and, in the aggregate, almost overwhelming. This is not a feel-good travelogue, and Mr. Salgado has never pretended to be a cockeyed optimist.

The climax as a whole is cheerfully chaotic, if not over the top, but who cares about perfection when a movie is as good as this one?

Mr. Haroun is a sophisticated filmmaker who alternates bold, almost impressionistic strokes with quietly meditative passages, and his cinematographer, Mathieu Giombini, works in astonishing colors that can be bold and exquisitely subtle almost simultaneously.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.

I loved this movie, and I wish it could be seen by all those kids who turn out every weekend for shoddy studio comedies that show them who they'd like to be. Raising Victor Vargas shows young lovers as they are.

Yann Demange’s ’71, with an astonishing performance by Jack O’Connell, is big-screen storytelling stripped to its dramatic and visual essentials, and the result is nothing less than shattering.

More persuasively still, Blackfish — an Indian name for orcas — argues against the very concept of quasiamusement parks like SeaWorld that turn giant creatures meant for the wild into hemmed-in, penned-up entertainers.

This stop-action animated feature is downright sweet and tender, as well as all the other things we've come to expect from him -- funny, bizarre, graphically stunning and blithely necrophilic.

Avi Belkin’s documentary offers fascinating insights into what made its subject tick.

For the most part, though, the real people - the movers and shakers of Nim's world - are there to speak for themselves in the present as well as the past, and the main ones are, with a conspicuous exception, a sorry, self-serving lot.

That’s all there is, the two men and the lighthouse — plus a matched pair of brilliant performances, torrents of astonishing language, a slow crescendo of fateful sounds and a succession of hypnotic images, in black and white on an almost square screen, that lend a rock-solid sense of reality to a growing struggle for dominance.

A lot of talent to lavish on a single movie, but the result is uncommonly smart for the genre, and not just smart but tremendously enjoyable.

Verve! Lilt! They are precious qualities in movies. As soon as you encounter them you know that liftoff is likely. Saint Frances, newly available on demand, has them in an abundance.

Much of the time, though, you're transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.

What makes this droll, darting story about a loose group of family and friends so moving? The answer lies partly in its tone. Mr. Mills seems to have thrown everything he could think of into the mix, dramatic unities be damned, but suffused it all with a poetic sense of life’s goofiness, solemnity and evanescence.

The images captured by the film - dancers in theatrical sets, dancers in surreal exterior settings - are deeply scary for their loneliness and pain, and crazily thrilling for the intensity of their joy.

A phenomenal debut feature with a terrific title, David Michôd's Animal Kingdom is both a study in Darwinian survival-in this case survival of the shrewdest-and a group portrait of ruthless predators in the underworld of Melbourne, Australia.

Visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon.

The Lego Film has a specialness all its own. There's never been a hodgepodge quite like it.

With someone else in the central role, Gloria might have been cloyingly sentimental or downright maudlin. With Ms. García on hand, it's a mostly convincing celebration of unquenchable energy.

This film is cunningly crafted in every detail--direction, script, performances, comic timing, special effects--from thunderous start to delicious finish.

The most elegantly crafted and confidently directed of all his (Cronenberg's) films, it's a calm, chilling portrait of a blighted soul and, just as calmly but quite stunningly, an evocation of the thought processes behind the blight.

More than a musical offering, it’s a study in boundless passion, plus a wellspring of wisdom about art and life from a man who sees no dividing line between the one and the other.

This unique enterprise, which began as a documentary experiment almost a half century ago, has grown into an inspiring testimonial to the unpredictability of the human spirit.

The best of Up in the Air--meaning most of it--is right up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood's golden age.

More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.

Zachary Heinzerling's feature-length documentary gathers force slowly, but with such wisdom and calm mastery that I found myself stunned, toward the end, by the beautiful vastness of it all.

The concept is inspired, and inspiring—kids with a misorchestration of neurons, if that’s what it is, escaping from solitary confinement. More than that, the film is beautiful—the cinematography, by Ruben Woodin Dechamps, combines objective views of the subjects and their parents or teachers with startling visual analogues of the ways people with autism perceive the world they inhabit. And “The Reason I Jump” is deeply informative.

There’s too much plot for the film to manage, but its heart, and sumptuous art, are so firmly in the right place that its appeal comes through sweet and clear.

Here's an entertainment to warm the heart of anyone who grew up (or failed to) on the formative joys of action movies.

As an evocation of English working-class life half a century ago, it feels utterly authentic, and is ennobled -- not too strong a word, I think -- by Imelda Staunton's performance in the title role.

What Sadie brings most importantly to Private Life is the lovely, sometimes loopy and always infectious joy she takes in living. She’s a bright, welcome presence in a film that can be startlingly dark, even polemic, and she represents another side of Ms. Jenkins, whose previous films, “Slums of Beverly Hills” and “The Savages,” were overflowing with life.

This freewheeling account of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s is problematic as narrative drama, but stunning as provocation.

Much of this is fascinating, as far as it goes, but it wouldn't go as far as it does into drama were it not for Ms. Johansson's wonderfully strange performance.

Red Army is about many things — politics and sport, service and servitude, integrity trumped by money. Most memorably, though, it celebrates a good man living a great life by his own lights.

It’s a great story told well, for the most part, and exceptionally well through Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham

What makes The Flat mesmerizing is its wealth of historical detail. What makes it universal is what it says about families everywhere - that children, being children, don't want to know what their parents are up to, and that grown-ups, being human, don't want to credit troubling facts that conflict with what they need to believe.

See The Magdalene Sisters for its own sake; the performances alone are inspirational. But see it too as an example of how powerful a feature film still can be in the hands of an impassioned filmmaker.

What's so affecting about him in the film, though, is that he doesn't seem monstrous at all. To the contrary, Iron Mike, having meted out epic suffering in the ring and other venues, seems to be a man who has suffered genuinely, even terribly, in the course of a life that he never believed would last 40 years.

Viggo Mortensen's performance is flat-out brilliant, and this relentlessly dramatic thriller represents a mid-life growth spurt for its director, David Cronenberg.

Footnote does function as a character study, an exceptionally rich one.

Free Solo would be an exceptional piece of filmmaking if it confined itself to the physical poetry of Mr. Honnold’s achievements. But it gets at his inner life too, and goes a long way toward answering the unspoken question of what makes — or allows — him to do what he does.

The film succeeds to the degree that it does -- partially, but honorably and sometimes affectingly -- because it was made as well as it was.

This sneaky shocker of a debut feature —sneaky because it’s so good at depicting the sisters’ joyousness before, and even after, darkness descends — was directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven from a script she wrote with Alice Winocour.

It Follows finally loses track of itself in a silly climax. All the same, it’s one more stylish reminder of how readily we the people can be creeped out.

Don’t Think Twice really shines as an improv procedural, a film that celebrates, in illuminating detail, the skills and anxieties of this showbiz subgenre.

An elegant horror film, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, that takes pleasure in its own theatricality, gives pleasure with caustic wit, trusts the power of Stephen Sondheim's score and exults in flights of fancy that only a movie can provide.

Tom Hardy, the actor who plays him, is by turns spellbinding, seductive, heartbreaking, explosive and flat-out thrilling. At a time when the studios are spending vast sums of money on a bigger-is-better aesthetic, here's a chamber piece with the impact of high drama.

Operates in an orbit somewhere between Oliver Sacks and Lewis Carroll. I can't remember when a movie has seemed so clever, strangely affecting and slyly funny at the very same time.

Many of the boxing genre’s conventions are observed in the screenplay by Mr. Coogler and Aaron Covington, and the fight sequences are brutally effective.... But the film is full of life and loose humor...and Creed often transcends the genre by playing with movie mythology.

Still, the cynosure of all eyes is honest, articulate Elizabeth, her own woman in an era when women belonged to men, and at the same time full of love. Lizzie is the best, and Keira Knightley does right by her.

What makes the film enthralling is the wisdom and grace with which it addresses the twin subjects of grief and healing, and the quiet beauty of Mohamed Fellag's performance in the title role.

The result is provocative, even startling, and more edifying than you might expect.

Awash in terrific performances.

It reminds us how long she had to wait for the recognition she so richly deserved, and what a distinctive, generous, funny, astute, self-doubting, unstoppable and formidable figure she was along the way.

Ms. Muylaert’s guiding principle seems to have been fearlessness, and her film, which was shot by Barbara Alvarez, is superb on all counts.

Ms. De Clermont-Tonnerre’s direction is a revelation — not just a good first try, but a first-rate achievement by any measure. She clearly watched such relevant classics as “The Black Stallion” and “The Misfits,” yet found a laconic style that is all her own.

It's exciting, stirring, often funny, sometimes lyrical and unusually thoughtful. And, with that one egregious exception, genuinely pleasurable.

Thrillers aren't always so thrilling, but Tell No One is -- and absorbing, sometimes perplexing and often stirring as well.

Exquisite images, poignant humor, echoes of cinema history and a sense of having watched genuine magic.

Gives us the same sort of perverse pleasure that's been a staple of "60 Minutes" over the years -- watching world-class crooks tell world-class lies.

This improbably magnificent film and Michael Giacchino’s majestic score are a perfect match.