Joe Morgenstern

Paddington 2 is “The Godfather Part II” of Peruvian bear movies, a sequel that surpasses the superb original.

A drama of uncommon moral complexity, unexpected humor, convincing transformations (for good and bad) and, best of all, vibrant, unpredictable energy. In a movie landscape littered with dead souls, here's a live one.

A moveable feast of delights.

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.

What might have been predictable or sentimental in other hands becomes startling in the film’s approach, as well as beguiling, unsparing, terribly moving and occasionally very funny.

Pieces of April would deserve your attention and respect even if all these colorful threads didn't come together into a luminous whole. But they do, beautifully and unaffectedly, because what's been on Mr. Hedges's mind is not just a comedy of alienation but a drama of acceptance and reconciliation.

The right word for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is wondersful -- as in full of wonders, great and small.

Ms. Gerwig’s performance is a comic diamond, and not in the rough. Her timing is flawless, her delivery is droll. The character she has created — from a remarkably smart and supple script, plus her own unerring instincts — may have spiritual connections with Cate Blanchett’s delusional Jasmine or Diane Keaton’s blissed-out Annie Hall (Brooke solemnly and absurdly consults a spirit medium).

Marvelously smart, funny and entertaining film.

The film takes itself frivolously when that's appropriate--some of it is charmingly silly--and seriously when, as is often the case, all sorts of good surprises are unleashed.

The main attraction is Welles, of course, decked out with scruffy hair, a cantilevered beard, crusty eyes and a crafty smile, and deploying a tuba-register voice that shakes the timbers of the Boar’s Head Inn. He gives a performance that’s monumental in girth.

In a tale that touches on such a diversity of subjects—loneliness, mortality, adoption, family ties, the realm of the senses, artificial intelligence—it’s the ineffable things that count.

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.

It's a tone poem, really, less concerned with conventional action than with exploring themes of love and commitment through understated performances, sumptuous images (Bradford Young did the cinematography), lovely music (Daniel Hart composed the score) and very few words, intoned elegiacally.

Before and after everything else, Honey Boy — James’s nickname for his son — is a movie worth seeing for its distinctive qualities, but it must also have been worth doing for its therapeutic effect. Filming well is the best revenge.

Some films make do with stories that present an interesting surface and little more. In “The Boy From Medellín” undercurrents run constantly. Depression and anxiety provide two of them, but the most dramatic one—the source of the film’s genuine suspense—flows from politics.

Untold billions are laundered in The Infiltrator, while Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel moves mountains of cocaine into U.S. markets. But the drug of choice here is acting, and the highs in this hurtling, often violent thriller are doubly intense, since two of its stars play flamboyant double roles.

The Guardians, though, is special in a new way. Imagine devoting several years, as Mr. Beauvois did, to making a reflective, bucolic feature that is organized around the themes of community and evolving culture. It’s all too subtle for words, but perfect for moving pictures.

Here's one vote for the most affecting, anguishing, revealing and prophetic scene of the movie year-and yes, it's all of those things at once in a powerful film that alternates between moments of earlier happiness and later pain.

Mr. Quaid has long been a reliably likable actor, but this time he pitches a perfect performance -- no frills, no tricks, not a single false note -- in a film that's true to its stirring subject, and to the sweetest traditions of the game.

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

Seduces us with its leisurely pace and felicitous details into believing that something miraculous is afoot in a mundane rural community.

A smart, funny and strangely touching film.

This exquisite film by the Swedish master Jan Troell is about seeing clearly, and fearlessly. It's also about subdued passion, the birth of an artist and a woman's struggle to live her own life.

Much of this R-rated movie is chaotic, yet it’s a richly hued, madly inventive, gleefully violent and happily slapdash contraption with a formidable female at its center.

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.

Shrewdly conceived, confidently executed and outrageously entertaining.

Calmly, almost serenely, Mr. Van Sant and his superb cinematographer, Harris Savides, reveal a vision of contemporary American youth quite unlike any other.

This debut film by Filippo Meneghetti, streaming on major digital platforms, is elevated by the beauty of its performances, and by its masterly technique, which would suggest a filmmaker at the height of his career, not someone directing his first feature.

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

Smart, surpassingly odd, extremely funny and mysteriously endearing at the same time.

This classic tale of a little guy taking on giants benefits from being essentially true, and from accomplished filmmaking, but most of all from the beautiful vitality of Mr. McConaughey's performance.

A glorious feature-length documentary -- This film will leave an indentment, and a deep one, on anyone who loves great, joyous music and cares about the people who make it.

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.

This portrait of a failing marriage is one of the summer's great discoveries, and a marvel of mercurial intimacy.

The Square is too long at 150 minutes and occasionally falls into the sort of preciosity it loves to deride. But the film is full of delicious riffs.

This is a harrowing film to watch. In spite of the vibrant jungle greens and the searing sun, it’s as bleak a vision of modern warfare as has ever been put on screen.

I also know The Assassin to be so ravishingly lovely that tracking the plot is far less important than luxuriating in the images.

Never Look Away makes an eloquent case for art as an expression of hope, a way of searching for meaning in chaos.

A movie of uns — unforced, unhurried, unpretentious. Though it's sometimes underdramatized, this story of adolescents on the brink of adulthood is refreshingly, and endearingly, unlike the overheated features that have come to define the genre.

What you see is exactly what you think you’re seeing from the moment of your first guess. What you feel is another story—one of calm, almost inexplicable enchantment.

Diane navigates some challenging narrative disjunctures en route to a spiritual dimension, but it also has quiet moments that speak volumes. They’re all about Diane achieving a state of grace by awarding it to herself.

Beautiful moments abound. In Departures, the contemplation of death prepares the way for an appreciation of life.

Almost everything about Cary Fukunaga's version of the Charlotte Brontë romance is understated yet transfixing, mainly-although far from exclusively-because of Mia Wasikowska's presence in the title role.

What's most rewarding, though, is that Mr. Senna speaks extensively and eloquently for himself, and reveals himself to be an eminently human hero. He's thoughtful, even philosophical, about decisions that deprive him of seemingly well-earned victories.

I can't pretend to understand the intricacies of the Buddhist belief system that informs the surreal story, or the fantasy system in which Boonmee, embodying Thailand, recalls his nation's history and shimmering myths. Yet no effort of understanding is needed to be moved by Boonmee's descent into a limestone cave shaped like a womb.

Daughter of Mine is a triptych of vivid characters and superb performances (including that of young Sara Casu), a study in contrasting and competing passions.

This "Les Mis" does make you feel, intensely and sometimes thrillingly, by honoring the emotional core of its source material.

The Grandmaster, may well be the definitive illustration of kung fu in all its arcane schools and intricate styles. There's never been anything like it — a seemingly endless flow of spectacular images in a story about Ip Man (Tony Leung), the legendary kung-fu master who trained Bruce Lee.

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.

This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty -- heartbreaking, then heartmending -- of Melissa Leo's performance as a poor single mother who's living her whole life on thin ice.

The links and resonances remain largely abstract -- to understand them isn't necessarily to be moved by them -- while the individual dramas of those three lives are often stirring, and the three starring performances are unforgettable.

A magnificent documentary that flies us along with migratory birds on their intercontinental travels, it's the polar opposite -- North Pole, South Pole and all latitudes in between -- of modern feature films that rely on special effects.

Short Term 12, a low-budget feature only 96 minutes long, is a big deal on a small scale: for what it reveals of Mr. Cretton as a filmmaker — especially as a storyteller, and a director of actors within tautly constructed scenes — and of Ms. Larson's abundant talent.

Everything and everyone is observed sharply, succinctly and indelibly.

Where the film shines is in its vivid and affecting portrait of Tillman himself. Instead of the square-jawed hero memorialized by the army and lionized by the news media, we get to know a man of many gifts for many seasons.

For a filmmaker who has made his reputation with such crime thrillers as "Little Odessa" and "The Yards," James Gray reveals an unexpected gift for the mysteries of romance.

This remarkable piece of antiwar cinema honors its theme, and the movie medium.

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.

The movie's metaphorical dimensions rarely interfere with the concrete, quirky pleasures of its story. The Flower of My Secret is Mr. Almodovar's most entertaining work since his phenomenal "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." [15 Mar 1996]

What it's about is also what it requires for proper appreciation -- the ability of the human mind to hold, and even cherish, diametrically opposite thoughts.

This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same.

While the film handles itself well in the ring, it's brilliant in the arena of a blue-collar family that brutalizes its younger son and best hope for worldly success in the name of sustaining him.

A work of singular beauty and a significant technical achievement, the film makes water audible — the thumps and groans of calving glaciers sound like the planet coming apart — and almost palpable; heaving mountains of blue-black waves in an Atlantic storm convey stupendous mass and titanic energy as in no motion picture I’ve seen before.

Meticulously crafted and beautifully performed.

In what I think may be the filmmaker’s plan, all that stuff — that maddeningly cacophonous Stuff — is what we’re meant to cut through and get past in order to become as alert and alive as the star of Mr. Godard’s movie. In this interpretation, it’s the pooch who points the way toward perceiving beauty by learning to live in the vibrant, fragrant present.

A captivating entertainment for the holiday season and well beyond.

A marvelous story.

The Dark Horse brings Cliff Curtis back home, and he gives a performance that’s transcendent in more ways than one.