Joe Morgenstern

The prime mover is sexual tension, which grows inexorably as the women learn the contours of each other’s lives. Portrait of a Lady on Fire — the fire is figurative, but also real — goes beyond painterly beauty. It sees into souls.

What you call Mr. Shults’s first film is spectacular.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

Brilliantly funny and moving comedy.

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

Mr. Day-Lewis works famously, and phenomenally, from the inside out. The mystery at the core of his gorgeous performance, which is enhanced by Mr. Kushner's script, has to do with his masterly grasp of Lincoln's quicksilver spirit.

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.)

Transcends its star's controversial career and, in the bargain, stands head, shoulders and heart above every other Hollywood movie that we've seen so far this year.

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

Us is great entertainment, a fearless mixing of serious and silly by a filmmaker who started out as a funnyman and continues to sharpen his comic chops.

Ms. Hawkins reminds us how intense silent films could be. She gives the best performance of the year with the most heart-piercing silence you’ve ever seen.

The best part of Tracks — aside from the spectacular images, the succinct dialogue, the elegant filmmaking and the mysterious beauty of Mia Wasikowska's performance — is what's left unsaid.

Ms. Howard is nothing less than mesmerizing. She seems to be giving a master class in unswerving focus and absolute simplicity. It’s a superb piece of acting about acting, and a harbinger of great things to come in this young actor’s future.

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.

To turn a spotlight fittingly on Spotlight, it’s the year’s best movie so far, and a rarity among countless dramatizations that claim to be based on actual events. In this one the events ring consistently — and dramatically — true.

Judged solely as a film, a partially fictionalized account of the decade-long search for bin Laden, it's superbly crafted and relentlessly dramatic. More than that, though, Zero Dark Thirty is a shock to the system, one that's bound to incite discussion of profoundly troubling issues.

Wonderfully funny and subversively affecting.

Michael Haneke's French-language Amour, a perfect film about intertwined lives, proceeds at its own pace, and breathes so deeply that it takes your own breath away.

Can a movie that generates steady-state anxiety also function as entertainment? Yes it can, and Adam Sandler is here to prove it in Uncut Gems, a hard-edged and hard-charging phenomenon directed by Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie from a screenplay the brothers wrote with Ronald Bronstein. Mr. Sandler is flat-out sensational as Howard Ratner.

This tough-minded, forthright and exquisitely tender film transcends polemics. It’s the odyssey of a lost child in poorly charted territory.

Mr. Fukanaga's purpose is to evoke the immigrants' experience, which he does with such eloquence and power as to inspire awe.

With a calmness that bespeaks confidence, this small, spellbinding second feature by Hilary Brougher brings together two women, trapped in separate states of denial and distress, who manage to end each other's entrapment.

Give yourself away to this movie and you'll be glad you did.

A delicately poetic, essentially plotless vision, unblinking but not unhopeful, of life in Watts, where little but the ghetto's name recognition had changed a decade after the riots.

Ms. Gerwig’s reimagining — and provocative restructuring — of the American classic is all ablaze with ferocious purpose, urgent passion, boisterous humor and the nourishing essence of family life in good times and bad.

One of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies I’ve seen in years.

It's a portrait, by turns chilling, thrilling, mysterious and terrifying, of a woman who refuses to be terrorized.

What Mr. Hoffman has done here borders on the miraculous.