Joe Morgenstern

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.