Joe Morgenstern

The story begins as a social satire of rich and poor, as witty and sophisticated in its fashion as vintage Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch. Remarkably, though, it gets funnier as it grows more serious, then savagely funny and finally…but we mustn’t get ahead of a movie that stays ahead of its audience every frame of the way.

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.

The level of invention is so high, and the density of detail is so great, that it’s impossible to absorb everything in a single viewing.

I don’t know how Ms. Arnold works the magic she does with her actors, whether amateur or professional — Mr. LaBeouf inhabits his role with sly charm and explosive ferocity — but it’s an expansion of what she started doing more than a decade ago in her remarkable “Wasp.”

Here's an iffy proposition. If A Hijacking was in English, or if U.S. audiences weren't finicky about reading subtitles, or if life was fair, this brilliant thriller, by the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, would be playing on multiplex screens throughout the country.

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida, a compact masterpiece set in Poland in the early 1960s, gets to the heart of its matter with startling swiftness.

What it is can be summed up in a word that’s often used loosely but fits the case here—a masterpiece, a mysteriously enthralling creation that keeps you guessing about where it’s going, then reveals its essence with astonishing clarity.

Lacking space for a proper review, let me say first that Tampopo is right up there with “Ratatouille” and “Big Night” when it comes to peerless movies about food.

A dulcetly crazy, certifiably hilarious and eerily mysterious little comedy.

The third film of the trilogy turns out to be gorgeously joyous and deeply felt.

The loveliest part of Mad Max: Fury Road is its grungy, quasi-Gothic imagery — the production was designed by Colin Gibson and photographed by John Seale. And the fullest flowering of its images can be found in its muscle cars, muscle trucks, muscle trailers and muscle buggies.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

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.

Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values and bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems.

Movie audiences have never been presented with anything quite like the intertwined beauty and savagery of 12 Years a Slave.

The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school.

First Cow is vividly alive on arrival and grows into pure enchantment, although it starts at a saunter and its physical scale is small.

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

It's a meditation on mortality, with remarkable resemblances to "Gravity," not to mention echoes of "The Old Man and the Sea." It's admirably crafted, with a wealth of detail that illustrates the sailor's resourcefulness.

Through it all -- the free-form conversations, the brilliant set pieces, the preposterous gross-outs, the flawless performances -- Kristen Wiig's forlorn maid of honor, Annie, seeks her own destiny with a wrenchingly cockeyed passion.

This evocation of the mission half a century ago is as good as it’s likely to get — meaning not just good but magnificent.

Only in America, though, could filmmakers illuminate such a dire subject, and the financial debacle that ensued, with the sort of scathing wit, joyous irreverence and brilliant boisterousness that make The Big Short an improbable triumph.

Sideways makes you glad about America, about movies, about life.

Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present.

An absolutely phenomenal film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.

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

A splendid war movie. The combat sequences are harrowing -- all the more so for the director's spare, sharp-eyed style -- and the performances are phenomenally fine.