Joshua Rothkopf

An aggressively unpleasant man somehow lands a perfect series of gigs in this rudely funny documentary: first as a pounding rock drummer who revolutionized the field; then as a fearless, rage-filled polo player; and finally as an impatient interviewee.

That rarest of art documentaries, one that actually leaves viewers with a better sense of the gifted versus the phony.

The rollicking, space-opera spirit of George Lucas’s original trilogy (you can safely forget the second trio of cynical, tricked-up prequels) emanates from every frame of J.J. Abrams' euphoric sequel. It’s also got an infusion of modern-day humor that sometimes steers the movie this close to self-parody—but never sarcastically, nor at the expense of a terrific time.

But mainly, it’s the film’s folk music that roots in the heart like a faraway lure.

The acting, especially from Menash Noy as an ineffectual attorney, is phenomenal, resulting in a feminist knockout told in inverse.

Little Women sometimes plays like a comedy, one that includes a crumpled cry over a bad haircut and several kitchen interludes that feel like Christmas miracles. Yet it’s Alcott’s visionary attitude, well-struck by Gerwig, that stays with you the longest: the loneliness of female liberty.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

As gritty as Heaven Knows What often feels, it’s leavened by empathy and poetic moments: desperate kisses, a passed-out couch nap lit by slanting sunbeams, the beautifully eerie synth music of Tomita. This isn’t an easy watch, but it validates every risk we want our most emboldened filmmakers to take.

A masterclass in tension, visual panache and B-movie excess.

Why do we care? Because never before have the steps to thugdom, as depressing as that destination may be, been so rigorously detailed, neither romanticized nor negated. Don’t miss.

If you can stomach the fear, go. Confident hands created this film. Its nightmare lingers for weeks.

The movie is a coming-of-age story, but whose age is coming? That's the profound question we're left with, in a stellar adaptation that balances gore with black humor, ethical quandary, hope and—yes—plenty of brains.

The film plays like a better episode of "Mad Men," pitch-perfect in its details yet fully lived-in: a universe of rolled-up shirt sleeves, sweat-laden brows and screams that don’t sound canned.

The Third Man is best seen as his romantic fantasy; we’d have to wait decades before another awkward scribbler, also a fish out of water, plunged helplessly into a misadventure. His name was Barton Fink.

It plays like one of Linklater’s most intimate gifts, an adult rumination on the tricky subject of patriotism.

This one’s a crucible of sweaty pre-natal panic, weird knocks at the door, mind games and ultimately, a roaring, miniature apocalypse set inside a single claustrophobic living room. If that already sounds like your home, it's time to go and give it a try.

The most gratifying thing about the film is feeling Moodysson’s warmth return to him.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Voyage to Italy is the kind of movie that makes those unhappily in love feel understood. And even if that’s not you (congratulations), it’s still possible to groove on Rossellini’s stranger-in-a-strange-land psychodrama.

Obliquely related to her recent movies, Hogg's latest is either her slyest joke to date, or another swerve in an especially fecund career phase.

Phenomenally sad yet exhilarating.

Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment.

There’s a quiet fury to Johnny Guitar, best embodied by Mercedes McCambridge’s vicious Emma, who wants to drive Vienna out of town. It’s a film that climaxes with a gunfight between two women, while the men hide behind tree stumps.

The final Harry Potter movie, above all others, supplies Radcliffe with the gravitas of not just an epic story come to completion, but some real dramatic heft. Not so bad for a Hogwarts dropout.

It’s a movie about memory that actually improves the more you go over its folds.

In lesser hands, this could have easily been some seriously detestable John Wayne jingoism. But via Fiennes, the film is a spiky and complex counterweight to Hollywood sentiment and indie cynicism alike.

By a whopping margin, this is Kubrick’s most radical film and greatest dramatic gamble.

Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.

Of all the things to be nostalgic about, warfare would seem the least likely candidate, but that's the unusual perspective of this one-of-a-kind 1943 landmark - maybe the most wonderfully British movie ever made.

Amer could exist only as a movie, not as a novel or a pop song. If you give it a whirl, you won't simply get drunk on its immediacy; you may throw out plot and character altogether.

It’s made with so much love, care and enthusiasm—plus no small amount of risk—you thrill to think that they’re just getting started.

See this film immediately.

A nuanced exploration of situational ethics tinged with guilt, it's a small, near-perfect New York story.

Co-scripting with her director, Goth is the standout, displaying a verbal vigor and earthiness she's been unable to tap so far (not even in movies like Nymphomaniac and A Cure for Wellness).

Give yourself over to the movie's absorbing sense of process and rehearsal, complete with notes of humor that never quite puncture into mockery, and you'll have a better time with it.

Pruning would hamper the unencumbered risk-taking on display, which extends to some atmospheric animation (as it did with Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), and instantly vaults the effort to the top of the Bowie docs. The music itself, gorgeously remixed by Bowie's longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti, has never sounded better or stranger, with isolations of instrumental passages that stick in mind.

The romance of the documentary emerges out of its deep, unfaked appreciation for nature: long, uninterrupted stretches where these self-described "weirdos" go off on their own to explore alien worlds like astronauts in their protective gear.

It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine, the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

The movie also gets deeper and more emotional as it goes, becoming a metaphor for restless empathy and non-binary points of view. You Won't Be Alone is a fitting title, bearing the ominous warning of a juicy thriller, but also a subtle sense of compassion. It's a big world and you won't be alone, if you let the witches in.

In its colorful, Godardian way, Return to Seoul becomes a quest movie, but not the one you're expecting — it's the opposite of sentimental or overly therapized.

For its whole running time, X has ideas on its mind. Like the doubled-edged title itself, both an evocation of the grungy rating this movie might have received in 1979 and something more suggestive ("You've got that X factor," Wayne says of Maxine's allure), it indicates a film that feels unpinned, ominous, and potentially unforgettable.

Diallo, an inspired stylist with bold things to say, strikes the balance between thrills and ills in a way that's wholly her own.

The Killer is an opportunity for America’s most stylish director to reboot, to get back to basics, to come in under two hours.

It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.

Not only has a real filmmaker emerged with A Real Pain, with both the sensitivity and boldness that could launch a career, but Eisenberg has never let himself be this exposed as a performer.

Villeneuve has made good on one of the great Hollywood gambles in recent memory, delivering a two-part epic of literary nuance, timely significance and maybe even the promise of another film or two.

The potent image-making and performative ferocity turns what could have been a crime thriller into a near-metaphysical showdown.

The takeaway isn’t exhilaration; the unease is what makes Garland’s film valuable. You watch it with your jaw hanging open.

Doubling down on COVID-era listlessness and QAnon paranoia, the impressively fidgety, crammed-to-bursting Something in the Dirt ends up with something like: Please let my life make sense. It's an understandable wish in an uncertain moment.

A global celebrity during America's earliest conversations about civil rights, Armstrong preferred to keep his dissatisfactions to himself, becoming a symbol of change rather than a spokesperson of it. That tension comes to vivid life in Jenkins's worthy account, sure to be appreciated by those who come in on solid footing

Resurrections does eclipse its predecessors for full-on, kick-you-in-the-heart romance: Reeves and Moss, comfortable with silences, lean into an adult intimacy, so rare in blockbusters, that's more thrilling than any roof jump (though those are pretty terrific too). Their motorbiking through an exploding city, one of them clutching the other, could be the most defiantly sexy scene of a young year.

You'll forgive the movie its cluttered shagginess because its universe is so strange — even an icy puddle is rendered exquisitely.

The Old Man & the Gun plays like a long-winded joke with a sneaky punchline that warms you belatedly, like a shot of bourbon.

Phillips goes too far sometimes (border-jail breakout?), but his new direction is promising.

The story is a little slight compared to the grand romantic ache of Pride and Prejudice, but Beckinsale and Stillman do their inspiration proud: Finally, a Jane Austen movie that's fresh and deliciously rotten at the same time.

This isn’t a straight documentary — part of what makes the film so suggestive is the idea that we’re seeing a double performance pitted against our own prurient interests. As for the movie’s final scene, you won't witness something as confrontational all year: a yowl from beyond the grave. It’s a small piece of revenge for a lost soul.

The movie works on a bedrock level that many ostensible action films forget. Let New Age viewers in your crowd get misty-eyed - there's plenty here for anyone.

By movie’s end, you see flocks of umbrella-adorned commuters in a different light; and what’s often viewed as Japanese humility becomes a doorway to something huge and eternal. Bring the kids.

The attention to detail is fine-grained, especially on the slippery slope of plea bargaining. Missing are two pieces that might have turned this into an urban classic.

Given the dreck we’ve seen this summer, it’s nice to be reminded of the virtues of clean storytelling and cultural curiosity.

Indeed, the doc works best as a relationship study, filled with endearing moments of intimate bickering. Takei is a self-admitted ham but a playful one, projecting his confidence in increasingly meaningful directions.

The idea that we would want even a few of these draggy, didactic scenes (the poorly paced French plantation sequence plays better with self-satisfied critics than with audiences) may remind you of one of Marlon Brando’s immortal lines, the one about an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

Though its come-on is playful, this documentary sinks into some swampy subjects, including racism, secret biowarfare and political assassination.

Another Earth is a movie you take home and write your own ending to.

What might have been a long walk off a short pier becomes a valid, vital rethinking of a crime classic.

The rich atmosphere of the movie may be the sexiest thing about it: It’s no wonder these women breathe in the air of possibility and find themselves imbued with boldness.

Russell Crowe's pained vocal stylings (they sound more like barks) as relentless Inspector Javert can be forgiven after hearing Hugh Jackman's old-pro fluidity in the central role of Jean Valjean, hiding a criminal past.

Though supported by Woodley’s subtle narration, The Fault in Our Stars is relentlessly outward. That’s part of the book’s inspiring touch, and even if some of the supporting cast comes off as merely functional onscreen, the core of the tragedy comes to life in a heartbreaking way.

It's not an easy sit; we're never let off the hook with golden-hued memories or belated bits of wisdom. Maybe this is love after all.

This isn’t the kind of puzzle thriller in which all the elements click into place with a thudding literalism that compliments an attentive eye. It’s one that accommodates the vagaries of human behavior, leaving punishment aside as a secondary concern.

Inspiring heartbreaker of a documentary.

This installment delivers a heavy and welcome dose of paranoia, administered between fleetly paced smackdowns.

The spirit of the movie is nonjudgmental, an observational intimacy that, in turn, becomes inspiring.

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

Arnold's vibrant, Malickian adaptation has another bold stroke worth mentioning: Heathcliff, a Gypsy in the original text, is now an Afro-Caribbean former slave, initially a bruised teen (Glave) and then an unusual, self-made man (Howson).

The plot is a touch obvious, but Menashe still plays like a more culturally specific Kramer vs. Kramer, setting up a testy, fascinating dynamic between micromanaging rabbis and a naturally warm dad with wisdom of his own.

It’s a weird and unusually honest film.

What makes Moore’s latest so ferocious—and pound for pound his most effective piece of journalism—is the way it pivots to a meaty central subject that isn’t Trump but has prescient echoes.

There's still tremendous vitality here, and Wheatley's avoidance of yet another Guy Ritchie gabfest is a pleasure in itself.

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

Blackfish, a troubling exposé of Sea World’s hazardous entertainment trade, does much to restore a realistic sense of danger, interviewing former park workers who detail their shoddy, nonscientific training, and chronicling the much-suppressed history of whale-on-human violence.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

To the Wonder is arty for sure, but for the first time, its maker is working with anxieties we all feel. Let’s hope this Malick sticks around for a while.

The man himself stares into Davis's lens, both confident and scared; for these moments alone, the movie is key.

The year’s most shocking transformation arrives in the form of Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill, a creation for the ages.

The pieces here are wonderful, even if the documentary fails to make any kind of overall analytical point.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

If this profile is marred slightly by thematic tidiness and a willingness to overglorify the champion's rise (Fischer didn't even write his best-seller, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess), it still supplies a cracked, conflicted genius trapped in his ceaseless endgame.

Deeply irresponsible, this a film that will give parents seizures-and Roger Corman a big old smile.

Girls Trip is so successful because it lets its cast of improvisers ease into a bond that feels bone-deep.

It teases out the distinctly modern subject of celebrity profile-writing, a rare one for the movies, detouring into avenues of attraction and envy.

A wonderfully crude film (we're talking "Superbad" levels of raunchiness), but one in which the overall vibe is sweet: kids patiently waiting for their parents to grow up already.

Walker integrates stranger-on-the-street testimony to further her general vibe of ignorance, thus pinpointing the true target of an agitated doc--our own blithe apathy.

Strikes an intelligent balance between funk-scored pride and a more universal story of activism threatened by in-fighting and accidental celebrity.

Stations of the Elevated plays like a time capsule, particularly for having no dialogue or plot. It swings to Charles Mingus’s hardest bop and evokes a long-gone city, somehow more adult and confrontational even in silence.

You'll be arguing with your friends about the ethics of secrecy and defense for hours; that's what makes these exit interviews so essential. They come late to the spy game, but are welcome regardless.

It’s definitely a horror movie but a wonderfully witty one, not for gentle souls.