Joshua Rothkopf

If you’re even remotely a fan, you need to see this.

The plot’s tired blood is jumped up considerably by style; all in all, it's an intoxicating blend of eerie horror and ’80s pop, made by an artist to keep an eye on.

The film plays like a Trump-state "Big Lebowski," as Ruth and Tony’s amateur sleuthing teases out a much deeper conviction, perfectly stated by its main character.

His (Fatih Akin) new movie, an occasionally shouty comedy, is easily his most fun.

There's a wild, "Miami Blues"–like dreaminess to the movie that's addictive. If anything, it shows up exactly what "Little Miss Sunshine" lacked: plenty of ammo.

Ruffalo, a master of rumpled befuddlement, finds his signature role here—it can't be overstated how deftly he eases into the tricky creation, a blue-blooded slacker who aches when the world won't hug him back.

The film gets so many exquisite details just right—the vacuous party guests, Hayek’s slightly self-righteous pose, the happy clink of the wine glasses—that it’s a letdown to realize the movie doesn’t have a proper ending. You take it home with you and argue about it.

Gay conversion therapy gets the indictment it deserves, from an insightful script based on a you-are-there tell-all, and an outstanding cast.

Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results.

Inherent Vice, Anderson's sexy, swirling latest (based on Thomas Pynchon's exquisite stoner mystery set at the dawn of the '70s), is a wondrously fragrant movie, emanating sweat, the stink of pot clouds and the press of hairy bodies. It's a film you sink into, like a haze on the road, even as it jerks you along with spikes of humor.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

An oblique history of ’80s disarmament laden with revealing off-camera asides, The Reagan Show makes the glossy surface profound. It’s the most crucial and unique doc of the moment, apart from the one that’s unfolding on the news every night.

Feels like the kind of movie that would have been designed for Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver back in the day, ragged yet sumptuous, filled with moments for devastating monologues yet never so obvious as to be self-aggrandizing.

No other filmmaker on the planet can touch Evans for long-take beatdowns and wildly inventive flourishes.

Adjust to the deliberate rhythms of this hiking movie-set on the lush slopes of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains - and the psychological payoff stings like a blister.

The actors are what save it. Not only does Johnson build on his subversive 
persona of hulking, dim-witted likability, 
but he’s joined by Neighbors’ Zac Efron, today’s reigning king of the hazy one-liner.

This is a brutal movie that finds unusual freedom in limitations, as do wiry bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and bleach-blond concert attendee Amber (Imogen Poots), who both turn out to be pretty handy with weapons. Chalk it up to their killer instincts.

Sally Hawkins cruises into her new movie the same way she did her breakthrough, "Happy-Go-Lucky."

The unexpectedly wonderful thing about this sequel is that it actually improves on the jokes.

What makes The Favourite work are its women—who rule, both literally within the movie and outwardly, dominating our enjoyment.

Everyone rises to the occasion of a special project of subtle significance: a comedy about nothing less than the proper way to say goodbye to the past.

Superfans aren’t necessarily going to love this. It’s a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

When Kriegman is heard at a Weiner low point asking, “Why did you let me film this?” you’re glad the question is asked. But there’s no answer: The narcissism is all up there onscreen, but shame will have to wait for the sequel.

Director Radu Muntean has pulled off the near-impossible, turning each scene (captured in capacious long takes) into arias of generosity for his actors.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s deceptively shallow but ultimately fascinating latest, is animated by that spirit of we-don’t-give-a-f**k playfulness.

It's the stuff of melodrama, heightened by Davies's pitch-perfect use of pop songs, like a sad "You Belong to Me," slurred by a misty crowd in a bar.

Forgive this film its marvelous moodiness — someone needs to go there once in a while.

Built out of complex performances etched with economic flair, unobtrusive camera work and the faintest tinge of comic whimsy (the film’s score, by Japanese trumpeter Jun Miyake, is marvelous), Norman is an intimate film that simply has no drawbacks.

Rarely do movies-never mind foreign ones, of any nationality - explore an honest-to-God ethical quandary. Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Ten Commandments–themed Decalogue.

Actor turned director John Carroll Lynch gets out of the way of his star and lets him cast his spell one final time.

Bringing optimism, nerd-itude and a touch of crazy to his character's solo ordeal—at one point, scraggly Watney calls himself a “space pirate”—Damon is the key to the movie’s exuberance.

Dope has thrilling moments and flies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but its caustic intelligence glints fast and furious.

As time-travel action films go, here's one that's brainy, stylish and carries itself with B-flick modesty - all of which feels like some kind of alchemy.

How filmmaker Robert Greene got an entire town to ham it up remains a mystery, but his gift for inviting self-interrogation (also on display in his equally fascinating Kate Plays Christine, a 2016 hybrid about an actor’s plunge into the life of a suicidal newscaster) marks him as an innovator who may become a future Errol Morris.

Suleiman can be criticized for failing, ever so slightly, at crafting an overall structure-his latest, based on his dad's diary and other memories, is an autobiographical story of exile and return that skips like a stone over water, fleetly but not so deeply. Still, this is a welcome example of kitsch wedded to serious indictment.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are unusually committed to maritime mechanics, and the excitement grows as steadily as the sailors’ beards.

Occasionally, the movie italicizes its points with heavy musical drones, but its tone is remarkably even and concentrated: It makes sense that Jolie excels at stewarding the scenes she usually tears apart onscreen: two people struggling in an emotional death grip, the camera up close.

Kuhns makes time for political insights, provocative montages of race riots cut with the movie’s hick militia, and the comments of owlish Romero himself, who recounts the shoot like the enthusiastic 27-year-old he was.

What's missing, then? There's no fiery central performance in the mix (the horse doesn't count), and once Emily Watson's hardscrabble mom is rotated out of the action, you yearn for an anchor.

The first and only piece of advice needed on one’s way to the fishing pond is this: Bring your patience. Not surprisingly, the same could be said to a viewer of this slow-building but riveting experimental collage.

Cedar's idiosyncratically brilliant script also has a moral question at its heart: Is lying to spare someone's feelings ever justified? Surely the Talmud has a thing or two to say about that.

The new Let Me In does more than merely preserve the original's mood; it actually improves on it.

If you're even slightly interested in folk music, there will be something here to simmer that curiosity into a full-on boil: the Arabic trip-hop stylings of monomonikered rapper-singer Raiz, raspy Pietra Montecorvino's Stevie Nicks–like dance tunes, a gorgeous sax solo from local jazz legend James Senese.

Ultimately, Jenkins teases out a fascinating theme of black identity shaped and altered by sales and evolving tastes.

It doesn’t seem new for them, yet as super polished, mannered, slightly surreal comedies go, the movie feels as rare as a unicorn.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

Stripped to a minimum of editorializing (but, like "The Hurt Locker," flush with sympathy), this Afghanistan-shot war documentary takes its cues from the unblinking style of cinema verité.

Apfel is constantly chatting to “Albert” off camera, not to us, and the affection adds an unusual meta level to Iris, a conversation between two old-timers who have gone from making history to becoming it.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.

The movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).

The Family Fang goes deep into dysfunction, but even more impressively, it smuggles in the daredevilish art theories of the late Chris Burden and his ilk.

Lockout is the kind of manly nonsense no one wants to make anymore.

Brawl then becomes a nightmare in scenes of skull-splattering violence that are truly sickening (and wonderful). Don’t look for a deeper meaning. Just soak up the grindhouse.

Emily Blunt is hypnotically charming in the year's sweetest surprise—a big-hearted contact high.

Moore makes it all play like the classic club remix it is.

Worthy is a marvel, transitioning from pasty wallflower to a glowering, unencumbered threat.

Charmingly, like a throwback to the pre-Twitter age, here's a horror film that's been made with no reasonable way to discuss it beforehand.

In the film’s second half, the two characters have roughly swapped social positions — Mindy is about to get married — but their sexual attraction (never fully expressed) remains a palpable thing. Try this one.

Finding reciprocity—in the eyes of the law, your partner, your colleagues—is the essence of this documentary, one that comes at a moment that desperately lacks it.

Cry foul, you documentary purists, but narration by Jena Malone and others pulls the gamble off. The film makes its point ingeniously.

Add to the list of actors who, beautifully and boldly, go it alone in their own survival movies the name Blake Lively. Do it without laughing, because she’s the shark here: Even though The Shallows, a tremendously entertaining bit of fluff, pits her against a computer-generated great white, the poor creature never stands a chance.

Make room for the modest but affecting pleasures of veteran actors tearing into the subject of golden-years resignation.

The main reason to commit to this movie’s tough story of orphan loneliness is the screenplay by Céline Sciamma, herself a major French talent devoted to tales of youthful resilience. (Her 2014 film "Girlhood" is breathtaking.)

Inception, though, is no "Avatar"--instead, it’s the movie that many wanted "Avatar" to be. In a roaringly fast first hour, we’re introduced to a new technology that allows for the bodily invasion of another person’s dreamworld.

The new drama, best viewed as a church movie, is a return to the kind of corner-chat indie cinema Lee revolutionized, with an emphasis on a towering performance by The Wire's Clarke Peters as a local bishop inflamed with the Word.

It’s a portrait that’s equal parts shtick and soul — in other words, exactly what "The Love Guru" should have been.

Visually ripe and located just around the corner from melodrama, A Cure for Wellness is a cousin to Guillermo del Toro’s recent "Crimson Peak," another thriller nostalgic for the deep-pocketed lushness of ’30s-era horror-branded studios like Universal, the makers of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein."

The movie isn’t quite suitable for the extremely young, but its apocalyptic tint may be catnip for smart preteens. They’ll breathe in the chilly air of a mysterious forest--the way forests should be.

Where he ends up going—a place of real anxiety and envy—speaks to the filmmaker’s nervy ambitions. If this is Baumbach’s commercial breakthrough, he will have made it several steps up that staircase with nothing lost.

As presented here (cut down from a longer edit), the film might have benefitted from more technical context related to the plant’s failure — this is a cautionary tale worth heeding. But the voices are valuable enough.

It’s a movie about coming to peace with solitude, leagues beyond most biopics.

If Fuqua and his screenwriters (including True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto) slightly botch the underlying theme of redemption—Ethan Hawke’s haunted ex-Confederate sharpshooter could have been more developed—it still makes good on its ideas of community pride.

The documentary is strongest during these conference-room brainstorms, similar to those of a political campaign. (It could have used more of Boies’s witness-demolishing courtroom eloquence.) The draw here is watching a careful process unfold, regardless of the outcome.

What makes this latest installment such a riot — apart from having more money than usual, thereby allowing the practical special effects to achieve a splattery early–Peter Jackson glee — is its original script by "Brawl in Cell Block 99’s" S. Craig Zahler.

You can't believe what you're watching: Compliance, true to its title, digs into the rarely explored subject of psychological acquiescence (behavioral scientist Stanley Milgram should get a cowriting credit), with common-sense dignity being the first casualty.

The riskiness of [Jenkins'] set-up, one that blooms with complications and rawness, is a thing of adventurous beauty. Her film is a gift to those people who discretely flinch at every dinner party and kid-celebratory anecdote.

You feel for the potential Wesleyan parent who asks an administrator if his daughter is going to have to move home after graduating: His question is met with an uneasy pause. Crucial stuff.

The movie does an uncommonly sensitive job probing the psychologies of blocked men, less so the urges of a widow who needs more than comforting words.

Feeling anything in a DC Universe installment is, in itself, evidence of filmmaking that’s superheroic (that overall bluish-gray glumness is completely gone). So imagine the shock to also encounter a nuanced, funny script, a richly developed surrogate family, a visual appreciation of Philadelphia and its heroic Rocky iconography, and not one but two expert jokes involving a strip club.

When the plot stops cold for a beauty-pageant performance of exquisite purity, you’ll feel like you’re watching the most American film of the year.

It’s a film that doubles and trebles in complexity as it dives inward to a place of strange intimacy, one that’s a lot like Spike Jonze’s "Her": manufactured, yes, but no less affecting for its desperation.

Didn't Soderbergh notice there was pathos enough in Matthew McConaughey's beefcake proprietor, an ab-slapping, spandexed Peter Pan? Between this role and his owlish DA in the subversively sly "Bernie," the actor has finally found a way to subvert his six-pack. He's the magic here.

It's a comedy about the unchecked id; indeed, there's sleepwalking in it. But will those grunting strolls happen through a second-story window or on the highway? You're left cringing, and that puts Birbiglia in excellent company, alone though he might be in bed.

Even as it drifts into narrative indiscipline, you appreciate the movie’s attempt to make sense of a troubled, beclowned present.

The rush of A-listers combined with apocalyptic dread creates its own kind of dizzy pleasure: Who's going down next on this Poseidon Adventure?

The film builds riotously via a series of verbal takedowns as male authority goes limp in the wake of a regrettable impulse. This is slender material to build a whole film around, but Östlund turns it into something deep, for viewers with patience.

Alfred Hitchcock’s interrogator, the rising French director and critic François Truffaut, brought a fan’s passion and a colleague’s precision to his questions. The result remains a how-to guide for Vertigo, Psycho and a future wave of nail-biters inspired by their observations.

A lost-artist comedy in the vein of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, but more deeply, a referendum on the dead-end choices Rock himself might be feeling.

David Scarpa’s nail-biter of a screenplay—based on John Pearson’s 1995 account Painfully Rich, adapted with a free dramatic license—amps up the tension with phoned-in demands and impulsive raids by knuckleheaded local police, yet it never loses the bitter, fascinating taste of imperious wealth.

In its early scenes, Dinosaur 13 works nearly as well as a certain Steven Spielberg thriller, creating the giddy, ominous mood of past and present colliding in excitement.

Even if you’re not boned up on your classic Ozu family tragedies, see it before Spielberg does his remake.

Such is Kim’s plotty momentum that the whole thing feels like an extreme joke made of pained silences, one that somehow strips bare the subtext of overbearing parents. Meryl Streep herself couldn’t improve on it.

Generation P is worth struggling through, even if it boggles you. In many ways, it's a keyhole into the future of the entire world.

As dark spells go, Lane’s is complex, one that will lead viewers down a surprisingly benevolent path.

Stopping just short of the devastating exposé it might have been (but plenty creepy).

Lowery is committing to nothing less than the scope of eternity; frankly, sometimes it feels as much. But by doing so, he does more to explore supernatural sadness than any thriller I can think of. He’s crafted something strange and wonderful, with a romantic metaphysics all its own.

For those of us who find somber superhero movies faintly ridiculous, Kick-Ass is a one-film justice league.