Joshua Rothkopf

It Comes at Night is a film of tense gradations, a chamber piece set at the twilight of humanity.

It’s a film that makes you want to sharpen your barbs and sling sass with the adults.

The movement of the story—from wrenching homesickness to blooming confidence and a smile on one’s stroll to work—elevates the movie into universal urban poetry.

Too few films take on the art of arguing as a subject; we could certainly use more of them, but until then, Lumet’s window into strained civic duty will continue to serve mightily.

Here's where it's easiest to see Clouzot's advantage over his more famous peer, as he combines nail-biting action scenes - calibrated to the millimeter - with a Hawksian command of earthy performances.

To watch Bigelow’s expertly calibrated chaos during the riots’ escalation – nothing short of block-by-block guerilla warfare – is to witness something depressingly familiar to anyone who has seen the videos of today’s police brutality, of violently botched arrests and furious community responses, and worried that it would never get better.

It's meant to make you feel sad for what's lost, but a vitality throbs through it.

A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.

Andersen makes humorous hay out of the stark home designs of Richard Neutra — only suitable, it seems, for drug dealers.

World on a Wire is the discovery of the season, rarely screened in America but very much a key chapter in Fassbinder's story--a step toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, yet clarifying of his core artistic legacy.

Rarely leaning on the weepy families back home, this briskly paced triumph maintains a clear focus on human costs, with hope slipping away onboard while lives hang on the burp of a fax machine.

The movie toggles between two periods-before and after a catastrophe-and, were it not for Swinton's magnetism, it would be unbearable. Instead, you'll want to stay for the wallop.

This film leaves you with the thrill of a good fight fought hard. It’s a scrappy, absorbing tribute to the pragmatic value of compromise, carefully proffered in pursuit of a greater good. America’s candidates would do well to take a page out of this doc’s book.

Deceptively hidden under layers of gorgeous surfaces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s borderline-sick romance waltzes toward a riveting tale of obsession.

Stunning, eerily atmospheric.

Particle Fever is that rare, exhilarating science doc that’s neither dumbed down nor drabbed up.

A staggering political drama that could put you in mind of the intimate sweep of Bernardo Bertolucci, Incendies feels like a mighty movie in our midst.

The auteur’s style — dramatic zooms, winking symmetry — is balanced against a newfound political context; this one’s his "To Be or Not to Be."

It’s real Streetcar Named Desire territory as the fights pile up, and if you think that doesn’t sound entertaining, know that it is, in a hypnotically catastrophic way.

A classically structured rampage that bears serious comparison to the definitive greats of Akira Kurosawa, 13 Assassins will floor connoisseurs of action, mood and the dignity of a pissed-off scowl.

Sprung from a 1982 French graphic novel and bearing its era’s trickle-down tensions, Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy — but you’ll love it anyway.

You must see Oklahoma City, if only to know the enemy. They’re not stuck at the airport.

When superfans speak of the superiority of The Godfather Part II, this is not merely to be contrary. Coppola took Mario Puzo’s pulp and darkened it with Nixonian paranoia and the power of political back rooms.

To say Lonergan has evolved further with his third feature would be an understatement: He toggles between his new plot’s years with the relaxed mastery of Boyhood’s Richard Linklater. Plus, he’s finally got a complex central performance that anchors his ambitions to cinema’s all-time great brooders.

Director Showalter does a beautiful job of twining Nanjiani and Romano’s similar slump — you smile at what a perfect almost-father and son they already are — and he steers Hunter to a rapprochement of uncommon complexity and grace. And we thought we were watching a Judd Apatow film.

It remains as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming.

Sly and suggestive, Lourdes is a cosmic black comedy that bumps up against the metaphysical.

Call Me by Your Name has a choking emotional intensity that will be apparent to anyone who’s ever dared to reach out to another.