Joshua Rothkopf

Love Is Strange emerges as a total triumph for Sachs and his co-leads, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who, despite lengthy filmographies, turn in career-topping work. a sensitive domestic tragedy about the finite nature of any union.

Director Paul Greengrass remains a genius of claustrophobia, yet his better films — "Bloody Sunday," "United 93" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" — all beat with a stronger sense of central identification. He doesn’t have as much to work with this time, and his solution is to slow down the pace. The result is more clarity, but also more monotony.

Snitch is a movie that cries out for the wiry B stars of yore: Robert Forster, a younger Tommy Lee Jones. And it would have occurred to a craftier screenwriter to make his hero’s walk on the criminal wild side a touch more tempting.

Tonally, it’s a touch awkward (like the movie as a whole), but Larraín’s endgame set on a snowy mountainside is as abstract as the final moments of "The Shining" — a film that’s also about the life of the mind.

No one is going to explain any of this for you — and the slightly snobby implication of Upstream Color is that explanations are for suckers.

Expressively (Berger knows his grammar), a white communion dress is dipped in black dye as her custodial grandmother passes away and an evil castle beckons.

At Berkeley works beautifully as a picture of compromised activism; viewers who summon the patience to commit to its indulgences won’t feel shortchanged, even if next year’s freshmen are.

Arrival director Denis Villeneuve pulls off the dare of the decade, hatching a thoughtful, expansive sequel to a sci-fi classic.

Hardly the heady stuff of "Frost/Nixon"--or then again, maybe exactly the same thing. This one’s more rude and fun.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

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.

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.

The film's sociopolitical critique is as dull as a sledgehammer - and maybe on the money - but the truth is far more entertaining.

Admission’s comedy has walls built around it; director Paul Weitz (About a Boy), normally a softener of harsh edges, might have been stymied by Fey’s snappy persona.

Gifts of civility small and large mark Steven Spielberg's latest film, a deeply satisfying Cold War spy thriller that feels more subdued than usual for the director—even more so than 2012's philosophical Lincoln—but one that shapes up expertly into a John Le Carré–style nail-biter.

Jackie pummels you with grandeur, with its epic visions of the funeral and that terrible moment in the convertible (all of it rendered in pitch-perfect detail and a subtle 16-millimeter shudder). Yet the film's lasting impact is dazzlingly intellectual: Just as JFK himself turned politics into image-making, his wife continued his work when no one else could.

It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term - a cult classic - and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.

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.

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.

The essential thrust here is both knowing and undeniable: No is pitched at the pivot point when the image makers were brazen enough to push ideology to the side. Considering how high the stakes were, it’s amazing they almost didn’t get the gig.

Enveloping you in its vintage folds, Peter Strickland's hypnotic horror film turns fashion into a death sentence.

Shockingly dull.

Vibrating with the geekery of a filmmaker off the chain, the movie plays like no other this year. Tarantino, steeped in even the smallest Leonean gesture (what's with the weird terrain shifts?), knows how to satisfy fans of scuzzy Italian horse operas and badass superviolence in equal measure.

Seriously missing the memo in a cringe-inducing way, The Hustle takes a perfectly fine premise from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels—two predatory men get played by a savvier woman—and obliterates it by swapping genders and ultimately selling out its feminist credibility.

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.

Us is too confidently made, too expert in its scene-to-scene command, to call it an example of sophomore slump. Still, after the film reveals itself to be the home-invasion thriller it is (and then the lesser Invasion of the Body Snatchers it becomes), you feel a slight letdown.

When a Hollywood comedy turns the crime of the century into a lark, you know a huge gamble has been chanced and won.

For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature.