Keith Uhlich

Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman‘s text and its technique.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.

The movie does have an air of cautiousness about it, trying so hard to be a respectful, definitive statement on WWII (and often succeeding) that it sometimes feels cadaverous.

The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.

The meanings of Close-Up shift, subtly and profoundly, with every viewing; the only certainty is that its rewards are boundless.

It is the richly evocative performances of Marion (aggressive yet enticing) and Merhar (wearing world-weariness like an aged suit) that cut deepest.

Fortunately, Oppenheimer keeps the film focused on the highly complicated Anwar — a charismatic devil if ever there was one — observing as this strange reckoning with the past slowly breaks down his defenses.

Woody Allen's sublime comic drama.

Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws.

Getting old, as Jackie and Don would have it, is part of their overall project. More than once they talk about the impermanence of the materials they use. One day, their art will cease to be, as will they. That Zen pronouncement doesn’t make the day-in/day-out drudgery of aging any easier.

A moving meditation on history, knowledge and mortality.

The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it’s unfortunate that John Magaro and Orion Lee's characters ultimately feel outside it all.

Sure it is - and a great one at that.

There’s an edge to The Circus that suggests a man gazing deep into the void, laughing at the darkness and urging us to do the same.

But when has a performer as fully and uniquely sacrificed himself to the moving-picture cause as De Niro? He leeches LaMotta of soul and conscience, making him a purely physical creature sculpted in sinew for the glory days, then padded up in lard for the declining years.

Fiske and Hallin show, over the course of their very affecting movie, how this naive analogy both complements and conflicts with the ups-and-downs of Gemma's reality.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

The popular view of art is that it belongs to the masses. Wiseman casts a more skeptical eye, questioning such egalitarianism with cold, hard historical context. Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that these works live on far beyond their original purpose, even if, as the film’s bold, brilliant climax suggests, they may eventually play to an audience of none.

It’s the creature’s instinctual murder spree that makes the immediate impression, but that would be nothing without the simmering tensions among the human counterparts. [30th anniversary release]

Stephen Maing's documentary about the NYPD's illegal policing quotas and other discriminatory practices gets the blood boiling.

Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.

It will test your faith in humanity, but Hersonski's film is nonetheless a brilliant reminder of the importance of bearing witness.

Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.

If there's a misstep here, it would be in the character of camp medic Maj. Clipton (James Donald). His overwrought dialogue---especially some Heston-like cries of "Madness!" during the finale---is too much of an on-the-nose contrast to the story's necessarily clinical existentialism. It slightly dilutes the film's piercing grandeur, but the nit is easily enough picked.

Yun is quite simply spectacular as a woman who holds steadfastly on to her dignity and empathy, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.

By using Laura as an avatar, Marker actually helps us see the visuals and their knotty meanings much more clearly. The more we watch, the more Laura softens, until — in a mind-bending conceit — her very status as a fictional creation is called into question. The effect is ecstatic.

What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?

Those Dardenne brothers…still making great movies with second-nature ease.

What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing.

For Powell and Pressburger, the personal and the political—much like their distinctive mix of high and low artistry—weren’t separate bedfellows: Even a marvelously entertaining tale of repressed abbesses on the edge could explore, with enduring resonance and profundity, an empire losing its grip.

You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.

Godly as the monks are, they are still human-which makes their ultimate sacrifice all the more devastating.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

There’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling to the trio’s every interaction—not only as characters but as performers—that makes the film’s casually tragic climax that much more devastating.

Nichols has said that the idea for the film emerged from a free-floating anxiety that he sensed in the world at large, the feeling that everything we treasure in life could be lost in an instant. That sensation permeates this strikingly original movie - especially its enigmatic mind-fuck of a finale, which will haunt you for several lifetimes.

The Cold War is over, but director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and his collaborators have brought those suspicion-fueled days to vivid life in this masterful adaptation of John le Carré's beloved 1974 spy novel.

Sokurov, who also acted as director of photography, films the character and his surroundings with the eye of a newly arrived visitor to another world.

At its strongest, the film feels like kin to Kirsten Johnson’s great Cameraperson (2016), a free-associative nonfiction memoir comprised mostly of B-roll and personal footage. Though the subject here isn’t Ross himself (despite a few offscreen aural appearances) but an entire community that, in both micro- and macrocosmic senses, has remained historically unacknowledged and unseen.

It’s almost impossible to describe the narrative specifics of The Past without making the movie seem ridiculously hammy. Indeed, several twists involving Samir, a dry cleaner with plenty of his own troubles, tip a bit into hoary melodramatics.

If there’s humor to be found in some of the particulars, it’s never to judge or to poke fun, but to revel in the very real delights of consensual sexual roleplay.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.

This is an exquisite portrait of a family navigating the wreckage imparted to them by one of their own.

The comic jabs — Tati makes brilliant use of a gaudy, gurgling fish fountain — never overwhelm the humanity of these disparate characters. [09 Sep 2010, Issue#780]

The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.

Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.

This is Young in his playroom, grabbing his toys at random while indulging his every antimelodic whim, and Demme’s off-the-cuff approach makes for the perfect aesthetic complement.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

This is in many ways a white-knuckle brand extension for Honnold above all else. Still, the film frequently treads into knotty territory.

Moreover, the story doesn’t climax in all’s-well-that-ends-well matrimony, instead building to a beautifully bittersweet moment of self-realization, one with a light-touch profundity that would make the Bard proud.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

Wang has made a confidently intimate movie that is devastatingly larger-than-life.

It's McConaughey who is the real revelation: All Grim Reaper strut and cutthroat stare, he savors each of Letts's vividly ghoulish lines.

No side overwhelms the other in the back-and-forth; you feel more like a profoundly uncertain moment is being marked, with little concrete sense of the outcome beyond mankind's enduring hunger for moving pictures.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It's exhilarating.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

Toward the end of the film, a few hard-hitting cuts between young and old brings the title's meaning home: These children have an inescapable life of drudgery before them, and there's little likelihood it will change anytime soon.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

No simplistic status parable. It’s more a psychological snapshot of a person forever doomed to remain a voyeur to her own life

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)

Meier is clearly carving out a path all her own; the next one should be a gem.

The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the '60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly "Bourne"-inflected recent episodes.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs.

This is a life lived, perhaps not always well, but certainly to the fullest.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.

Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

The running time may make you blanch, but Connie Field’s seven-part documentary about the history and eventual dissolution of South African apartheid is well worth the commitment.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

If Jim Jarmusch’s languorous, laconic style isn’t your bag, his stone-faced vampire comedy won’t make you a believer. Those who’ve already been bitten, however, will swoon like the film’s toothy leads whenever their lips touch neck juice.

Schimberg confidently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (more than once a scene that appears to be real is actually fiction and vice versa), though never to the point that it detracts from the people onscreen.

New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

This is derivative if well-executed product, except when it comes to the relationship at the film’s center.

Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.

It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.

It’s another fascinating entry in the director’s ongoing exploration of the sadistic and masochistic facets of human behavior.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

A dream, indeed. Sure to delight foodies and cinephiles alike.

Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.

Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.

A complex final scene — in which everyone finally lets the tears flow — only deepens the sense that well-meaning mother love can be as poisonous as it is nourishing.

At one point, Tsemel describes herself as a member of an occupying force and defines her mission in life as to somehow rectify the resultant power imbalance. The only way to get there, as the film's pointed final image suggests, is to keep on trudging.

There’s a sense that all the thematic messiness is intentional, a way for Jia to diagnose the ills of a country whose economic and social fabric is wilting under the effects of rapid modernization.

Mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.