Kyle Smith

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

Werner Herzog looks at the death penalty in Into the Abyss, and as is almost always the case, to look through his eyes is to marvel.

Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.

Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.

It’s a rare film that locates viciousness and kindness on both sides of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

File this one in the same category of edgy Long Island comedies as the equally smart 2009 Alec Baldwin film "Lymelife."

The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.

Like a Pixar movie shorn of the cutesy and manipulative aspects that marred “Inside Out,” the animated remake of The Little Prince, hitting theaters and Netflix, is as fragile and beautiful as the beloved rose guarded by the wee fellow of the title.

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

A cinematic enchantment, a low-key 1970s-style kids’ movie brimming with sincerity and heart. It’s one of the best films of the year.

The exhilarating documentary Sunshine Superman, which melds gorgeous aerial photography of Boenish’s jumps with sublime musical cues, finds in Boenish a kind of poet-adventurer, equal parts pixie and desperado.

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

As a former president of the United States remarked, "Childrens do learn," and what they learn in the heartbreaking yet thrillingly hopeful documentary Waiting for 'Superman' is that adults are finally starting to notice how badly kids have been betrayed by teachers unions.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

Bouncy vocal rearrangements of pop songs, sparkling choreography and a hilarious script make for a movie that's made to be obsessed over, seen 50 times, quoted as devoutly as such sacred texts as "Heathers" and "Bring It On."

Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.

McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu.

The funniest movie I've seen in more than a year.

Picture Graham Greene crossed with James Bond, with a splash of Sacha Baron Cohen, and you'll start to imagine the nervy talents of Mads Brügger, the fearless Danish filmmaker who has for a second time come up with a stunning, funny, and vital piece of guerilla cinema.

Cool It -- complete with its own slide show and witty graphics -- amounts to a devastating rebuttal to Gore-ism.

Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.

A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

The surprise of Ted is that it goes for honest Spielbergian wonder, too, and even earns some tears.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

A bit more context about some of the topics the witnesses discuss would have been welcome, but Whitaker's stark, unshowy style is probably the most effective way to approach 9/11.

The sharpest, wildest and most unpredictable thriller I’ve seen this year.

Indignation is devastating, haunting and important.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

Miami Vice isn't an action flick but a neo-noir: tough, quiet, moody and hard.

Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.

Few documentaries have covered such an important matter so convincingly and with such clarity. When it comes to public education, we are all New Jerseyans.

Blue Caprice takes a minimalist, documentary-style approach that proves harrowingly effective.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.

A long, messy cinematic novel full of hate, love, murder, ghosts, madness, poetry and Catherine Deneuve.

The movie could -- should -- be a symphony, and it frequently makes excellent use of spare classical music. When Brosnan pipes up, he is as welcome as a car alarm.

What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

In other words, this punkish, sleek film about beautiful kids wallowing in purloined Prada could have been written by a grumpy 65-year-old white guy in gabardine, provided he had a sense of irony. The Bling Ring is the bridge between Coppola and Bill O’Reilly.

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

Frustrating, at times agonizing, the film is nonetheless dappled with a sad beauty. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

Rom-coms died because they weren’t very rom and didn’t have enough com. But Sleeping With Other People, which is both hilarious and emotionally alive, is as delightful as a first date that crackles with possibility.

It’s too bad that Keaton plays Kroc as a grasping, alcoholic sleaze as he builds the McDonald’s brand into an all-American empire, but I forgive the movie’s cheap shots because this is one of the most thorough and satisfying depictions of business — everything from quality control to cost-cutting and branding — ever put on film.

Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.

I laughed more at Seth MacFarlane’s sendup of ’60s Westerns than I did at all the other comedies I’ve seen this year, combined.

Everything Must Go is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is familiar -- busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair -- yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.

A triumphant and heartwarming film, not an angry and scolding one, that carefully maps how excellence and determination win over the doubters.

A great big snowy pleasure with an emotionally gripping core, brilliant Broadway-style songs and a crafty plot.

For boldness of execution as well as vision, The Red Chapel stands out as a singular, important comedy.

The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.

Sincerely directed by one woman (Phyllida Lloyd, who did "Mamma Mia!") and smartly written by another (Abi Morgan), the film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.

A brutally funny deconstruction, a hybrid of “Watchmen” and “Superbad” filtered through John Woo. It’s a boisterously original piece of entertainment . . . that isn’t for everyone. Note the rating, which should be triple-R, as in Really, Remarkably R.

Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.

Director Marc Silver expertly interweaves the courtroom drama and its larger social and human connotations.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

A yellow dog of a movie that delights in offending the offendable. It's also a whitesploitation classic, from its menacing sideburns to its demented laughter.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

Like the paintings of the master, Renoir is beautiful to look at, but it would be a mistake to call the film (or its subject) shallow.

As for Hoffman, the shambling Everyman naturalism he shows here gives God’s Pocket an added elegiac layer that makes its bitter ironies that much more painful.

There’s an exhilarating sadness to it all that amounts to cinematic poetry.

Thanks to his (Oldman) mastery, and Alfredson's, no film this year left me hungrier for a sequel.

Like a dedicated teacher, this is a film that stays with you.

A fantastically entertaining biography.

This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It’s what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

There’s something strange and dreamlike and delicate and beautiful about Anomalisa, an animated film for grown-ups that takes a long while to make its point, but does so with a dark brilliance.

If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.

The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul.

The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.

A good documentary uses judicious editing to make an important addition to your knowledge of a subject, and Mitt does so in a big way.

It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.

Proving it’s still possible to stick to the broad contours of “The Graduate” story and come up with something brightly endearing, 5 to 7 is a memorable directorial debut for “Mad Men” writer Victor Levin.

Mr. Luhrmann successfully makes Presley’s concerts fresh again.

Through a single family, Mr. Rasoulof has created a vivid portrait of the dilemmas of today’s Iran, where the power of iman, or faith, suggests one kind of observation but the power of the iPhone suggests another.

The tone is dry farce that never strays into camp, with a mildly sardonic appreciation of oddballs recalling such Robert Altman films as “The Long Goodbye.” A creepily discordant musical score by Fatima Al Qadiri adds immensely to the feeling that everyone is hiding something and no good will come of it.

This all-you-can-eat thrill buffet easily bests most of the recent big-budget movies and reminds us that Mr. Cruise remains a showman par excellence.

The film may not propose a solution to any of our maladies, but it’s a bitterly convincing diagnosis.

Combining the best aspects of “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” but more satisfying in the end than either, this 2 1/2-hour epic Christian allegory recreates the same mix as the best Steven Spielberg fantasies—wonder, adventure, humor, warmth and pathos, all infused with a child’s sensibility.

Here’s a brilliant idea for a rock documentary: Catch up with a band in the creaky fog of middle age, long after the hits. A certain toll has been exacted, a certain humility achieved, and yet the story is not yet over.

After Love may be a bit thin on story, but it nevertheless shines with feeling.

The second half, in particular, exemplifies science fiction at its best: thoughtful, exciting, provocative and pointed. It’s fantasy wrapped around ideological substance, making “Kingdom” the best of the franchise films to make it to theaters so far this year.

Without straining to make an obvious point, Mr. Tomnay uses black comedy and shocking splatters of gore to tweak the class of jaded plutocrats who are as asset-rich as they are morals-poor.

Dreamin’ Wild is an elegant appreciation of the many textures of aging, balancing the feel of rhapsodic memories and shuddery regrets.

If a thriller can make you hold your breath for fear of being eaten by aliens while you’re sitting in the multiplex, it’s working pretty well, and “A Quiet Place: Day One” appropriately kept me in a frozen state, afraid to so much as crinkle a page in my notebook.

Chile ’76 subtly illustrates how difficult it becomes to separate the personal and the political in an authoritarian state. As it goes on, it develops from a character portrait into an unusually realistic thriller, with danger asserting itself everywhere.

It’s difficult to watch but beguilingly genuine in its exploration of the tortured dynamics of three adult siblings whose mother died five years earlier and who haven’t been together in three years.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

Though the oddness of the situation yields the same kinds of lightly funny observational moments that gave Lost in Translation some of its charm, Rental Family is, like Sofia Coppola’s movie, above all else a sweet drama about the difficulty of connections. Which makes it an unusually mature and considered experience at the movies.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

For those who complain that movies are too pat and formulaic, “Marty Supreme” is mostly a bracing tonic—pungent, wild and weird.

Directed and written by Kelly Fremon Craig, it’s a charmer: sensitive, funny and grounded. It’s also a kind of rebuttal to many woeful cinematic trends, foremost among which is dishonesty, or lack of verisimilitude.

You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight—this one amounts to an extended fatuous argument that an individual who behaved like a corporate restructuring would be a psychopath. But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.

Once the two rovers landed, three weeks apart, problems that had never been confronted before in the history of humanity started to become routine occurrences. So did solving them, and the documentary is a warm and well-earned tribute to the brilliant scientists and engineers who did so.

The Christophers is zingy fun. Whichever world Mr. Soderbergh decides to visit, he invariably makes the trip worthwhile.

The film is a scintillating drama that explores a weighty historical dispute with Gothic flair.

It’s stylish and chilling, with a lively feminist undercurrent.