Kyle Smith

Both literary and cinematic, “Poor Things” gives the audience everything we can ask for in a film—beauty and wonder; hefty ideas and clever storytelling; twists, shocks and laughter.

Though Ms. Bigelow includes a few humanizing and even humorous touches . . . she is not interested in the imperatives of the action movie or the moral lesson. She simply lays out one nauseatingly possible future, which means A House of Dynamite is one of the most terrifying movies ever made, but not in a fun way.

Sly, wry, adorable and deplorable, Guillaume Marbeck is priceless as the endlessly irritating and yet frustratingly charismatic Godard in one of the year’s brightest pictures, a rare standout in a sea of multiplex mediocrity.

It’s that priceless dialogue, the bitter ironies, the magnificently skeevy cast of characters and even the overall structure that make The Seven Five “Goodfellas” in blue.

The moral alertness of the film is of the level normally confined, in military pictures, to talky courtroom scenes, yet Eastwood skillfully works dilemmas into propulsive and suspenseful action.

Mr. Nolan’s utterly enthralling film lasts three hours. But despite being as talky as a math seminar, it crackles, hurtles and whooshes, generating more suspense and excitement than anything found in the alleged climaxes of the recent superhero pictures (which owe much to the director’s Batman films).

Mr. Elliot’s script is so rich and gently funny that he could easily have made an excellent live-action feature from it. As it is, though, the animation makes it even more lovable.

56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."

Sharp, funny and as mesmerizing as the master’s notoriously languorous suspense scenes.

September 5 is tough, rough, messy and gritty, in the tradition of American cinema from the decade in which it takes place.

Oddity is everything a horror film should be—creepy, exciting, unpredictable—and it leads to an ending that’s both shocking and inevitable.

That the story has largely gone untold is a shame, and Kennedy (daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy) has done a service to the country in reminding us.

With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, The Banshees of Inisherin is a strangely profound little comedy. It’s one of the few true originals among movies this year.

A thrilling and propulsive drama.

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it.

A great American movie about the greatness of ordinary Americans, Patriots Day combines an electrifying manhunt with the intimacy and feel for character writer-director Peter Berg showed in his brilliant TV series “Friday Night Lights.”

The End of the Tour is a five-day bender of a talk — a film that illuminates like few others the singular pleasure of shared discovery of one another’s sensibility. In an unassuming way, it’s a glory.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s funniest and finest movie in many years is perfection all the way through: the perfect casting choice, the perfect balance of comedy and pathos, the perfect wacky route to the perfect ending.

Firmly rejecting the prevailing style in horror movies today, Mr. Eggers has created a somber, cold-sweat doomscape that is in no way a thrill ride.

I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though.

Directed by his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Linklater, Mr. Hawke makes the most of what might be the year’s most brilliant screenplay, by Robert Kaplow, by delivering a Hart full of mischief and wit, desperation and self-loathing. There has never been a great book written about Hart, but at last he has this movie to renew and restore his story.

Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange."

The movie is as loaded with fun as it is with social implications. Its broad comedy about the modeling world plays like a deadpan version of “Zoolander,” and its third act has more primal drama than a season’s worth of “Survivor.”

A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.

The plot is so rich and eventful, and the script so witty, that the movie doesn’t drag once the extended flashback starts. Moreover, every moment is eye candy. The screen bursts with whimsical costumes (by Paul Tazewell) and sets (Nathan Crowley is the production designer), and all of the important roles are impeccably cast.

Dropping by on the same people every seven years like an old friend - or an unwelcome relative - Apted has constructed a peerless, suspenseful work that develops character to a depth that would make Tolstoy jealous. If you have any interest in documentaries, watch the DVD of the first film, "7 Up" (49 Up hits DVD Nov. 14). You won't be able to stop.

A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film.

Deep, disturbing and funny.

There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.

Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, soulful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.

The narrator tells us that a doctor said to him, “War is like an X-ray. All human insides become visible. Good people become better; bad people, worse.” Such astute observations, together with the harrowing imagery, lift “20 Days in Mariupol” to the ranks of the great war documentaries.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Both broader and deeper than the relentless and monotonous “12 Years a Slave,” it’s one of the few important movies to hit cinemas this year.

In Living, Mr. Nighy excels again in a performance that is magnificent in its restraint and eloquent in its sparseness of words.

If it’s an extravagant demand of time it’s an even more extravagant pleasure, the rare film worth a trip out to the cinema for full immersion.

Lost Illusions is sumptuous yet piercing, an expertly plotted social-relations saga of the kind that once typified prestige Hollywood cinema, and it dives into moral quandaries rather than dispensing easy bromides.

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.

Heart and soul—those two concepts beaten to death by lyricists—suffuse every scene of this modest, perfect picture.

Rich, evocative, crafty and exciting, it’s one of the few standout movies of the year.

Chess Story is a nerve-scraping exercise in grand deception.

Just as early youth means the endless fascination of new encounters, it also brings sudden, bewildering losses. “Little Amélie” brims with feeling for every precious moment of it.

The Housemaid is a delightful hall of mirrors in which reality turns out to be subject to infinite modification.

Cinema’s power to transport is vividly on display in Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s eerie but beautiful visit to a rich and unfamiliar setting.

Messrs. Soderbergh and Koepp have followed one of (Elmore) Leonard’s Laws—“Leave out the parts that people skip”—to construct an electric, fast-paced thriller that amounts to one climactic scene piled atop another.

The film honors maturity and all its weighty deliberations without putting a sheen of sentimentality on the condition.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

The determination to find greatness in the ordinary gives Song Sung Blue a magical, unforced luminescence that much more immodest films usually lack.

Though marred by an unfortunate title (“Fire of Love” sounds like a disco number from about 1979) and by the wobbly vocals of its narrator, Miranda July, who speaks in a fragile croak, the film is one of the year’s few awe-inspiring documentaries—a visually ravishing record, a bustling adventure, and an engrossing character study that begs to be remade, with actors, as a big-budget Hollywood narrative feature.

Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.

Mr. Bellocchio, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Susanna Nicchiarelli, has crafted a weighty, suspenseful family drama that touches on the eternal conflicts of religion but widens into a consideration of law, personal development and power politics.

Daddio is a bracingly naturalistic conversation with a sneakily brilliant screenplay and two wonderfully textured lead performances.

The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling—and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals.

Low-key indie dramas sometimes overstate the understatement to a degree that becomes dull or even exasperating, but The Quiet Girl is consistently fascinating throughout its 90-minute runtime.

The attraction is in the haunting texture of the picture, its delicate, breathy wonder.

Quirky touches, dry wit and first-rate characterizations make “The Bone Temple” a rare treat and one of the finest zombie movies I’ve seen, not to mention a major improvement from last summer’s third entry in the series.

Rejecting all Hollywood trends pointing the other way, Inside Out 2 goes for the penetrating over the shallow every time, never allowing the premise to devolve into a mere gimmick.

Making your characters relatable, likable, charming and vulnerable might seem to be a fairly obvious assignment, but it conflicts with the comic-book-movie urge to make its characters completely and devastatingly awesome. In getting back to basics, “First Steps” proves to be easily the best superhero movie of the year.

The pair’s growing fascination for each other is as unmistakable as the beauty of their surroundings, and so a film about inanimate elements turns out to be a delightfully human love story.

Forswearing anything like a pedantic message and giving the audience plenty of reasons to be sympathetic to the viewpoints of all three characters, Ms. Chinn has created a heartbreakingly real coming-of-age story.

The climax, in which police slowly drag the truth out of the central figure, is harrowing.

Sentimental Value is an affecting look into a fractured family. Art and domestic life intertwine with each other, inform each other and perhaps support each other more than is at first apparent, leading to an ending that provides a satisfying union of the two realms.

A combination of whimsy and devastation.

Martin Scorsese is the ideal moviegoing companion: His fandom is so exuberant, so well-informed, and so contagious, that he makes you want to see every work he mentions (or see it again) to luxuriate in the images as he does.

Ms. Reijn’s film is brilliantly evocative, exploring the shameful, shadowy parts of a complicated woman’s psyche, the ones she would never discuss and doesn’t fully understand herself.

Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.

Few caper comedies have this much heart, and few romantic dramas offer such an appealingly nutty plot.

Who better to lead us into this netherworld than a late-night bartender, the kind who is still slinging shots at 4 a.m.? As Hank, Austin Butler turns in yet another starburst performance in Darren Aronofsky’s careening, sordid, often hilarious noir about a man on the run in a metropolis abounding with weirdos, poseurs and goons.

The purity is admirable. The excitement is notable. “Chapter 4” may run nearly three hours, but when we’re having this much fun calling out “Oof!” and “Get him!” the evening passes in breezy delight.

BlackBerry is a biography of a once-great business that is fascinating enough on its own terms without being reshaped to fit a narrative formula.

Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.

For those who half-remember the novella from school (as I did) and didn’t especially enjoy it (as I didn’t), Mr. Ozon both honors his material and reinvigorates it.

Bugonia isn’t merely dark; it’s a black hole. But Mr. Lanthimos’s vision is sternly compelling, and Bugonia is that exceptional movie that’s extremely hard to forget.

Directed by James Griffiths, “Wallis Island” is warm, endearing and very funny, a quintessential indie smile-maker about nice, humble people adorably stumbling their way toward a little happiness.

Thanks to a polished script by Mark L. Smith, exciting yet human-focused direction by Lee Isaac Chung, and two likable stars, the quiet scenes work too. This is one of the few Hollywood movies this year to achieve everything it sets out to do.

In keeping with the exuberance of early Hollywood, Mr. Chazelle and his creative team—Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, Florencia Martin’s production design and Mary Zophres’s costumes all have to be dazzling to maintain Mr. Chazelle’s vision, and they are—create the feeling of a madcap, whirling ride.

Any five audience members might have five different takeaways, which tells you there is a lot going on here. I was left with this thought: How well do we really know anyone, even ourselves?

“Dogs” is a beguiling recreation of one irrepressible childhood. The movie is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, but always invitingly candid and relatable. In its specificity it winds up being universal: As children, we really were odd little beasts, weren’t we?

In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.

What you take away from Anatomy of a Fall is largely up to you, but it’s a thoroughly engrossing case study.

The age when such images held firm positions in the culture may be over, but Mr. Corbijn’s film has given it a glorious and stirring elegy.

Asleep in My Palm is a virtuoso debut feature from writer-director Henry Nelson.

It’s all painfully exact and true. Myself a product of exactly this kind of blue-collar New England community, I winced as I laughed at this gang of badly dressed, foul-mouthed reprobates. My people!

All three of these attractively awful figures are to egotism approximately what the sun is to light, which makes for a delightful triangular battle for supremacy not unlike the one in All About Eve. Clever plotting—an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Félix does some goofy martial-arts training turns out to be critical—and inventive character details enhance the wicked fun.

Though all of the film’s events could be recounted in a few sentences, “Anemone” is a vivid character study and an acting showcase for the four lead performers, each of whom gets ample opportunity to show a deep understanding of their tortured pasts.

Without exaggerating any characteristic of suburban-mom life, steering clear of sentimentality or contrivance, Mr. Gravel succeeds breathtakingly in making us appreciate how much grit is contained in the Julies of the world.

Gorgeous set pieces thrill the senses, but there is philosophical inquiry as well. "Alien" was, after all, just "Jaws" in space, but Prometheus ponders where evil comes from and how it conquers its makers.

Adding goofy uncertainty to shoulders as wide as the East River makes for a disarming hero in one of the spiffiest WWII action yarns ever to march out of Hollywood.

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

It’s a small movie, but in his third feature, indie writer-director Chad Hartigan proves he is a major talent, imbuing the interactions with wit and warmth and charm.

This movie doesn't get huffy, it gets laughs.

It’s a captivating throwback that promises to lead the genre away from sci-fi flash and trickery. I’d rank it beside “X-Men: Days of Future Past” among the best X-Men entries.

Sicario, which combines dizzying action scenes with a taut script, ravishing photography and an otherwordly musical score, is a knockout.

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

This is all as pure and sunny as lemonade.

Not that a film as taut and exciting as this one needs punchy dialogue, but Black Sea has that, too.