Kyle Smith

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.

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.

Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).

About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.

“GBH” is a featherweight screwball comedy that, trying mightily to be cosmopolitan, feels awfully provincial, desperately touristy.

Name names, please. Or shut up.

A desperado drama wrapped around a Bernie Sanders campaign speech, Hell or High Water overcomes its vapid political leanings with loads of West Texas atmosphere, smart dialogue and acutely observed relationships.

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.

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

It’s the sweet sincerity of Brooklyn that stamps it as both refreshing and nostalgic. The film is as welcome as a photo you just discovered of your mother before you were born, in which she looks prettier than you ever imagined.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.

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.

The film is still a gripping experience, though, with its circling sharks, its sun-dappled beauty and its agonies of shattered hope. At one point I was convinced that Sandra Bullock would splash down next to our man in her space capsule and Hanks’ Maersk ship from “Captain Phillips” would steam by to pick up both of them.

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.

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

In The Kid With a Bike, Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer a sly but finally banal update of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."

Roger Ebert makes an unusual candidate for a documentary: He was a writer, which isn’t cinematic, and not the swashbuckling kind. He didn’t go to war zones, just movies.

Of all the versions I’ve seen, the latest one is the best, a holiday spectacle bursting with spirited sisterhood. Its characters may be broadly drawn, but their sorrows and triumphs come across with more feeling than ever.

Though far too long for its wisp of a plot, this stylish film has a nerve-cinching grip that makes it more alarming than most horror flicks, let alone most movies about a couple having a tiff.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

The Tillman Story purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces -- massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.

Dopey as the film is on a plot level, it’s equally vapid in its psychology.

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

As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.

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.

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