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.

The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.

Lymelife, set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.

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.

In balancing the two sides’ competing motives, Mr. Sorogoyen has fashioned not only a taut drama but a parable that is widely applicable across many cultures at this moment.

It’s as effective as one of the fabled machines it celebrates.

The latest and best “TMNT” movie contains a little more substance than may at first be apparent, and this sci-fi reptile comedy admirably advances a message that we can and should all get along, majority and minorities alike.

If you emerge from this movie with a strong urge to rewatch the entire saga, you won’t be alone. Neither will those who emerge with tears of gratitude in their eyes.

Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.

Ms. Mirren and the film do us all a service in declining to paint Meir as a legendary figure but instead observing that although she was a strong leader who can rightly be credited with saving her country from annihilation, crisis forced her to make grueling decisions whose psychic burdens she bore heavily.

As directed with a wonderful combination of whimsy, deadpan humor and childlike exhilaration by Ms. Regan, the film is impish and full of bounce.

The bad news about the Ennio Morricone documentary Ennio is its length: 2 1/2 hours. Far too short!

The film is quiet, deliberate and low-key, and some may find it underwhelming, but writer-director Gabriel Martins has a novelist’s feel for his characters, taking us under everybody’s skin with deep sympathy for their differing outlooks.

It’s easily the most effective work of horror I’ve seen this year.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.

Understanding that a knockout finish is the most important element, Mr. Spielberg delivers spectacularly in a scene drawn from a real-life meeting. He puts a mischievous twist on his well-earned reputation for sentimental endings by dramatizing an encounter with one of the gods of celluloid.

There is a lot of untapped potential here, and a reality-TV series covering the same subject would be welcome. Nevertheless, inspiring true stories about youth are a little too scarce these days, and “Folktales” is not only magical and warm, it’s also a bracing interlude of good cheer.

A film such as this one ought to present a portrait that feels in some sense true and also make viewers so engaged that they’re hungry to learn more about the subject. Suffused with youthful passion and a deepening sensation of onrushing doom, Ms. O’Connor’s film heartily succeeds on both counts.

American Fiction is being heralded as a brilliant satire, which is almost correct. I’d say it’s sharp and funny, but its targets are low-hanging, and the film’s writer-director, Cord Jefferson, is hardly the first to take a poke at them.

The Iron Claw is either a cheesy professional-wrestling hold or the unbreakable grip of a hostile fate. Or perhaps it’s how a father clutches his children. Whatever it is, it’s a resonant image for a potent tearjerker.

The contrast between the two Killians—mighty on the outside, meek within—makes Magazine Dreams a wrenching character study, by turns lovely and chaotic.

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.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

What might have come across as a soap opera in lesser hands instead feels appropriately weighty. As he steers events toward a devastating climax, Mr. August proves he’s still an able steward of refined human drama.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet

Mr. Wang’s honest self-appraisal yields a richly detailed film.

In the title role, Sydney Sweeney must be relieved to be giving people a reason to discuss her acting. She’s excellent in the role, small and vulnerable yet tough and fierce, a pink-clad dynamo who is nevertheless beholden to others.

Though the affair dragged on so long before Dreyfus was finally cleared that Mr. Polanski confines the resolution to an epilogue, he has nevertheless made an oft-told tale lively and urgent. “An Officer and a Spy” is Mr. Polanski’s finest work in many years.

The film is a sort of jigsaw puzzle that demands either paying minute attention or viewing it twice. Seemingly unimportant and easily forgotten details from the opening minutes turn out to cohere and create a conclusive emotional impact of the kind that everyone in the movie is missing.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

Mr. Birney’s exotically low-fi imagination makes for a freaky and feverish trip.

Filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, a native of the state, has done a breathtakingly expressive job of capturing the strangeness, the beauty and the devastation of her homeland in the poetic, entrancing documentary King Coal.

Creed III brings up unusually troubling questions for a formula picture, and the care the script takes to add depth to Donnie strengthens the final third of the film, which in accordance with the sports-drama rulebook leads us through a rousing training montage and a climactic competition, this time in Dodger Stadium.

Borrowing the look of The Lego Movie, Piece by Piece is as bouncy and playful as a room full of rambunctious toddlers.

We tend to think of gangland tales as exhibiting clear demarcations between those who are and are not “in the game.” La Civil catapults us into a considerably more disturbing environment, a sort of toxic sinkhole that pulls everyone into its horrors.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

It’s a pleasure to report that the 100-minute conversation is as wonderful as the actors who deliver it—by turns witty, wistful and revealing, steeped in an appreciation for the hard learning that comes with age.

The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.

Who doesn’t love Bill Shatner? The theatrical documentary “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill” reminds us why, stylistically channeling what became the actor’s signature: a dedication to sustained gravitas so portentous that it becomes absurd, then keeps going until it emerges, triumphantly, into the realm of the genuinely spellbinding.

Movies about the mini-problems of normal people are vanishingly rare these days, mainly because it’s hard to make normal people seem interesting enough to be worth the price of a ticket. Ms. Holofcener has more than managed that, in a thoroughly engaging conversation-starter of a film.

Throughout The Hong Konger, Mr. Lai exhibits amazing composure as he tells a story that is both inspiring and enraging, in interviews filmed both before and between his arrests.

It’s a finely wrought story of palace intrigue enriched by lush sets and decors, having been shot at Versailles.

All of [Bogart's] facets are on view in a must-see documentary for fans of Golden Age Hollywood.

This kinetic, documentary-style, fly-on-the-wall and in-the-halls tale proves that in the hands of capable dramatists the rack of suspense can be tightened to an almost unbearable degree even when the outcome is known.

As lean and effective as its thriller elements are, especially in a breakneck third act, the movie is most intriguing in its subtext—an implied clash between conceptions of masculinity and the eras with which they’re associated.

It’s a hefty, substantial, at times dizzying experience despite lacking some elements that might have elevated it to the highest levels of its form.

Amrum is a stirring example of how childhood reminiscence can stand for so much more.

As this frequently lyrical and touching portrait of youth reminds us, for many thousands of people over the years, Cabrini-Green was simply home.

The plot is so cleverly constructed that its undertones sneak up on you. Their subtlety makes them that much more effective.

Among the film’s strongest qualities is its suspense: Mr. Zürcher builds a wicked sense of anticipation about just how far its desperately unhappy characters may go. As bleak as it is, The Sparrow in the Chimney is a skillfully painted portrait of an unstable menagerie.

In these days when flat-out comedy features are scarce, it’s one of the most welcome tenants at the summer multiplex. A mid-movie snowman gag puts the new one over the top, bestowing on it the honor of being mentionable alongside its predecessors. It sets the lunacy level to “inspired.”

Mr. Assayas has crafted a beautiful and moving tableau of how one small group dealt with a bewildering change. The time when Covid-19 ruled our lives is one many of us might prefer to forget. May our most gifted artists resist that impulse.

The warm performance by the ageless Ms. Gainsbourg and the soulfulness of the two younger leads (Judith is a subordinate figure of little importance) make for an absorbing two hours.

Carney’s film (unlike his disappointing previous effort “Begin Again”) is mad, irrepressible youth incarnate, by turns as exuberant as “The Commitments” and (nearly) as heartfelt as “Once.”

Inspector Bellamy leaves a sense not unlike a summary of Chabrol's entire career -- of guilty stains seeping away in every direction, of motives hidden and of endless stories that frustrate full understanding. To Chabrol, no life is ever a closed case.

The movie is more a situation than a narrative, and it's repetitive and depressing. One interrupter -- a murderer who did 14 years in prison -- says of the program, "In essence, it's just a Band-Aid." At best: One of his colleagues gets shot in the back for his peacekeeping effort.

The film, made by two Cuban-American exiles (and produced by their friend, Charlize Theron), makes an ironic point about Cuba: This is a land where the grandparents are revolutionaries (or at least say they are) but the kids are yearning for capitalist globalization.

For all its glutinous cuteness, damn if About Time doesn’t sneak up and sock you in the tear ducts. I tried not to fall for it. I failed.

A taut suspense flick for grown-ups.

The main flaw is that, as an actor, Duplass isn't able to make the audience love him. Picture "Bottle Rocket"-era Owen Wilson in the role, and you've got something special.

Kids will be as enthralled by this film as you were by the live-action Disney movies of the '70s. It doesn't get any sweeter than a roomful of mattresses with kids and dogs jumping on them.