Kyle Smith

Rangy in tone, style and theme, it has so much going on that a single viewing hardly seems sufficient to absorb it all. Whether it’s a masterpiece or a hodgepodge will be a matter of some discussion; the reach is evident but the grasp is a little shaky.

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.

Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.

In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.

La La Land deserves credit for high spirits even if it’s essentially a collection of glamorous throwback music videos for so-so songs.

The Coens, so cutting to so many of their characters, are gentler with Llewyn, inviting us to wander and wonder along with him as he ponders why he must forever play the jerk.

Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

It’s lacerating, a master class in how to show without showing.

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

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

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.

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

The main reason for Winter's Bone to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill -- a bit of poverty porno -- for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Mostly a routine love story elevated by one of the year’s most magnetic performances.

So there is courage and cheekiness here. What there is not is a story, or much insight or even anger; anyone expecting an indictment of Iran will be sorely disappointed.

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

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).

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

American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.

A thrilling and propulsive drama.

Ms. Gladstone draws a lot of sympathy as the modest, helpless Mollie, but like everything else here her performance suffers from inertia. She spends the bulk of the movie mired in illness and despondency, and her look mirrors how I felt as I watched: numb and trapped.

Yet the film is marred by Hawke’s blundering intrusions as he keeps changing the subject to Hawke: He tells us he often wonders “why it is I do what I do,” as if anyone but he is interested in the answer.

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

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.