Manohla Dargis

The story is nearly obscured by its schematic design (everyone doesn’t just have his or her reasons; he or she is also guilty), but there are mysteries, surprises and complexities, notably in the representation of the children and in Ms. Bejo’s thorny, layered performance with its strata of neediness, resentment and hope.

By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.

Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.

From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.

A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.

The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.

The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.

This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.

Private Property embraces the banal and the monstrous, and affords Ms. Huppert opportunity to astonish rather than overwhelm.

A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.

No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.

In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale).

A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.

This isn't a profound film, or even an important one, but then it isn't trying to be. It's so diverting and so full of small satisfying pleasures, you don't realize how good it is until it's over.

Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.

This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.

Moonrise Kingdom breezes along with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick. Like all of Mr. Anderson's films, though, there's a deep, pervasive melancholia here too.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.

Intercepted is yet another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid. It’s a reminder that war isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.

There are moments in Earth Mama, a drama about motherhood at its most fragile, when the movie’s quiet intensity seems to settle in your chest, as if a heavy stone had been placed over your heart.

It’s a sincere, mesmerizing and admirably unorthodox film that, by turns, invites your love and tests your patience. It demands attention and generosity from you, including toward characters who can be tough to tolerate, much less care about. They and the movie can be maddening, even when it’s impossible to look away.

A great goof of a film...However daftly amusing, and periodically inspired, Men in Black is distinctly short on character and plot, even for a cartoon.

The film's three leads are extraordinary, but what Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization.

Heart of a Dog is about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.

Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.

In other words, the movie is exactly what you expect — not more, not less — from an estimably well-oiled machine like Pixar.

On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.

With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.

Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt's mug.

The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.

A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.

Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.

A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, King Arthur moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark.

Furious, brilliant, exhausting, Synonyms is the story of a man in self-imposed exile.

By eliding the Legion’s history and focusing on winning personalities, the filmmakers have made an engaging movie about some kids who — as their jokes give way to debates, stratagems and even shocks — already seem to be drafting their own more interesting sequel.

Mr. Leigh has never been an artist for whom happy (word or idea) has been an easy fit. Life is sweet, as the title of another of his films puts it with a heart-swelling yes, but it’s also an eternal fight against doom and gloom, the soul-crushing no.

The three leads remain watchable, but only the sourness in Jake’s face when he moves into Justine’s house hints at the kind of true and complex emotions that, bromide by bromide, this movie insistently denies.

Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.

Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as “Stonewalling.”

It's the sort of unassuming discovery that could get lost in a crowd or suffer from too much big love, and while it won't save or change your life, it may make your heart swell. Its aim is modest and true.

It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.

An airless, sometimes distressingly mirthless comedy.

A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood.

Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.

Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.

Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.

Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.

War may be terrible, but for a woman like Shideh there’s no horror like home.

The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.

The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.

There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.

Raw and wretchedly current, it is a story that packs a cruel emotional wallop.

Pure junk.

Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives.

The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.

There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.

His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.

Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.

In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”

Eggers meticulously sets the scene, adds texture and builds tension and mystery from men locked in battle and sometimes in embrace. He has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations.

When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.

Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.

Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.

The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking.

It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.

Life rushes by so fast, it flickers today and is gone tomorrow. In 56 Up - the latest installment in Michael Apted's remarkable documentary project that has followed a group of Britons since 1964, starting when they were 7 - entire lifetimes race by with a few edits.

More elegantly plotted and streamlined than the first film.

One of the pleasures of Up in the Air is that its actresses share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props

I can't think of another good movie this year that's as tough to watch as Moodysson's, but, then, I can't think of very many movies that are as good.

Colors and hearts explode in Belle, and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime.

Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.

The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.

While I don’t remember seeing any fingerprints dotting their forms this time around, the tender care that went into fashioning each of Wallace’s toothy expressions and Gromit’s quizzically raised brow remains palpable. The love, well, that you feel, too.

One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.

As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg invariably comes down on the side of optimism; here, that hopefulness feels right. It also feels like a rallying cry.

They have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama.

See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki deepens quietly. This is Mr. Kuosmanen’s first feature (he has directed a few shorts), and if he had any rookie jitters you wouldn’t know it.

The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.

Mr. Knight keeps a fairly steady distance from Ivan — underscoring certain tense passages with tighter close-ups — but moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it’s Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger’s face into a life.

Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.

At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.

What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.

By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.

Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.

The Mustang is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's hypnotically beautiful cinematic trilogy Three Times doesn't just illuminate faces and objects; it seems to fill them up, as if they were lighted from within.