Manohla Dargis

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.

There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

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.

Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured.

Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.

The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.

Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.

Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.

Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.

It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

The film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

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.

With visual precision and emotional restraint — and aided by Mr. Driver’s tamped-down, sober and gently endearing performance — Mr. Jarmusch creates that rarest portrait of the artist: the one who’s happy being hard at work.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

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

A potent, persuasive and quietly furious documentary.

It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.

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.

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

In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.

There are several genres nimbly folded into The Skin I Live In, which might also be described as an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza. In other words, it's an Almodóvar movie with all the attendant gifts that implies: lapidary technique, calculated perversity, intelligent wit.

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

If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

At once an emotional thriller and a domestic horror movie -- a woman's picture with a vengeance, in which the bloodletting is kept to a minimum, and ends up all the more powerful and profound for it.

Tim isn't super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness - with his decency and sense of wonder - is pretty extraordinary.

A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.

The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.

What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.

Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.

By far the most approachable of the director's recent films, with an emotional depth that's true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word.

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.

Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.

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

Exuberant.

Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.

Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.

Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.

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.

Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.

An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.

As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.

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.

It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.

Flight is freakishly real; it's one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules.

Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.

Generous, soulful film.

Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.

The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.

The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.

Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that's brought it to life.

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.

A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.

Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.

Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.

[Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.

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

The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.

Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.

It is undeniable in its poignancy, an ecstatic vision of what might have been, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork.

In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in On the Rocks, a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.

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.

Rarely does pop come with such sizzle.

What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.

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

A memory play and a sleight of hand, Eternal Sunshine is more than anything else deeply sincere. Like Spike Jonze, who directed "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," Gondry succeeds principally by balancing Kaufman's churning skepticism with unflinching hope.

Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease.

There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.

The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).

The world of My Joy is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but. It's suspenseful, mysterious, at times bitterly funny, consistently moving and filled with images of a Russia haunted both by ghosts and the living dead.

Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).

Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13TH will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking.

The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of Incredibles 2, even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles.

A gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close.

What makes the material still feel personal — other than the yearslong investment and love that transform entertainments into fan communities — is the combination of Katniss and Ms. Lawrence, who have become a perfect fit.

The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.

Isn't just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle's favorite science-fiction series. It's also a testament to television's power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from.

Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.

Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.

A grave and beautiful work of art.

Because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie's pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage.

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.

All the Money in the World revs up beautifully, first as a thriller. But while the kidnapping is the movie’s main event, it is only part of a story that is, by turns, a sordid, desperate and anguished tragedy about money.

Eschewing voice-over or any obvious trace of an on-screen or off-screen presence, she (Brown) lets her images, a little text and other people do the talking for her. Her quiet has its own force.

Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.

Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

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

Love, death, cinema — they’re all there in Mia Madre, bumping up against one another beautifully.

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

It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.

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.

It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting.

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.

Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.

It is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling.

It's a modest film, if only in scale and apparent budget, about some of the greatest questions in life, like the existence of God, our capacity to see beyond our own vanity and the legacies of fathers, both blood and state.

The film is unabashedly sexy, and its heady romanticism feels as right and as unaffected as Im's bold use of color and his equally bold decision to tell the story through traditional pansori narration.

The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.

What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French.

Part of what's bracing about Gomorrah, and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.

Wildly ambitious, thoroughly entertaining and embellished with some snaky moves, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is a lot like its nominal subject, Elvis Presley.

Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.

Yes is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.

Audiard’s touch here is light, sensitive and attentive as usual; you feel his fondness for these characters and their world in every frame.

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.

Working with cinematographer Harris Savides and serving as the film's editor, he (Van Sant) has fashioned a visual style and a narrative shape that has the quality of a waking dream, then a nightmare. Rarely do form and content add up with such harmonious grace and power.

Im recounts the painter's life in bold strokes rather than with the literalist's painstaking detail, and in the process tells us more about the mysteries of genius than a bushel full of quotidian fact.

"Ocean's 23," oops, Ocean's Thirteen, is also a gas; it's lighter than air, prettier than life, a romp, a goof and an attentively oiled machine.

Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.

Hogg’s greatest stroke in The Eternal Daughter is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist.

Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.

Mr. Perry is such a good filmmaker that he can make the embarrassing and the unbearable insistently, fascinatingly engrossing (and often funny).

The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years.

All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.

What makes Half Nelson both an unusual and an exceptional American film, particularly at a time when even films about Sept. 11 are professed to have no politics, is its insistence on political consciousness as a moral imperative.

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.

Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).

As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.

With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.

Mr. Fancher’s movie love and way of spinning a yarn to its near-breaking point — one detour opens onto another — dovetail nicely with the cinephilia and playfulness that characterize Mr. Almereyda’s movies.

In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.

Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.

This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.

Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.

In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.

Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.

A seamless model of form and content. (My only quibble is the poor quality of the digital video, which doesn't do justice to Johnson's work.)

Mr. Miller does his finest work with his three superb leads.

Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.

An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry -- for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies -- Reprise is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure.

What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic.

The three women in Clouds of Sils Maria love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.

This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.

The bright sun that blasts through Starlet, a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses with thirsty lawns and dusty cars.

Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab.

City Hall runs four and a half mostly engrossing hours, making it one of Wiseman’s longest. That sounds daunting, but I could have watched hours more of people simply talking to one another in auditoriums and across conference-room tables.

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.

[Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.

One of the most harrowing and plausible visions of apocalypse since George A. Romero's 1968 zombie shocker, "Night of the Living Dead."

The dread gathers and surges while the blood scarcely trickles in The Conjuring, a fantastically effective haunted-house movie.

A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.

Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them.

If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation.

This convulsively funny movie takes an up-close and sometimes queasy-personal approach to its motormouth subject, who, when she's not making you howl with laughter (or freeze up in horror), brandishes her deeply held hurts, fears, prejudices, poor judgment and bad taste as if they were stigmata.

Godard has always made films that are as thrilling for their ideas and ideals as for the sheer beauty of their images; the difference here is that for the first time in years he's more interested in turning us on than in turning us off.

Mostly, Ernest & Celestine is an ode to the happiness that comes from being with those different from us.

The film has the requisite surface fidelity.... But it also has moments of lightness and strangeness, as well as kinks and sour notes, which strengthen the sense that these are people, not figurines in a dutiful, paint-by-numbers biopic.

Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power.

One reason filmmakers like Mr. Nolfi seem attracted to Philip K. Dick's work, beyond the brilliance of its ideas, is that his unembellished writing style leaves them room to make the stories visually their own.

Unguided by obvious story signposts, you slip from image to image, pulled along by their beauty (the digital cinematography is by Chris Dapkins) and by the dreamy, leisurely rhythms of the editing (by Seth Bomse).

Mr. Hong is not yet the equal of Mr. Antonioni, but it has become increasingly difficult to see intellectually stimulating, aesthetically bold films like this in American theaters.

In both its intellectual reach and the elegant simplicity of its form, A Talking Picture bears resemblance to Andrei Sokurov's "Russian Ark."

A sly and thoroughly charming Trojan horse of a movie.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly's thoroughly enjoyable paean to Moe, Larry and Curly and the art of the eye poke.

A triumph of low-end production design, shot in sizzling, solarized black and white, and driven by a propulsive, insinuating score, Pi is a horror movie that makes you think and an indie film that makes you squirm.

Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.

As a performer, Moore can go big, and a terrible yowl here pierces the heart. But she’s a virtuoso of restraint. She shows you the rush of emotions just before they break the surface, so the hurt and confusion flicker on her face like minute shifts of light.

An immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor.

The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.

Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.

It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.

Again and again, as the story shifts between women, times and moods, Mr. Jordan adds a punctuating flourish...that exquisitely illustrates the once-upon-a-time mood.

Napoleon is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character.

Despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking.

Mann shoots this lunatic race from every conceivable angle — with cameras in and out of cars, bearing down on drivers’ faces, agitatedly hovering midair — creating an immersive, visceral intimacy that, as engines whine and thunderously roar, you feel in your bones.

Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies.

The problem of translation — who speaks for whom and why — echoes through Expedition Content, which builds to a shattering climax during a long, boozy revel in which the expedition men joke and laugh.

Mr. Almereyda takes Milgram, his work and ideas seriously but doesn’t suffocate them: Despite the story’s freight, the laboratory shocks and Milgram’s insistent melancholia, Experimenter is a nimble, low-frequency high.

It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.

What tethers the movie and especially April and Teddy is how Ms. Coppola captures that exquisitely tender, moving moment between fragile, self-interested youth and tentatively more outwardly aware adulthood, a coming into consciousness that she expresses through their broken sentences, diverted glances and abrupt turns.

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.

Long Shot isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart.

Marshall McLuhan called advertising the greatest art form of the 20th century. In No, Pablo Larraín’s sly, smart, fictionalized tale about the art of the sell during a fraught period in Chilean history, advertising isn’t only an art; it’s also a way of life.

In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.

Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.

Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.

The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one.

Va Savoir doesn't so much flow as wander, trailing off into drama one minute, slapstick the next; it tries your patience, but ever so gently, masterfully.

An agonizingly familiar refrain, but one that the young Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos relates with such tenderness and with so much ethereal beauty that it feels like something fresh.

Kitano uses exaggerated acting, choreo-graphed violence and, most radically, the rhythms of everyday life -- farmers pounding the earth, the syncopated plop of falling rain -- to turn this genre story into a crypto-Kabuki play and one blissfully idiosyncratic diversion.

A whirlwind of talking heads, found footage, scary statistics and cartoonish graphics, the movie is a fast, coolly incensed investigation into why people are getting fatter.

Turning ordinary life into movie magic is one of the most difficult, least-heralded challenges for any filmmaker. What makes Freaky Friday a charmer isn't how far-out things get for this mother and daughter, but how sweet and distinctly un-freaky a kid, her mom and their love for each other can be.

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.

Indeed, one of the nicest things about this jewel of a film is that there isn't much of a story at all -- just a handful of delicately drawn characters moving through life that is at once familiar and yet slightly elevated by a director who loves the good in people more than the bad.

Logan is a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth. It solidly hits its marks as it moves the franchise furniture around, and features striking special-effects scenes in which the world shudders to a near standstill.

More than anything, Mr. Jones is an argument for witnessing and remembrance.

This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop.

A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.

One can never get enough of this prodigiously talented octogenarian artist and his bestiary.

What took a while to grasp is that it isn’t necessary to like Anaïs. What’s crucial is that you stick with her, that you listen to what she says and doesn’t say, that you look beneath the skittishness to get a handle on what drives this woman — that you see her for who she is.

Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.

A thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in.

Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

If the screenwriter and director had followed their cinematic instincts fully, they would have collaborated on one of the more satisfying political thrillers in years; instead, they've managed to create three-quarters of one.

There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.

In this context Ferrell seems more than just comic relief. He's a reminder that the greatest, deepest laughter doesn't come at the expense of some other guy, but from the glints of self-recognition we get when the screen becomes our mirror.

A surprisingly affecting mood piece.

The movie opens with the defendant bashing in the victim’s head and then burning the corpse. A trial seems almost beside the point, a view that the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes on to dismantle with lapidary precision.

Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.

Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.

One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.

Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."

Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.

It won't make you bleed, just howl.

A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers.

Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.

More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.

One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.

Soderbergh's smart, spooky thriller about a thicket of contemporary plagues - a killer virus, rampaging fear, an unscrupulous blogger - is as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center.

Mr. Doueiri creates characters, emotional colors and political contradictions that have the agonized sting and breathe of life.

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.

If the cast is distractingly pretty, the performances are also quite fine and, in the case of Gordon-Levitt, exceptional.

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.

There's undeniable pathos to many of these encounters, and because the director has a wonderful feel for color and knows how to throw a frame around the world, there's also unmistakable beauty.

Then too there's the sheer pleasure of hearing these words spoken by an actor like Mr. Fiennes, whose phrasing is so brilliant, you might be tempted to close your eyes if his physical performance weren't equally mesmerizing.

This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.

As his attention to detail and beauty shots prove, Mr. Maringouin has a terrific eye: he brings you close to Mr. Strel, sometimes within panting distance, without forgetting the larger, lovelier world.

A hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.

The Legend of Tarzan has a whole lot of fun, big-screen things going for it — adventure, romance, natural landscapes, digital animals and oceans of rippling handsome man-muscle. Its sweep and easy pleasures come from its old-fashioned escapades — it’s one long dash through the jungle by foot, train, boat and swinging vine — but what makes it more enjoyable than other recycled stories of this type is that the filmmakers have given Tarzan a thoughtful, imperfect makeover.

The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.

A spasmodically funny and bleak film about the love that speaks its name.

The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.

Part of what makes a great documentary great is the subject, and though the film never scrapes below the surface of the schoolteacher -- we never find out if he lives alone or has children of his own -- Lopez pulls as hard on the imagination as a fictional character.

Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.

In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn't matter when anything takes place or why.

Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.

When Jenkins is true to himself, he soars; he stumbles, though, when he’s overly faithful to the novel or doesn’t trust the audience.

Bethlehem is emphatically political, as perhaps any movie about warring Israelis and Palestinians must be. Yet its ideas are more complex than is suggested by either its schematic story or fast-moving genre elements.

[Ms. Shawkat] and Mr. Arteta, a sensitive observer of life’s everyday churn (his credits include “Beatriz at Dinner”), do some lovely work in a movie that reminds you that sometimes all you need in realist fiction is a glimpse into another person’s being — but with heart and intelligence, good craft and technique.

Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage.

Mr. Willis has always been an acquired taste, but for those who did acquire that taste, riding shotgun on his good times and bad, it's a pleasure to see him doing what comes naturally.

Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran Sammo Hung, the fights are spectacularly designed and performed, relying more on muscle and skill than wirework.

Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.

With its fragmentation and mysteries, Upstream Color offers itself up as a puzzle as well as a philosophical toy that you can spin and spin until the cafe closes and kicks you into the night.

A central work in the new, boldly politicized Iranian cinema.

About as non-narrative a film as you're likely to see in commercial theaters. This makes it a curiosity and, less charitably, something of a gimmick, but mostly it makes it a challenge.

The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.

Endearingly ridiculous.

Guaranteed to infuriate anyone with strongly partisan opinions about the region. The film offers up simultaneous critiques of Palestinian and Israeli extremism, but the most radical thing about it is that it's often disquietingly funny.

The world that Mr. Guadagnino creates is at once seductive and aspirational, and another reminder that movies have always excelled at stoking consumer desires.

His (Ralph Fiennes) Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it's a performance of sublime villainy.

A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.

What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.

Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."

A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.

At times, Colin and Mitch’s trip to Iceland feels like a lark, for them and for the filmmakers. Yet there’s no denying the deepening effect of a movie in which two older men, with their creases and sags, white and thinning hair, inhabit so much screen time.

A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.

Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.

Works its charms slowly but steadily.

[A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.

Belly dancing isn't always the most thrilling of dances, but it's a blast to see these women shaking and rolling because they're so thoroughly in charge of the male clientele and their own sexuality.

While A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story.