Manohla Dargis

One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.

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

“Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

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.

In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, Sorry, Baby is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift.

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.

The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it’s free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won’t come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable – call it art.

Its focus is purposely narrow. But that narrow focus, along with the lack of fully realized characters, and the absence of any historical or political context, raises the question of why, notwithstanding the usual (if shaky) commercial imperative, this particular movie was made.

Mr. Bale, like some other stars who embrace playing ugly, feels as if he’d been liberated by all the pounds he’s packed on and by his character’s molting looks, an emancipation that’s most evident in his delicately intimate, moving moments with Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence.

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.

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 story’s romance is warmly inviting, and DiCaprio and Gladstone work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole.

Like most of Mr. Wiseman’s work, the movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.

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.

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

So effective does it close the distance between you and Mr. Bernstein that afterward you may find yourself scanning the streets, hoping to catch sight of him, as if for an old friend.

A hyper-charged take on a bildungsroman, Marty Supreme is one of the most thoroughly pleasurable American movies of the year and one of the most exciting. Part of what makes it electric is how organically its numerous parts — its themes, characters, camera movements and accelerated pacing — fit together in a whirring whole.

The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm.

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.

Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light.

The Power of the Dog builds tremendous force, gaining its momentum through the harmonious discord of its performances, the nervous rhythms of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the grandeur of its visuals.

Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott's film still shreds nerves.

Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears.

Pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac, it is an inarguably serious documentary with light, surrealistic flourishes that, at times, veer into exuberant goofiness.

Mr. Kaufman’s gift for quotidian horror remains startling; he’s a whiz at minor miseries.

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.

It doesn’t aspire to art-house significance, just to white-knuckled entertainment.

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.