Manohla Dargis

Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason.

The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs.

With deep feeling and lacerating and gentle words, Leigh creates a world that, like the vast, mysterious one hovering outside its frame, can seem agonizingly empty if you can’t see the people in it.

Everything fits together too neatly in “Three Billboards,” even when chaos descends, but the performers add enough rough texture so that it doesn’t always feel so worked.

Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.

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.

Beautifully shot by the French cinematographer Georges Périnal (whose credits include Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet"), the film soon evolves from a claustrophobic domestic affair into a mordantly discomfiting look at the betrayal of innocence.

The writer and director Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) has an exacting eye. The framing is meticulous; soon it’s also very purposefully working your nerves.

In its best moments, Leave No Trace invites you to simply be with its characters, to see and experience the world as they do. Empathy, the movie reminds you, is something that is too little asked of you either in life or in art. Both Mr. Foster’s and Ms. Harcourt McKenzie’s sensitive, tightly checked performances are critical in this regard.

That film does have its attractions, notably in its two solid leads and standout support from Mr. Pearce.

Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices.

It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.

Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.

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.

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.

If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.

The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn't only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs.

The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.

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.

The camerawork in Birdman is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space.

Written by Masato Kato, Bushido holds you with its performances and a story that circles around questions of honor, loyalty, masculinity and the ties that bind and sometimes throttle.

The audacity of The Missing Picture — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia’s killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness.

A great deal happens in Pain and Glory, just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.

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.

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.

The black-and-white world of Eraserhead disturbs, seduces and even shocks with images that are alternately discomforting, even physically off-putting, and characterized by what André Breton called convulsive beauty.

Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).

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.