Manohla Dargis

The Grandmaster is, at its most persuasive, about the triumph of style. When Ip Man slyly asks “What’s your style?” it’s clear that Mr. Wong is asking the same question because here, as in his other films, style isn’t reducible to ravishing surfaces; it’s an expression of meaning.

Totem is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat.

Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.

Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas, reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl and, over time, gather tremendous force.

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.

It's a doozy of a story and so borderline ridiculous that it sounds - ta-da! - like something that could have been cooked up only by Hollywood.

In Spring Breakers [Mr. Korine] bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy.

Mr. Phoenix’s note-perfect performance flows on the story’s currents of comedy that occasionally turn into rapids, as the funny ha-ha, funny strange back-and-forth abruptly gives way to Three Stooges slapstick.

I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive.

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

With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.

This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.

The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.

The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.

Life and death, nature and culture, sex and money, man and beast, God and the Devil — Post Tenebras Lux embraces the world even if it doesn’t open itself up to ready interpretation.

Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.

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

By adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art.

A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.

Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

In Sweetgrass, a graceful and often moving meditation on a disappearing way of life, there is little here that is objective and much that is magnificent.

Like some of Mr. Spielberg’s other recent movies, notably “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance.

As he (Wong Kar-wai) floods the screen with beauty and fills the soundtrack with hypnotic rhythms, he forges a filmmaking style of incomparable eroticism.

In Policeman, Mr. Lapid, making an electrifying feature directing debut, traces the line between the group and the individual in a story that can be read as a commentary on the world as much as on Israel.

Using a limited frame, Mr. Maitland does his own commemorating, inherently raising questions about terror, the nature of heroism and what it means to really survive. He also does something even more necessary: He turns names on a plaque into people.

Mr. Scott’s seriousness isn’t always well served by the scripts he films, but in Mr. McCarthy he has found a partner with convictions about good and evil rather than canned formula.

At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, Her is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman.

The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!