Matt Zoller Seitz

The movie is a lot of fun and masters a pleasingly detached yet sardonic tone early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot more to offer after that, aside from a growing human menagerie of admittedly lively characters and a philosophical through line that’s pretty worn out—something like, “Humans are the real monsters.”

Two Pianos is a melodrama, and damned proud to be one.

It takes a special screen actor to play a character who appears in almost every scene of a movie; is anxious, sad, or irritable in most of them; never talks about his feelings; and makes choices so upsetting that certain viewers might want to quit watching, but somehow leaves you thinking he’s not that bad of a guy. John Magaro is such an actor.

Some of the close-quarters beatings and fights are diminished by shooting and editing so chaotically that the action becomes incomprehensible. For the most part, though, it’s a powerful debut by filmmakers who understand human nature and would rather enlighten than provoke.

There’s no denying Hill’s instinct for identifying the heart of a dramatic scene and turning the volume of the storytelling down low enough for us to hear it beating.

Ian McKellen is stunningly good as the older painter, Julian Sklar, a 1960s Swingin’ London sensation who has aged into a decrepit caricature of himself.

Like most of the director’s work—including “Ahed’s Knee”—it has many expressionistic and dreamlike elements, and weaves a loose, fairly simple story around wild situations that are mainly about questioning Israel’s self-image, prodding it, sometimes tearing at it.

The top-to-bottom cast of proudly eccentric actors, including Holland Taylor, Jessica Harper, Zosia Mamet, and Bob Balaban (as Dianne’s father), ensures that every scene has moments of truth, and the filmmaker’s empathy pushes the movie over the finish line.

Chomet’s gift for deftly caricatured faces, expressive movement, and clever compositions hasn’t deserted him, and there are many flat-out beautiful bits scattered throughout, but this is altogether a work that’s best appreciated with the sound off, while blasting a playlist of Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits.

We take moving pictures for granted now. We can’t go back. But the film “Lumière, Le Cinema!”, about the gradual rollout of the automated motion picture projector and the goals of its inventors, Louis and Auguste Lumière, is a very good try.

Despite Lang and Fisher’s exemplary teamwork, “The Optimist” never overcomes its clunky plot or its inclination to teach rather than dramatize.

All told, “Man on the Run” feels like an extra-long podcast episode featuring a celebrity promoting the latest project, coupled with a 90+ minute montage cut together so there’s something to look at on YouTube.

This is a more-than-solid observational comedy with a melancholy undertone, reminiscent of early Albert Brooks movies like “Modern Romance.”

This is a special movie. It has a life force unlike any other crime thriller I’ve seen. It’s about characters who suffer a personal failure but emerge transformed. It’s a violent movie, but not a cruel one, and unexpectedly moving by the end.

The President’s Cake is notable for its unvarnished, affecting performances; its digitally shot yet eerily film-like cinematography, which packs an amazing amount of crisply focused information into wide frames with rounded edges. But most of all, for the way it captures the strange disjunction between the monotony of daily life for children in a war zone and the anxiety between adults who are aware that everything could fall apart at any moment.

What makes “The Wrecking Crew” worth seeing is what the cast and filmmakers do with the material. Simply put, this movie is better than its synopsis suggests, though not good enough to entirely overcome the familiarity of the component parts and the alternately jokey and sentimental tone (which is harder to pull off than studio executives seem to think).

It’s a nightmare parable about mortality, grief, faith, and the fragility of the flesh, made by one of the most fascinating filmmaking teams in American cinema, the Adams-Poser family.

Purely on a craft level, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is skillful and engrossing, never more so than when it captures wrenchingly painful moments in people’s lives with a detachment that keeps the focus on the subjects rather than shifting to Talankin.

Night Patrol is far from perfect, but it’s got a certain something that pulls you in. The bleakness of its worldview is matched by the integrity of its filmmaking and performances. The life it depicts is not sugarcoated. It’s drenched in blood.

The Israelis in "Holding Liat” are perfect subjects for a documentary about wartime trauma that hopes to reach beyond partisan enclaves.

Through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, this is a nostalgia trip of the best kind.

You may be left cold, feeling that you’ve seen a theoretical exercise whose purpose was never articulated. Or you may react as I did. I took pages of notes for this review, doing my best to describe the movie as a discrete work—an object to be contemplated. When the final credits rolled, I closed my notebook and wept.

The alchemical collision of the actors, the style, and the real-life settings result in a film so attentive to fluctuations in the characters’ emotions that watching them exist is exciting. You never know what these people will feel next or how they’ll express it, and the camera’s always in the perfect place to catch it.

This movie is a classic of silliness—no ifs, ands, or butts.

It’s a smart, mostly light movie that will teach viewers a lot about processes they might not otherwise think about. You come away from the movie seeing the world in finer shades than when you went in.

This isn’t a classic, but it’s good enough to make you think Fuller has a classic in him.

Whatever your feelings about Tarantino and his work, this is a tremendous visceral experience, with radiant colors, slate-somber black-and-white, and geysers of crimson blood. To quote the end of another Tarantino film, it just might be his masterpiece.

This is filmed theater in the purest sense.