Matt Zoller Seitz

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

Inherent Vice is a film about a stoner which itself seems stoned. This is just one small part of what makes it distinctive.

This is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success."

Brutal, sad, funny, and disarmingly sweet-natured, Riders of Justice is not so much a revenge movie as a movie about revenge.

If I were nine years old, I would see the monsters-versus-robots adventure Pacific Rim 50 times. Because I'm in my forties and have two kids and two jobs, I'll have to be content with seeing it a couple more times in theaters and re-watching it on video.

Once the action kicks in, though, Shadow is on rails. Zhang, co-screenwriter Li Wei, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, production designer Horace Ma, and costumer Chen Minzheng work in seemingly perfect harmony to create a visual scheme that the director has said is based on the brush techniques of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

Bill Nighy is a fun, uninhibited actor, but there's an abashed, melancholy quality to him that hasn't been fully explored until Living, a drama about a senior citizen reckoning with his life.

Wright is a brilliant director of turbocharged exposition, elegant but bruising action sequences, and graphically bold comedic overkill.

An engrossing and frequently extraordinary feature.

There are points early in this documentary where you might wonder if it really needed to be a feature (one can imagine a cut-down "60 Minutes" piece doing the job just as effectively) but when Lane gets away from the man himself and focuses on the details of the business of music, a new frontier of understanding opens up.

Writer-director Sean Durkin ("Martha Marcy May Marlene") has delivered a nearly perfect film here — the cinematic equivalent of of those substantial, long-but-not-too-long short stories that says everything about its subject without actually saying everything.

Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl is one of the world's best directors of actors, and he nears some kind of a peak in Rimini, a blisteringly funny and often touching film about people struggling towards happiness despite having experienced lifetimes of disappointment.

Israelis call the events of 1948 The War for Independence, while Palestinians call it Nabka, or The Catastrophe. It's hard to imagine how the two could be reconciled, and "Tantura" doesn't try. It has its hands full just trying to establish what happened, and encouraging participants and beneficiaries into accepting what it meant.

One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, The Flash is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It features some of the best digital FX work I've seen and some of the worst.

The most fascinating thing about the film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of fighting it.

A love letter from one iconoclastic Italian Catholic artist to another, Abel Ferrara's Pasolini stays far from the cliches of the Hollywood biopic, embracing a fragmented, intense, impressionistic approach.

This is a Sad Rich People movie, no more so than a lot of American films dating back to the dawn of cinema, but it's no "The Leopard" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Great Gatsby" or you-name-it.

Reichardt—who also edited the film and has said that she based the story on details from many real-life people and incidents, including the 1972 robbery of an art museum in Worcester, Massachusetts—builds the movie with her characteristic mix of dry humor, incisive psychological details, and elegant, minimalistic visuals.

If only Dying of the Light had broken Schrader's recent close-but-no-cigar streak.

Worse, Z for Zachariah is ultimately too dramatically slight and brief for its ambitions, despite its sometimes labored myth-making script and visuals.

Trophy strives to be kind and fair. But it is unmerciful in its exploration of the hunting business. Like a ruthless lawyer, it loves poking holes in arguments that appear rock-solid.

This is a tearjerker of a film but also a joyous one.

If Black & Blues returns to the same melody a few too many times, it doesn't diminish the overall achievement, which feels free in a way that these sorts of films rarely do.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

The film ultimately runs up against the limitations of its own nature.... But it’s still an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled by soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, period, rather than "good, for 'Star Wars.'"

Private Property is a terrific example of the spell that a confident film can weave by placing a handful of troubled characters in a confined location, and in the end it does feel like as much of a tragedy as a potboiler.

A brutal but stirring fantasy.

Unfortunately, The Public Enemy isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically.

It’s the humblest deep movie of recent years, a work in the same vein as American marginalia like “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Trees Lounge,” but with its own rhythm and color, its own emotional temperature, its own reasons for revealing and concealing things.

If you have a good idea, a strong cast, a smart script, and directorial chops, you don't need a lot of money to make a compelling movie. The Endless is proof.

It's a small movie that takes big swings.

This is a fun movie if you love the band, and maybe even if you’ve never heard of them before. The interviews are thought-provoking, funny, and moving; the filmmaking is superb, and the music kicks ass.

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.

It's worth seeking out for the way it observes psychologically complex small-town characters struggling to endure present-day hardships and past traumas.

It's a work of fertile imagination that takes every step confidently, even if it isn't certain where it will lead.

This is a movie that doesn't merely tell a gripping, important story, but reminds us that the storyteller and the storytelling matter just as much.

Funan is structured as a series of carefully choreographed set pieces in which things go from bad to worse to unimaginably awful.

It's quite good, for what it is. But it's that "for what it is" part that proves slightly exasperating.

Gone Girl is art and entertainment, a thriller and an issue, and an eerily assured audience picture.

Ahed's Knee is a fascinating movie that evades most complaints of not having anything to say by showcasing its characters struggling to explain free-floating anxieties that have to do with a lot of things. It's also stylish as hell.

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.

Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one.

Pepe was been turned into something he was never intended to be. His creator and steward didn't realize what was occurring until it was too late to halt or reverse it.

One of the most striking things about the movie is how it reveals the way in which all adult children feel forever small when contemplating the life experience of their parents: the brave or reckless choices, the beneficial and destructive outcomes, the redactions and blank spots, and the mysteries that will never be solved.

An account of a film that was never made despite all the love that its makers poured into it, yet somehow it's warm and inspirational: a call to arms for dreamers everywhere.

The film is good to excellent in every way except morally, and there it's questionable more often than it should be, not because it's an evil film, or because the filmmaker or actors are bad people, but because the interplay of means and ends have been under-thought or misjudged, to the point where the film becomes a catalog of obscenities.

A film like Linklater's brings you inside the consciousness of a person whose perceptions of the world are simultaneously constrained and curious, and open to new experiences.

It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “arty” to modern audiences who aren’t into older movies and have no reference point for what they’re watching. Hopefully not, though, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that engages your attention differently than movies usually do.

The movie would fit nicely in a film festival comprised of works with a similar theme, including "Legends of the Fall" and "The Revenant" and older wilderness dramas like "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Bend of the River."

Loud, smart and ferociously committed to its premise, and it leaves an intriguingly bitter aftertaste.

Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait Kokomo City is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking.

This is a powerful movie, but perhaps its greatest triumph is that for a brief time it resurrects Kitty Genovese, and lets us see her as a person.

The film's main goal is to make us laugh and pull the rug out out from under us. But while there's a bit of pathos here and there, the movie doesn't add up to much in the end.

You could call it a musical performance documentary and not be wrong, but it's trying to do other things too, some expertly and others not so well; but there's never a point where you quite get a handle on it because it keeps changing in front of your eyes.

The uncanny confidence of Dick Gregory comes through from the opening minutes of The One and Only Dick Gregory, and he only becomes more formidable as the film unfolds.

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 movie about people whose successes and failures originate in the same places: a tragedy shot and edited like an action comedy.

The lead performances are extraordinary. They're real-seeming, in the manner of so many gifted but relatively inexperienced performers who haven't yet had the spontaneity crushed out of them by the cliches of formal training.

Wahlberg should not be cast in any role predicated on the idea that he’s good with words and ideas. Hauser is one of the best actors in the English language and will escape this disaster and do more great work, so there’s that.

Police Story is one of the great 1980s action films. It’s also one of the most 1980s action films.

Wang's movie is empathetic enough not to pass negative judgment on the characters as they muddle through their experience.

At times the movie feels like Hereditary without the supernatural elements and gore. It's a psychological horror movie about the ordinary miseries and compromises of family.

One of Us is so strong as-is that its more harrowing sections — particularly Ari's account of his childhood suffering and the details of Rachel's fight for freedom — are so already hard to watch that you might want to turn away.

This is filmed theater in the purest sense.

Those who don't know anything about the tale going in (a category that included me) might be gobsmacked by what happens. The order of events doesn't stick to any established commercial movie template. What happens feels as random yet eerily inevitable as life itself.

A rare and welcome exception to that norm.

If Zootopia were a bit vaguer, or perhaps dumber and less pleased with itself, it might have been a classic, albeit of a very different, less reputable sort. As-is, it's a goodhearted, handsomely executed film that doesn't add up in the way it wants to.

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

Whenever Spontaneous starts to run out of imaginative juice, it turns a tonal corner and either puts a smile on your face or wipes it off.

This is Smith's show, and it's all about the writing here, with Smith serving more as a town crier, an information delivery device in human form.

The movie is put together with the no-fuss confidence of Soderbergh's best entertainments, staging comedic banter and suspense sequences with equal assurance, even playing sly perception games with the audience by making you wonder how smart or dumb the characters (and the movie) actually are.

With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate.

It reminded me of being a child and seeing the original "The Exorcist" and feeling as if I was seeing a documentary record of evil, one that was itself cursed, and that I should not even be looking at, because by looking at it, I ran the risk of releasing that evil into the world.

Every Body is a moving, fascinating look at a too-often-ignored subset of the world's population, filled with empathy and understanding but also a cool, analytical anger about what history has put them through.

It's bracing in its simplicity. It's a character portrait, period.

Let It Be Morning is a quiet film that builds to a powerful ending.

The premise is innately powerful and offers a lot of room to bring the world beyond the arena into the arena, expanding the horizon of the sports picture. There isn’t anyone anywhere who can’t relate to “Tatami” on some level, even if they’ve never competed in sports.

In every way, this quietly majestic film should be considered a triumph.

This is a drama that prizes journalistic or documentary values, as well as the "epic naturalism" of films by directors like Terrence Malick and Chloe Zhao in which the camera might be as interested in flowing water, a sunset, a flock of birds, or a line of silhouetted horses as in whatever the characters are doing or saying.

If you're interested in that period, the sheer number of notable photos shown here is reason enough to see the movie.

The movie unfolds according to its own logic and intuition and demands a great deal of adults as well as kids, starting with the basic proposition that life is finite and ends in death, you don't get to choose the time, place, and circumstances of your passing, and it's not only OK for animation to talk about these things, it's healing.

Suffice to say that in the end, “Presence” is less of a horror movie or even a traditional ghost story than a drama about personal morality, responsibility, self-inquiry, and personal evolution, told from the perspective of someone who’s not alive anymore.

It's often said that when you're presented with conflicting accounts of an event, the one that seems most plausible is probably correct. The movie seems to align itself with that sentiment.

The movie is angry and horrified and mournful but also warm, sensual, life affirming, and so blisteringly funny that critics and political commentators are sure to blast it as distasteful.

Gandolfini's quietly magnificent performance is the only reason to see Violet & Daisy.

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

Empire of Light never entirely coheres, but it's worth seeing for the power of Colman's lead performance and the expertly judged backup acting.

The movie is at its best when it's immersing you in a series of conundrums and letting you feel what it's like to live with them, and wrestle with them. All of these people are doing the best they can, but the system is broken.

The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail -- the sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning" but with a wickedly funny narrator -- and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked.

It's to the credit of Anthony, who wrote and edited as well as directed, and his cinematographer Corey Hughes, that you come away thinking about parts of the film that felt like cut-able digressions and undergraduate musings when you were watching them.

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.

Despite its missteps, this is Baker's best-directed film, judged purely in terms of how economically he sets up and pays off each mile marker in the story, often getting in and out of a scene with two or three elegantly choreographed but unpretentious shots.

Breaking Fast is a sweet romantic comedy that shows how it's possible to observe nearly every convention of the mainstream romantic comedy yet still deliver something that feels new.

What's missing is a sense of how Monroe, seemingly a law-abiding young man before his family's financial dark days, suddenly went from being a go-along-to-get-along type to a budding criminal mastermind.

However heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.

All in all, this is a thoughtful, remarkable piece of nonfiction, working in an accessible commercial vein but doing its best not to take the easy way into any aspect of Reeve’s story.

It's as if the group had studied the "Rabbit season! Duck season!" exchange from the Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck classic "Rabbit Seasoning," and figured out how to turn the punchline into a political movement.

Co-directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren seem to be operating from a place of nonjudgmental curiosity, so pure and sustained that it becomes indistinguishable from love. They can't get enough of John Wojtowicz.