Matt Zoller Seitz

Circus Maximus is a curiosity and a career footnote more than a substantial freestanding film achievement, which is too bad. It's more a notion for a work of art than a work of art, and you can't expect people to pay $25 (the cost of a special engagement ticket opening weekend) for a notion.

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.

Oppenheimer rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

20 Days in Mariupol, about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, spares no one's sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the images are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory.

Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself.

Some composited landscapes and helicopters don't pass the believability test, and a few big camera moves that take us from outside to inside and vice-versa are too clever for their own good. But it's all so intricate and expertly timed that you still appreciate it, as one might a performance of a fiendishly difficult piano concerto where just hitting the notes is beyond most players' capabilities.

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 all over the place, and if there was a way to unify all of its disparate elements, the filmmaker never quite figured it out. You just have to agree that it's all of a piece and accept it isn't going to settle into any one mode for very long.

When a movie loves its characters and story as much as this one, and dedicates every aspect of filmmaking and performance to doing them justice, and consistently puts virtuosity in service of meaning, the result conjures a feeling that's close to what you experience when someone you adore has a great and richly deserved success, and you're privileged to be able to witness it and cheer them on.

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.

De Niro, bless his heart, is the engine that keeps this refurbished jalopy puttering along for 90 minutes.

For the most part, Stay Awake stays low-key and believable, particularly when the actors are moving through real-world locations while living their lives.

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

It's better with fists and guns than with people, but it knows what targets it wants to hit, and its aim is sure.

The entire thing has a whiff of missed opportunity, and sometimes you might wonder if Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks wanted to dive deeper than they knew Disney's copyright-tending, merchandise-selling executives would have allowed.

Sam Now is remarkable not only for its powerful subject matter and the restrained, intelligent way it examines its key players, but for how it simultaneously reaches the audience and everyone involved in the story.

There's a good movie in Romano the feature filmmaker, but this isn't it.

Unfortunately, The Pope’s Exorcist is a watchable but far-from-special rehash of exorcism movie cliches, with detours into a Vatican conspiracy plot that has been compared to Dan Brown's novels but half-assedly connects with church atrocities and scandals.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is one of the most original American thrillers in years, and one that draws from a deep well of movie history as it develops its characters and sets up its plot twists.

The jump scares work (jump scares almost always do; they're the easiest way to convince the audience that they've gotten their money's worth), but Malum is much more impressive when it turns its talented ensemble cast loose on material that was obviously a lot of fun to play with.

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.

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.

Still the Water knows what it is and what it's doing, and even if it doesn't quite come together in the end, it's a mistake to think that there's no point or plan just because the movie doesn't regularly announce its intentions.

It's a small movie that takes big swings.

Is it a must-see? No—the middle hour is fun, in that patented easygoing "Ant-Man" way.

Most of all, Magic Mike's Last Dance is about fit, graceful bodies moving through space.

Waking Karma is the kind of small movie you root for even when it fails to live up to its potential. There's a lot that doesn't quite work, but you can tell by the strong performances and the production's overall sincerity that everyone involved was hoping to create something memorable; the missteps are mainly about what the film decides to emphasize.

Watson's memoir and the 2010 documentary about her achievement, "210 Days," are altogether more thorough and nuanced looks at this story, though of course that's nearly always true of documentaries that tell the same story as works of fiction.

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

As focused and controlled as every scene in "Close" is, it feels, in a way, calculated and almost cruel.

We're watching two strong-willed people overcome their differences and learn to be a team: it's "Die Hard" reimagined as couples' counseling.

Did I like The Seven Faces of Jane? I love the idea of it, I love that it exists, and I'm not sure how much I can ultimately say for or against it, considering that everything good and bad is baked into the methods that the performers and filmmakers committed to.

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.

It's a portrait of a hard-drinking, charismatic, obnoxious self-styled rebel who was his own worst enemy but whose brilliance and tenacity allowed him to thrive in an industry that wouldn't ordinarily have any use for someone like him.

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.

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.

You think [Spielberg's] giving you everything and that it's all right there on the surface, but the movie lingers in the mind, and the longer it stays there, and the more times you re-watch it, the more you realize it's giving you something different from, and better than, what you saw the first time.

It's as much an anthropological pseudo-documentary as it is a drama, one that sometimes evokes the Terrence Malick philosophy of "The Thin Red Line," which began by insisting that humans are a part of nature and that when humans war with other humans, it is nature warring with itself.

Some experiences are so profound (and/or scarring) that they elude explication. The Inspection is about that sort of experience, which translates far beyond boot camp and resonates through our lives, until the final trumpet fades.

There’s only one character here, but the institution is still illuminated by verbal storytelling, as well as our observations about how the speaker comports herself as she describes her situation.

Good Night Oppy may be especially resonant for younger viewers who are interested in science but might not yet realize that there's more to it than crunching numbers and drawing charts.

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.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and featuring a remarkable lead performance by Dwayne Johnson, the spiky and majestic Black Adam is one of the best DC superhero films to date.

The movie adaptation is typically described in articles and on streaming platforms as an "erotic thriller" or simply "a thriller." But as is so often the case with Denis' films, that's a misleading way to characterize, or even think about, what's actually onscreen, which is more of a vibe than a story, and all the more fascinating because of that choice.

Morris' direction offers other filmmakers a template for how to make a small movie that feels big, just by making definitive choices and sticking to them.

It's filled with images of ordinary objects and situations that have been filmed in such surprising and revealing ways by Davenport that when you encounter them again in your own life, you will see them differently, and think of Davenport's work.

This is a compelling story about persistent problems that affect the majority of Americans, even though you don't hear about them very often in mainstream media. The blunt title says it all.

The characters are constructs who are so aware of themselves as constructs (and the plot, too) that there's really no reason why we should feel for them, but we do, thanks to the lead performances, the direction, and the kidding/not kidding vibe of the entire production.

François Ozon's "Peter von Kant" is an odd, chilly film, even by this director's standards.

Bianca Stigter's documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a great film about filmmaking and a quietly devastating memorial for lives long gone.

Everyone in this cast does their best to strike the right balance between seeming in on the joke and acting like all of this bloody absurdity is normal.

Bullet Train is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are really all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another, oblivious to the desires of any individual riding on it. The abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor ultimately undo any aspect that might otherwise sink its roots into the viewer's mind.

A jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond.

It's torment in cinematic form, made comprehensible and engrossing by its focus on a singular experience, and the performance that anchors it.

Fire of Love is one of a vanishingly rare breed of documentary that is determined to be "total cinema," not just capturing the facts of what happened to its subjects but creating an entire aesthetic—a vibe—around them.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

First Love is an earnest but unremarkable romance wrapped around an intelligent and sometimes powerful story of the destruction that capitalism inflicts on middle-class American families.

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.

Ninety minutes of footage like this, minus any characters or plot at all, probably would've resulted in an artistically better use of a couple hundred million dollars than "Jurassic World: Dominion," which will doubtless be a smash on the order of all the other entries in the franchise, even though it doesn't do much more than the bare minimum you'd expect for one of these films, and not all that well.

By the time the film eases into its final stretch, it becomes a sub-genre of drama that I call "accidental radio," meaning that even though there are pictures, you might not see them all because you're covering your eyes a lot of the time.

Part of the film's specialness lies in the fact that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the choices it makes, or when it decides to make them.

This is a dazzling movie, all the more so for being made on a seemingly tiny budget. Emergency has a lot to say even though it never carries itself as a film that has a message.

There are many rewards to be found here, not the least of which is a skill at staging scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends that are entirely dependent upon the subtle interactions of a few actors who live or die on the basis of the words they've been given to speak, and the silences they've been encouraged to inhabit.

Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.

Like its lead character, and the actor who plays him, Barry Levinson's The Survivor initially presents as familiar and comprehensible. The biographical drama then proceeds to surprise its audience, not with plot twists—we're told at the outset what the character's issues are, and have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up—but with how it keeps finding little ways to complicate and deepen every relationship and moment.

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.

If this movie and her previous project signal a shift in Watts' career that will be dominated by survival tales that put her at the center of a movie and showcase her doing things that give most viewers a pulled tendon just sitting there in the audience, so much the better.

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.

It's one of [Rogowski's] most moving and fully imagined performances, anchoring a drama that tries to do a bit too much for its own good in terms of structure.

Once in a while, you see a film where it's clear that everyone involved is operating at the peak of of their skills, yet the whole is so misguided that the result is still awful. Such is The Desperate Hour.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

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

It is equal parts Buster Keaton-Jackie Chan slapstick extravaganza, WWE-styled spectacle, and "geek trick."

Is it a compliment or a slam to say that "Sundown" could be the saddest "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode ever?