Matt Zoller Seitz

At its best, “Boys Go to Jupiter” has the bustling energy of those ensemble comedy-dramas about communities of oddballs that Robert Altman and Hal Ashby used to make, in which even minor characters are so exquisitely original they could be the lead of their own movie.

Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film, good but not great, distinguished primarily by the fact that it's the first Godard film to use no actors at all.

It is wrenching but never exploitive. It is impressively skeptical of the same mission that it takes on its shoulders: to make something positive from a senseless crime without diminishing its senselessness. This film doesn't just revisit an atrocity, it moves through it, and finds meaning in it.

What we’re seeing in “September 5” is the birth of live news as entertainment. It’s the opening salvo in a long and sadly successful war against journalistic ethics and ideals that would lead to the current pathetic conditions of cable and Internet “news,” which consist largely of “takes” rather than original reporting.

This is a quiet classic. Every choice is just right.

Nicole Riegel's debut feature Holler is a film to treasure—an intimate drama about family and work, steeped in details that can only have been captured by a storyteller who lived them.

This is a classic film, not just because every scene and line is casually beautiful and devoid of extraneous touches, but because its tone is mercilessly exact.

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.

If you go into a Herzog documentary hoping for a definitive, deep look at a certain subject, you're bound to come away disappointed. But if you go into them expecting a series of portraits of obsessed people, each painted by one of the most likable obsessives in cinema, you're likely to come away satisfied.

It's slightly frustrating that the movie doesn't venture a point-of-view on any of these larger issues, which are less clear cut than the matters of sexual abuse and its immediate enablers.

A very funny and observant movie, albeit squirm-inducing, with endlessly quotable dialogue.

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men.

An American independent film from the 1990s that just happens to have been released this year.

It's a rapturous experience, mostly, though tempered by a certain Godardian crankiness. Watching it is, I would imagine, as close as we'll get to being able to be Godard, sitting there thinking, or dreaming. It's a documentary of a restless mind.

The movie feels less like a prosecutorial document than an autopsy of a government's conscience, pinpointing the time of death.

Time out of Mind seems to have been undertaken for no other reason than that the filmmakers and actors believed in the truth of the material. How many American movies can you say that about?

Civil War is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

The bad news is, there are about ten movies going on in Captain America: Civil War, which is at least seven too many. The good news is, most of them are fun, and there are enough rousing moments to elevate the movie to Marvel's top tier.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

A quasi-romantic variant of “After Hours” that perhaps stretches itself a little too far, but it is always enjoyable and sometimes quite moving.

The process of transformation is the story, and the story truly belongs to the artist.

A nearly great documentary about a national crisis, but its heart is a tragedy with a sickening ironic twist.

A work of melancholy enchantment, by turns sweet, funny, scary, sad, and—in the manner of all good science fiction movies—thought-provoking.

McQuarrie understands that these films are essentially tall tales with a sense of humor, skating on the edge of parody at all times while maintaining a poker face.

Set in 1800s Italy and based on a true story, “Kidnapped” is so primally upsetting that you would think it would be unbearable to watch. But it proves intoxicating, at times nearly overwhelming, thanks to perfect casting, an economical and impassioned screenplay, and filmmaking overseen by 84-year-old cowriter-director Marco Bellocchio, who might be one of the greatest living narrative filmmakers who is not usually recognized as such.

Adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the novel by Peter Carey, and directed by Justin Kurzel, "True History" is a dream, or nightmare, about Ned, his family, Australia, manhood, womanhood, and how hard it is for poor people to escape the class they were born into.

For its near-miss moments, the inside-out approach of The Mission results in a richer film than one might have expected from reading the summary on a streaming menu.

Jane Giles and Ali Catterall's documentary "Scala!!!" is about a legendary, notorious, hugely influential and long-gone London theater. But it'll appeal to anyone whose formative moviegoing years were defined by eccentric, usually urban or college-town cinemas that programmed whatever the folks who ran the place found interesting and switched lineups every day or two.

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.

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

Over the years, Trueba has quietly, steadily built one of the most stylistically diverse filmographies in world cinema. This is another terrific entry. Try to see it on a big screen if you can. And if you can't, be sure to play it loud.

Written and directed by Robin Lutz, this is a rare feature that takes the trouble not just to understand its subject and communicate his significance, but find ways to actually show us, visually, how his style evolved, and the principles behind that evolution.

The film is most satisfying when it's just giving us details of Kilmer's philosophy of acting, which is uncompromising to the point of being exasperating, but lively, and ultimately preferable to the default attitude of so many straight male actors who denigrate their profession as trivial, or somehow unbecoming of an adult.

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.

Interstellar is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away.

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.

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 documentary does a fine job of capturing what made her special.

What makes it special is that it truly cares about the nuts and bolts of marrying pictures to music and understands how to explain the finer points to people who aren’t musicians.

This is not so much a movie about a straight and cisgender-identifying person learning how to accept his old pal in a new package.

Nearly every story point in the film is given to you right away or foreshadowed/telegraphed. What remains is the hows of storytelling and the whys of characterization.

This film will be a treat for anyone who loves any part of Brooks' career, or all of it. And its subject is so fascinating and open-hearted that one can imagine people who've never heard his name until now getting something out of it, too.

It seems more likely that this is a film about discoveries rather than statements, with the camera following people and then abandoning them to seek insight elsewhere, by looking into things rather than merely looking at them.

The filmmaker does a phenomenal job of setting up this world in a natural-seeming way, smuggling mountains of pertinent fact into conversations that pretend to be banal.

More than anything else, though, Decade of Fire succeeds as one of the best explanations in recent cinema of what the phrase "systemic racism" means.

End of Sentence, a road trip film that starts in Alabama and ends in Ireland, is another performance to place in Hawkes' "All Time Best" file, a drawer so stuffed by this point that you can barely get the damned thing closed.

This is a close-but-no-cigar movie, but so enjoyable for the most part, and so modest in its aims, that its disappointments aren’t devastating. I’d watch the first 90 minutes again anytime.

It seems clear that Corbine wanted to make a personal movie, not a history lesson or morality play aimed at hypothetical white viewers, and it's impossible to look at the finished product without feeling that he succeeded.

It’s a tour-de-force of voluptuously bloody slapstick that knows that we know how these movies work.

This is all fascinating stuff. But you pretty quickly get the sense that Buirski either doesn't find it interesting enough to let it stand on its own or else is afraid audiences will rebel against too many bare-bones elements.

Although Robin's Wish is ultimately unwilling or unable to really grapple with the emotions of the people left behind after suicide, it is a compassionate film that will bring information about Williams' condition to a wide audience.

All in all, this is a very likable, if sometimes a bit too polished and vague.

As gripping as the movie is as a legal thriller, it's even more notable as a portrait of a community.

As cinema, it's not trying to reinvent any wheels. But it's an impressive example of basic storytelling techniques refined for maximum impact, each element reinforcing and feeding off every other element, as in the enclosed ecosystem that it depicts.

No Stone Unturned at times veers close to a rant. It's clear that Gibney is going for something along the lines of Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line," which also used stylized re-creations, but the pieces don't fit together as neatly here.

One of the great director Terence Davies' best films: an example of old school and new school mentalities coming together to create a challenging and unique experience.

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

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.

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.

It isn’t until deep into “Moonlight Sonata” that you start to realize how many patterns Brodsky has woven into the fabric of this tale.

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.

This is an honest, real movie about people living big lives during tumultuous times, and coming through damaged but wiser.

There are multiple knockout supporting performances, and the film has a gift for giving you just enough of the supporting characters to fill them out in your imagination whenever Lourenço leaves their presence.

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.

At its most controlled and insinuating, Dark Waters is reminiscent of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown," where you know going in that you're going to see a story about how profoundly bad things are, thanks to corporate influence over government as well as the economy, but the extent of the corruption is still shocking.

A solid hangout movie as well as a band-of-buddies film — genres that tend to revolve around young men. It's also a movie that deliberately blurs the line between documentary and fiction: the main characters are all real New York skaters who are playing characters who are very close to themselves in real life.

Last Stop in Yuma County is the kind of movie where you root for the worst to happen, because every escalation of misfortune makes things more entertaining.

A long-winded but engrossing kidnap thriller.

Our Nixon seems to be more interested in evoking emotional than intellectual responses.

I’m not convinced that “Friendship” is the corrosive comic masterpiece that early festival raves primed us for. But it’s impressive, not just for the leaps it makes but the assurance it displays.

This an impressive debut movie, revolving around the sorts of lower middle-class people rarely seen in American cinema anymore, told in a style that's just as much of a throwback. It gives veteran character actors a chance to shine, not just in lead roles but supporting parts and one-scene cameos written so thoughtfully that you can picture the character starring in a movie of their own.

As a showcase for young American talent, it’s tough to beat. At its best, it reminded me of a rougher, more glassy-eyed 21st-century version of the kinds of movies Whit Stillman—and later, Noah Baumbach—have made.

Angelina Jolie's First They Killed My Father is far and away her best work as a director: a rare film about a national tragedy told through the eyes and mind of a child, and as fine a war movie as has ever been made.

Abrams and his screenwriters (Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) are so obsessed with acknowledging and then futzing around with what we already know about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and company that the movie doesn’t breathe.

It also serves up a smorgasbord of explicit homoerotic imagery, surrealism and ambiguity at a time when Western culture seems to be stampeding towards 1950s prurience, fascist-scented literal-mindedness, and corporate self-censorship, "Queer" is a film out of its time in just about every way. That's what's invigorating about it.

It doesn't go quite far enough into melodrama to fuse all of its different pieces together into a satisfying whole but it's an engrossing film all the same: intelligent, sincere and unabashedly goodhearted.

India's Daughter is a sorrowful and angry movie, yet measured. It seems determined to see a bigger picture without letting one victim's story get lost in the canvas.

It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of The Beta Test, has those gifts.

Beyond its brash confidence as a piece of filmmaking and its homages to the Western (including the use of a wider frame than was used on the show), El Camino is fan service executed at a very high level — an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, “And then what happened?” after the words “The End” have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch.

Stiller has become a deeper actor with age, and he's perfect here: you know he has a good soul, because this is a comedy, and not a dark one, but he keeps you guessing.

Golden Exits made me want to get up and go do something sensible and productive, so as to not be like the characters in the film.