Matt Zoller Seitz

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

For all its stunning exteriors, it's really concerned with emotional interiors, and it goes about exploring them with simplicity and directness.

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.

Baldwin's voice as a writer comes through powerfully anyway. It was wise to have Jackson read Baldwin's words plainly in his own voice, rather than attempt an impersonation.

This is a movie of vision and integrity made on an epic scale, a series of propositions dramatized with machinery, bodies, seawater and fire. It deserves to be seen and argued about. They don't make them like this anymore. Never did, really.

Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere" — which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love — yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.

Alternately sad, violent, and dryly funny.

The best parts of it feel truly new, even as they channel previous animated classics (including the works of Hayao Miyazaki) and explore situations and feelings that everyone has experienced to some degree.

The women are all compelling though never too-polished storytellers. Whether they succumb to the horror of what they're describing and start to cry or remain stoic throughout becomes part of the experience of hearing the tale.

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.

One of the most influential science fiction films that most people haven't seen, Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville is a combination film noir, social satire and riff on tough-guy movies, set in a world of nearly nonstop night.

Tower is explanatory journalism and history, but also personally expressive, and the two impulses never cancel each other out.

If you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.

The most surprising and challenging thing about Part Two is how it takes one of the central ideas from Part One—art's ability help us understand and express ourselves in everyday life—and externalizes it, so that creativity that might otherwise have been confined to the stages of the arts centers erupts into the world outside.

The film’s boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day.

Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars” film and then some.

A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.

The vast majority of "Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros" finds Wiseman and his cinematographer James Bishop finding a good spot to observe two or three or many more people doing a thing and just leaving it there and watching what happens. Each of these moments is rich enough to feel like a short film unto itself: sometimes explanatory, other times subtly funny or empathetic.

With Gett, the Trial of Viviane Amsalem, siblings Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz prove that they rank with the finest filmmakers alive.

This is an unrelentingly gripping and often disturbing film that dares to visualize (with taste and restraint) some of the vilest behavior the species is capable of, and take full measure of the psychic damage it inflicts on innocent victims.

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.

I didn't come out of this one feeling depressed or even particularly sad, more reflective. The sheer breadth and depth of this series creates its own sort of poetry, one that's strangely indistinguishable from journalism.

Its easygoing intimacy is what puts it over the top.

That the movie presents Cody as so iredeemably destructive, yet somehow makes you feel for him anyway, is the kind of storytelling magic that’s hard to explain or quantify. Thanks to the writing, the filmmaking, and especially Cagney's performance, you end up caring for this horrendous man, or at least understanding his pain and the demons that drive him.

It’s impossible not to appreciate the deep understanding of human behavior, as well as the way that ordinary objects and situations acquire symbolic meaning when we think about them in relation to the characters. This is a lovely, unique film.

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.

What it definitely isn't is a biography of David Foster Wallace, much less a celebration of his work and worldview.

This is a thoroughly stimulating movie.

The collage film Cameraperson is one of the most original, challenging, sometimes infuriating documentaries of recent times.

Maybe Dick Johnson is Dead is the filmmaking equivalent of the band on the deck of the Titanic playing their hearts out while the water rises. If so, the movie is aware that it might be that thing, and seems content to be that thing. That's every movie, every story. When the end is preordained, you might as well make music.

For all its visual audacity and honest feeling, Anomalisa is a modest, even slight work, aesthetically sealed off from the same reality it engages.... But there's so much beauty and sadness in it, and so many exquisitely conceived scenes (including an impromptu musical performance that ranks with Kaufman's greatest moments), that it would be miserly to underrate it.

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

Set in Argentina in 1980, Azor is a quiet, unhurried, un-flashy film, and that's what makes it unnerving. You come away from it feeling that you've been given a greater understanding of how authoritarian power-grabs happen.

The movie is a throwback to an earlier era of documentaries, when filmmakers did not feel obligated by commercial pressure to give their film the shape of a thriller, a sports film, a mystery or anything else, but instead simply brought their cameras into people's lives.

It's magnificent and unique, an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

This is a dazzling film—not just one of Haynes' best, but possibly the one that his whole career, with all of its self-aware formal and historical experiments, has been building toward.

The movie has its own unique life force, and such confidence that if you're tuned into its wavelength, you'll forget to speculate on what will happen next.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is one of the most frustrating Martin Scorsese films as well as one of the most out-of-character.

Stillman pushes the comedy right up to the edge of screwball.

Creepy beyond belief, Hereditary is one of those movies you shouldn't describe in detail, because if you do, it will not only ruin surprises but make the listener wonder if you saw the film or dreamed it.

The movie's major, perhaps only, fault is that its brilliant construction denies it the storytelling clarity and basic insights that conventional nonfiction films provide.

The problem, though, is that American Underdog doesn't ever really connect the modest virtuousness of Kurt and Brenda to Kurt's ascension as a quarterback.

Life itself, that loaded two-word phrase, is what Roger really wrote about when he wrote about movies.

Bisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people.

The film clearly has a lot on its mind. But by the end, you still might not know what it was, even though the hurtling camerawork, jagged edits, brutal physical confrontations, and bone-rattling sound design will send you home feeling like you’ve had an experience.

As written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch and directed by Baker, it's assured and immensely likable, and truly independent in story and style.

Like its hero, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors goes with the flow and has a chaotic and thrilling time but doesn't know where to go or what to do with itself.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer,” about a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is like a beautiful hand-wrought sculpture that’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Making it bigger would not have made it better. It’s perfect just as it is.

Once in a while you encounter a piece that seems like a premeditated farewell — a conscious summing-up of the life and work — whether or not it was intended that way. Varda by Agnès, a combination autobiography and career survey overseen by the filmmaker, is that kind of movie.

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.

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.

Vermiglio, about the lives of villagers in the mid-century Italian Alps near the end of World War II, is the rare movie set in the past that seems attuned to the consciousness of the time it depicts.

It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent.

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.

This latest, a thriller about a photographer who might be a killer, is wild pop fly that disappears in the stands.

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.

As gorgeous and impenetrable as a dream.

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.

This franchise has demonstrated an impressive ability to beat the odds and reinvent itself, over a span of time long enough for two generations to grow up in. It's a toy store of ideas, with new wonders in every aisle.

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.

I rarely see a movie so original that I want to tell people to just see it without reading any reviews beforehand, including my own. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is one of those movies.

The objective seems to be to make you feel, by the end, as if you've walked a million miles in Neil Armstrong's boots. On that score, judged solely as a spectacle, First Man has to be considered a success — especially if you see it in IMAX format.

Life After is a powerful movie that examines the political and social structures that surround and control people with disabilities, and comes to a conclusion that will spark many arguments.

It asks a lot of us. In fact it asks us to set aside everything we've been conditioned to think movies are, and roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect.

Bursting with humanity, grounded in humility, and in love with the poetry of faces, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a classic indie film that will irritate or mystify some viewers while inspiring evangelical fervor in others.

"Cars" and its various derivatives aside, Pixar has never released a flat-out bad film. And this is a good one: pleasant and clever, with a generous heart, committed voice acting, and some of the kookiest images in Pixar history.

It doesn't move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I've seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters -- and of life itself -- is rare and precious.

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.

Predators often seems to be going for an Errol Morris-style, “What is the truth, and what does the word even mean?” approach that’s equally explanatory and philosophical. It succeeds a lot of the time, but other times seems to get bogged down in tangents that take it too far away from the central issues.

The film's writer-director, Tamara Jenkins is a brilliant chronicler of upper-middle class white people and their foibles, and her eye for detail is anthropologically exact, empathetic but never begging for sympathy.

Patient and kindhearted, a painted storybook in motion, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds is a lovely glimpse of what animation can be.

A brilliant science fiction movie — more of an "experience" than a traditional story, with plenty to say about gender roles, sexism and the power of lust?

Hundreds of Beavers, a boldly bizarre, nearly wordless slapstick comedy about a 19th-century trapper doing battle with nature, exceeds expectations in every way, including the promise of its title.

It's messy in the way that life is messy. It's one of those movies that simultaneously feels too long and not long enough. But there's a purity and earnestness to what it's doing that's increasingly unusual in American independent cinema.

Part rap musical, part social satire, with elements of Westerns and kung fu pictures, Bodied is one of the funniest, freest movies of the year.

Çatak and co-writer Johannes Duncker have tapped into a largely unexplored subcategory of the thriller, one with unlimited potential to illuminate everyday life.

The physical or visceral aspects of the movie might sink into your brain and change how you look at these creatures. It had that effect on me.

Rams is an involving, at times curiously exciting film, because the story is so clean and simple and we always know what's at stake.

Luca Guadagnino directs Challengers, a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley.

It's attentive to regret and failure in ways that American films tend to avoid for fear of bumming viewers out and making them warn other people not to watch the movie. And it seems to understand the way people mythologize others and themselves, and the reasons it happens.

Ford's voice — always deep, lowered an octave by age and one more by William's longing — is even more powerful. This is Ford's best performance since "The Fugitive," maybe since "Witness."

For all its horror and sadness, this is one of the most hopeful films I’ve ever seen.

It can't quite seem to get out of its own way. It is intelligent and sensitive and assembled with a great care, and worth watching just for its images of the jungle.

The movie is significant as a movie: it's intelligent, sensitive and expertly made. But it's also significant because of its ability to provoke introspection and arguments. In its deceptively modest way, it's as much a Rorschach test as "American Sniper." Everybody who sees it will draw a different picture of the elephant.

It's hard to write about In Jackson Heights without sounding like you're trying to write poetry.

The movie never entirely convinces us that its heroine has the capacity to kill, although her pain and loss are conveyed with skill by Fishback.

This is a delightful, thought-provoking movie that’s about a lot of things at the same time. It’ll make you see the world with fresh eyes, and probably wonder why there isn’t more art in it.

The entire movie feels like something out of a dream, probably one that struggles to work through something real that keeps getting hijacked and twisted by the mischievous unconscious.

Roger Ebert famously described cinema as a machine that generates empathy. This movie is that machine: a relentless engine field by idealism and craft.

It wants to put you smack-dab in the middle of a particular place during a particular time, and let you marinate in that place and time through quiet montages and long—sometimes very long—scenes.

This is a difficult movie to sit through, not just because of the subject matter, but because it's so honest in dramatizing how people process tragedy and carry it through life.

This is a thoroughly fascinating documentary about a family discovering the depth and complexity of their patriarch while coming to terms with his flaws, as well as the capitalist system of art exhibition and sale that has different tiers and gatekeepers, depending on who you are and your version of life.

The cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve.

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

I had some minor quibbles about Coco while I was watching it, but I can’t remember what they were. This film is a classic.

In the end Foxcatcher proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in performance, direction and makeup, along with a certain clumsiness in the way that it tries to use its profoundly sad story to make some kind of grand statement about American values, or the lack thereof.