Matt Zoller Seitz

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.