Matt Zoller Seitz

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?

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.

True to the spirit of the original film, "Monsters Inc.", and matches its tone. But it never seems content to turn over old ground.

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.

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.

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.

This is a special movie. It has a life force unlike any other crime thriller I’ve seen. It’s about characters who suffer a personal failure but emerge transformed. It’s a violent movie, but not a cruel one, and unexpectedly moving by the end.

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.

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

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.

A deliciously unstable comedy.

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 so bombastic that it makes "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" seem modest.

Huerta is such a commanding figure, and the array of historical footage marshalled on behalf of her story is so impressive, that the film makes a strong impression.

It feels immediate and rings true, thanks to the performances of its lead actors, and the storytelling of director Yen Tan and his co-writer, co-editor. and cinematographer, the single-named Hutch.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Cold Lands is less a story than an experience, and that, as such, anything one might say about it could be considered a spoiler.

The alchemical collision of the actors, the style, and the real-life settings result in a film so attentive to fluctuations in the characters’ emotions that watching them exist is exciting. You never know what these people will feel next or how they’ll express it, and the camera’s always in the perfect place to catch it.

The movie has an organic intelligence and a sense that it, too, exists outside of linear time. It seems to be creating itself as you watch it.

Directed by Rod Blackhurst from a script by David Ebeltoft, it tells you what kind of movie it is from its gruesome opening image and continues in that mode for another hour and forty-five minutes. It's anchored to a lead performance by Scoot McNairy that ranks with the best of classic neo-noir.

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.

A very good jazz movie and a very good heroin movie, if indeed there's much practical difference between the two modes—and perhaps there isn't.

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.

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.