Matt Zoller Seitz

Trophy strives to be kind and fair. But it is unmerciful in its exploration of the hunting business. Like a ruthless lawyer, it loves poking holes in arguments that appear rock-solid.

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

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.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

The film ultimately runs up against the limitations of its own nature.... But it’s still an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled by soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, period, rather than "good, for 'Star Wars.'"

Private Property is a terrific example of the spell that a confident film can weave by placing a handful of troubled characters in a confined location, and in the end it does feel like as much of a tragedy as a potboiler.

A brutal but stirring fantasy.

Unfortunately, The Public Enemy isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically.

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.

If you have a good idea, a strong cast, a smart script, and directorial chops, you don't need a lot of money to make a compelling movie. The Endless is proof.

It's a small movie that takes big swings.

This is a fun movie if you love the band, and maybe even if you’ve never heard of them before. The interviews are thought-provoking, funny, and moving; the filmmaking is superb, and the music kicks ass.

Purely on a craft level, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” is skillful and engrossing, never more so than when it captures wrenchingly painful moments in people’s lives with a detachment that keeps the focus on the subjects rather than shifting to Talankin.

It's worth seeking out for the way it observes psychologically complex small-town characters struggling to endure present-day hardships and past traumas.

It's a work of fertile imagination that takes every step confidently, even if it isn't certain where it will lead.

This is a movie that doesn't merely tell a gripping, important story, but reminds us that the storyteller and the storytelling matter just as much.

Funan is structured as a series of carefully choreographed set pieces in which things go from bad to worse to unimaginably awful.

It's quite good, for what it is. But it's that "for what it is" part that proves slightly exasperating.

Gone Girl is art and entertainment, a thriller and an issue, and an eerily assured audience picture.

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.

Ian McKellen is stunningly good as the older painter, Julian Sklar, a 1960s Swingin’ London sensation who has aged into a decrepit caricature of himself.

Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one.

Pepe was been turned into something he was never intended to be. His creator and steward didn't realize what was occurring until it was too late to halt or reverse it.

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.

An account of a film that was never made despite all the love that its makers poured into it, yet somehow it's warm and inspirational: a call to arms for dreamers everywhere.

The film is good to excellent in every way except morally, and there it's questionable more often than it should be, not because it's an evil film, or because the filmmaker or actors are bad people, but because the interplay of means and ends have been under-thought or misjudged, to the point where the film becomes a catalog of obscenities.

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.

It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “arty” to modern audiences who aren’t into older movies and have no reference point for what they’re watching. Hopefully not, though, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that engages your attention differently than movies usually do.