Matt Zoller Seitz

The movie unfolds according to its own logic and intuition and demands a great deal of adults as well as kids, starting with the basic proposition that life is finite and ends in death, you don't get to choose the time, place, and circumstances of your passing, and it's not only OK for animation to talk about these things, it's healing.

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 often said that when you're presented with conflicting accounts of an event, the one that seems most plausible is probably correct. The movie seems to align itself with that sentiment.

The movie is angry and horrified and mournful but also warm, sensual, life affirming, and so blisteringly funny that critics and political commentators are sure to blast it as distasteful.

Gandolfini's quietly magnificent performance is the only reason to see Violet & Daisy.

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

Empire of Light never entirely coheres, but it's worth seeing for the power of Colman's lead performance and the expertly judged backup acting.

The movie is at its best when it's immersing you in a series of conundrums and letting you feel what it's like to live with them, and wrestle with them. All of these people are doing the best they can, but the system is broken.

The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail -- the sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning" but with a wickedly funny narrator -- and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked.

It's to the credit of Anthony, who wrote and edited as well as directed, and his cinematographer Corey Hughes, that you come away thinking about parts of the film that felt like cut-able digressions and undergraduate musings when you were watching them.

You may be left cold, feeling that you’ve seen a theoretical exercise whose purpose was never articulated. Or you may react as I did. I took pages of notes for this review, doing my best to describe the movie as a discrete work—an object to be contemplated. When the final credits rolled, I closed my notebook and wept.

Despite its missteps, this is Baker's best-directed film, judged purely in terms of how economically he sets up and pays off each mile marker in the story, often getting in and out of a scene with two or three elegantly choreographed but unpretentious shots.

Breaking Fast is a sweet romantic comedy that shows how it's possible to observe nearly every convention of the mainstream romantic comedy yet still deliver something that feels new.

What's missing is a sense of how Monroe, seemingly a law-abiding young man before his family's financial dark days, suddenly went from being a go-along-to-get-along type to a budding criminal mastermind.

However heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.

All in all, this is a thoughtful, remarkable piece of nonfiction, working in an accessible commercial vein but doing its best not to take the easy way into any aspect of Reeve’s story.

It's as if the group had studied the "Rabbit season! Duck season!" exchange from the Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck classic "Rabbit Seasoning," and figured out how to turn the punchline into a political movement.

Co-directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren seem to be operating from a place of nonjudgmental curiosity, so pure and sustained that it becomes indistinguishable from love. They can't get enough of John Wojtowicz.

There's something refreshing, at times remarkable, about the sureness of the acting, and the filmmaker's touch.

Some of the close-quarters beatings and fights are diminished by shooting and editing so chaotically that the action becomes incomprehensible. For the most part, though, it’s a powerful debut by filmmakers who understand human nature and would rather enlighten than provoke.

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.