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.

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

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, about the career of one of the most important film producers of the last 50 years, is one of Cousins' best and most entrancing films.

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.

The movie offers the most psychologically complex screen portrait of a Native American character in at least twenty years, probably more.

It's a rapturous experience, mostly, though tempered by a certain Godardian crankiness. Watching it is, I would imagine, as close as we'll get to being able to be Godard, sitting there thinking, or dreaming. It's a documentary of a restless mind.

A love letter from one iconoclastic Italian Catholic artist to another, Abel Ferrara's Pasolini stays far from the cliches of the Hollywood biopic, embracing a fragmented, intense, impressionistic approach.

The lead performances are extraordinary. They're real-seeming, in the manner of so many gifted but relatively inexperienced performers who haven't yet had the spontaneity crushed out of them by the cliches of formal training.

At times the movie feels like Hereditary without the supernatural elements and gore. It's a psychological horror movie about the ordinary miseries and compromises of family.

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

The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence.

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.

Beyond its brash confidence as a piece of filmmaking and its homages to the Western (including the use of a wider frame than was used on the show), El Camino is fan service executed at a very high level — an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, “And then what happened?” after the words “The End” have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch.

Like many classic Japanese monster films of the era, it is blithely unconcerned with convincing you that anything in its running time could actually happen. As a result, you believe in every frame. You enter the dream.

A long-winded but engrossing kidnap thriller.

You could call it a musical performance documentary and not be wrong, but it's trying to do other things too, some expertly and others not so well; but there's never a point where you quite get a handle on it because it keeps changing in front of your eyes.

Some experiences are so profound (and/or scarring) that they elude explication. The Inspection is about that sort of experience, which translates far beyond boot camp and resonates through our lives, until the final trumpet fades.

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.

If this movie and her previous project signal a shift in Watts' career that will be dominated by survival tales that put her at the center of a movie and showcase her doing things that give most viewers a pulled tendon just sitting there in the audience, so much the better.

By the time you get to the end, Cronenberg has pinned all his people against the screen like so many laboratory specimens, ripped off their scabs, and vivisected their longings: an old wound here, a long--deferred dream there. Still, the movie sticks with you. It's a fleeting nightmare that refuses to fade.

Does the movie work? Intermittently, sometimes brilliantly.

In his mind, Cohn was still the hero of his own story. And we get the impression from this film that, right up to the bitter, agonized end, he was engaged in an internal battle to justify himself to himself, and to the world.

This intimate Irish drama travels a road that'll be familiar to anyone who's ever seen a film about addiction, or known an addict, but the fact that all stories of addiction are essentially the same doesn't blunt its impact.

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

Much better and more original than anyone could have expected.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a return to form for director Tim Burton only in the sense that, like Burton early in his career, it’s not interested in form except at the immediate level of the image and the scene. It’s an overstuffed toy bag of a movie: every minute or two, the director digs into the bag and produces a new toy.

There are many rewards to be found here, not the least of which is a skill at staging scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends that are entirely dependent upon the subtle interactions of a few actors who live or die on the basis of the words they've been given to speak, and the silences they've been encouraged to inhabit.

Together Together is not just smart, it's sneaky-smart.