Michael O'Sullivan

The drama itself packs a powerful -- and timeless -- gut punch.

It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.

Dunkirk isn’t comfortable to watch; it never relents or relaxes. At the same time, it’s impossible to look away from it.

Petite Maman is what every film should be: powerfully, even arrestingly original; grounded in emotional truth; hyper-specific; deeply universal; strange; mesmerizing; and not a minute longer than necessary. It is, in short, a small wonder.

Sandler is so good, so committed and so watchable that, despite everything — Howard’s irrationality, a rogue’s gallery of unpleasant characters, the foreboding of a bad, bad end — you can’t take your eyes off the screen, which Sandler seldom vacates.

Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently.

But make no mistake: Hogg’s quirky coming-of-age tale (which teases a forthcoming sequel) is no misty remembrance of bygone days. Rather, it is a clear-eyed reflection on how hindsight — and true art — is always 20/20.

There is so much going on here, yet the director handles the film’s constellation of themes and sweeping emotion with impeccable assurance and an at-times breathtaking sense of the poetic.

Overflowing with madcap visual flair and following a rambling thread of a plot that seems, at times, more the product of free association than an actual script, The Triplets of Belleville is a triumph of animated style over substance.

It's one heck of a basis for a funny movie.

A major technical accomplishment. But it’s also a major feat of storytelling, one that mentions no dates, place names or famous battles, yet nevertheless manages to evoke a profound sense of connection with its nameless subjects.

All foreplay and no climax.

Small moments take on larger meaning in this exquisite memoir. That’s as true of the plot — in which nothing terribly significant happens, except life — as it is of the visuals.

To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.

Despite the seemingly uncinematic nature of this inert, even claustrophobic scenario, the film mesmerizes, utterly.

May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human.

Neither wholly cynical nor wholly romantic, Kaufman's story is a balance of smarts and sentiment. It's the most fully realized working out of his two favorite obsessions: the subjective nature of experience and the psychological mysteries of pair bonding.

Works as both historical allegory and moving family drama.

Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman's shaky-camera, cinema-verite-style dramedy meanders in charming fashion.

Binge-watching the first eight installments before you settle into this one isn’t strictly necessary, but I wouldn’t discourage it, either. They’re that good.

A gorgeous, magical and melancholy fantasia about the joy and pain of human existence.

The speculative ending is actually the most intriguing thing about “The Alto Knights,” more interesting even than De Niro times two. And yet the film’s climax nevertheless fails to raise much of a heartbeat in this boglike slog through a momentous moment in murderous mob history.

Gradually, a story of bittersweet beauty and unexpected tenderness emerges.

Surprisingly, it isn’t heavy-handed, moralizing, polemical or sentimental. And you can enjoy the film without knowing any of that.

Psychological suspense at its finest.

The Quiet Girl is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

All too often, the second movie of a trilogy is a bridge. ("The Matrix Reloaded," anyone?) As often as not, it feels more like the first half of the last movie than a film in its own right. The Girl Who Played With Fire is no exception.

For the most part, the film balances its outrage with objectivity.

Leave No Trace is not a sociological treatise. It has nothing grandiose to say about homelessness or PTSD. It does, however, deliver an effective (and deeply affecting) allegory of the inevitable leave-taking that all of us — housed or unhoused, happy or half mad — must undergo with our loved ones.

The geometry of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s masterful, moving Parallel Mothers, which follows the stories of two women who give birth almost simultaneously in a Madrid hospital, is really a crisscrossing set of two fascinatingly entangled lines.

Mostly, though, it's a film about that hollow feeling that hits you when the tears have all dried up and your face hurts way too much to even crack a smile.

What little dancing we do see is lovely to watch, but it’s also lovely to see a performer who once seemed to have an iron grip on the barre finally learn how to be gracious and let go.

As haunting as it is haunted, The Missing Picture leaves viewers’ heads rattling with ghosts.

As a portrait, Pain and Glory is less a mirror than an impressionistic painting. It’s an emotional rendering of a person, not a literal one.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

The film follows two remarkable men in New Delhi: Mohammad Saud and his older brother Nadeem Shehzad, former bodybuilders who used their scientific curiosity, compassion and knowledge of human musculature to figure out how to care for sick and injured birds.

It plays out with all the suspense of a thriller. Assisted by acclaimed editor Walter Murch, Levinson wisely shapes the story not around the hardware, which was plagued by malfunctions and other delays, but around the people tasked with making the LHC run.

It is incomplete, contradictory, as multifaceted (and as brilliant) as a diamond.

It's enough to make your head spin, but Almodovar, whose mastery of the medium has never been more assured, gives you plenty to think about, ultimately grounding the dizzy whirl of his idiosyncratic fictional world in a story that feels not just true but universal.

It’s slightly fussy, in-your-face filmmaking, but it’s viscerally effective.

The feature debut of writer-director Jennifer Kent is not just genuinely, deeply scary, but also a beautifully told tale of a mother and son, enriched with layers of contradiction and ambiguity.

With a firm grasp on the duality implicit in its title, Little Men is a story that’s neither tragic nor triumphal in the way it resolves itself, but rather one that’s sadly, even satisfyingly true.

Stagnation, collapse, heartlessness — whether on an individual level or a national one — are the true subjects of Zvyagintsev’s film. Its message isn’t subtle, but it is delivered with deadly, haunting finality.

In her latest film, Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

The film is a sobering reminder that the consequences of limiting access to safe medical care aren’t just theoretical but existential.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

With unsurprising irony, the "Sixteen" of the title foreshadows Liam's birthday and even worse calamity, which makes a grim and gripping story all the more heartbreaking.

Its charms, and they are both subtle and many, emanate like perfume.

It's depressing enough to watch this family's struggles with life. But their pain really hits home when you think that the pants you might be wearing could have contributed to it.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s like several pretty good ones.

The yarn that Lowery spins is rich with incident, but ultimately simple. Its enjoyment lies less in the story, but in the marvelous mystification of its telling.

The First Wave feels simultaneously hard to watch and vital, tragic and uplifting, like a backward glimpse over our shoulder at a period of conflict and struggle — in more ways than one — that we’re not quite done living through yet.

It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.

Enchants on every level: story, voice work, drawing and music.

It’s a watchable tale, yet it’s also hard to know just how much truth there is in the presentation of the Wayuu, whose presence in the film at times seems more picturesque than plausible.

The nail-biting quality of Shackleton's true story outdoes any dramatic fiction on the market.

One big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure flick.

It's a soaring achievement, without ever leaving the ground.

The narrative moves toward its foregone conclusion with the low energy of a slow-moving locomotive on train tracks leading to a broken bridge.

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

The film by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov is a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable.

Many thematic ingredients come together in Farhadi’s rich stew of a story: jealousy, resentment, betrayal, forgiveness, healing. The filmmaker stirs them, with the touch of a master, into a dish that both stimulates and nourishes.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

The frequent, mundane talks -- which Alexandra engages in with her grandson, Malika and the base camp's enlisted men -- are not so much about politics as they are about people.

There’s lots of hurt, past and present, in “Daughters,” as well as a huge measure of healing and forgiveness. Those feelings are palpable and contagious; they jump off the screen.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

A small film of surpassing beauty and sadness. Yet its bittersweet flavor isn't artificial, but rather the product of the slow ripening of character.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.

Spielmann doesn't move his camera much, but he doesn't have to. The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.

As quintessential a story of American ambition as Welles' own "Citizen Kane."

As overcrowded as it all sounds, “Flipside” never falls off the cliff into confusion or incoherence, thanks mainly to Wilcha’s superb grasp of his theme.

[A] solid yet subtly sphinxlike new drama from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The disparity between Cindy and Jerry is itself obscene, but less so than that illuminated by the customers of Farewell Cruises, whom Yung shows to be almost parasitic in the way they feed off the misery (albeit without knowing it) of those who serve them.

McQueen makes the case that its subject was an artist whose clay was clothing. It also, despite giving short shrift to psychoanalysis, reminds us that everything you might want to know about the artist can be found in the art.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

"Kubo" is both extraordinarily original and extraordinarily complex.

Momma's Man takes that germ of an idea and lets it flower, in a way that is both odd and oddly compelling.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.

Boys State is a portrait of the country in microcosm: divided, but not yet irredeemably lost.

Short on drama but long on poetry.

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

The Rescue isn’t just a movie about cave divers, or a recap of a well-reported humanitarian operation. It’s ultimately a film about the triumph of altruism, ingenuity and perseverance in the face of almost impossible odds, by the very people you might initially have dismissed as not up to the task.

Moodysson's cornball sentimentality about the many shapes of the human family is tempered by his honesty about personal frailty and the silliness of utopian living experiments.

What keeps Phone Booth going, despite its premise, is the acting and the writing, both of which are top-notch.

It’s tempting — and not entirely inaccurate — to call this oddly moving little film a comedy-drama, but if so, it’s a dark one at that.

In its small, achingly beautiful way, this is the lesson that Osama teaches us: When one human being suffers, it is all of us who share her pain.

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a red panda is just a red panda. And sometimes it’s a metaphor for that inner spark of creativity, the flame of originality that is to be cherished, not extinguished. With “Turning Red,” Shi demonstrates that she’s got it, in spades.

It’s upsetting and scary to watch the footage of orca attacks collected in Blackfish, a damning documentary about the treatment of the animals by marine parks.

It’s also a telling personal moment, because it opens the door to a discussion of Wallace’s struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.

It’s a story of standing out and blending in, sometimes at the same time.

There are so many things to like about The Lego Movie: a great voice cast, clever dialogue and a handsome blend of stop-motion and CGI animation that feels lovingly retro, while still looking sharp in 21st-century 3-D. But the best thing about this movie... is its subversive nature.

His story is sad, compelling and morbidly, tragically watchable.

It’s a wonder how Cutie and the Boxer, in less than an hour and a half, manages to say so much about love, life and art. Movies twice as long are often half as eloquent.