Michael Phillips

It's good for the soul, and composer Joe Hisaishi's themes are so right they sound as if they came straight out of the ground with the girl in the bamboo.

May be the best and saddest film of the year so far.

The acting's so true, and Bahrani's so observant, you find yourself caring about everyone onscreen.

For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly.

The movie is beautiful without wasting its time on cliched beauty. Kogonada, who edited as well as wrote and directed, collaborates intuitively with cinematographer Elisha Christian, who’s as good with faces as he is with sharp modernist edges etched in concrete.

The Artist may not be great art, but it's pearly entertainment.

Zama is a patient, delicately strange film chronicling an increasingly impatient man and a destiny beyond his control.

The actor (Segel) creates a dreamy, solemn but subtly vibrant version of Wallace that works for him and for the material.

A tedious picture about a remorseless serial killer, played by Matt Dillon.

The word masterpiece costs nothing to write and means less than nothing in an age when every third picture and each new Clint Eastwood project is proclaimed as such. After two viewings, however, Letters From Iwo Jima strikes me as the peak achievement in Eastwood's hallowed career.

It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.

The second film lingers less determinedly on the degradation of Lisbeth and concentrates more on moving the narrative furniture around. The relationship between the main characters is the glue holding the balsa wood together.

Bi, not yet 30, has made a movie that feels like a visual sigh and, yes, a dream. It’s a reminder of just how expansive the cinema’s boundaries remain.

Turns out to be every bit as deft, witty and, yes, moving as the first one.

A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit.

Mordant in the extreme, and often hilarious, The Death of Stalin somehow manages to acknowledge the murderous depths of Josef Stalin’s regime while rising to the level of incisive, even invigorating political satire.

It’s beautiful work, and not just because it’s beautiful.

The filmmaker's documentary training pays off in detail after detail.

For a while it’s engaging but pretty thin. Then it gets more interesting, especially for the actors.

One of Anderson's cleverest and most gorgeous movies, dipping just enough of a toe in the real world — and in the melancholy works of its acknowledged inspiration, the late Austrian writer Stefan Zweig — to prevent the whole thing from floating off into the ether of minor whimsy.

I love it, not simply because I love Chekhov or because I've loved so much of Ceylan's earlier work. I love it because the director, having come into his own as a master international filmmaker years ago, gives us so much to see and think about, so many astringent observations about life's compromises and longings.

Cooper is very much a real director, with a genuine facility with filming musical numbers. We believe in the characters’ talents, and spend time soaking them up without a lot of nervous, overcompensating editing. Between songs, he and Gaga make even the bluntest cliches about love and career and misery minty-fresh, all over again.

The film works, whatever your ethical stance on Snowden, because it's more procedural than polemic.

Mafioso is shaped like a comedy, and it is one, but its intentionally jarring clashes of tone and rhythm are truly out there.

This is the second feature from Maoz; his first, the superb “Lebanon” (2009), is one of the essential war pictures of the young century. Foxtrot qualifies as a war film as well, and as in all such pictures made by, and for, grown-ups, the psychic battles are no less intense than the literal carnage.

Matt Damon narrates, and I do wish the narration didn't end on such a generalized, throw-the-bums-out note, over footage of the Statue of Liberty.

The actors, predictably, are superb in roles shaped by screenwriter David Seidler, and directed by Tom Hooper. Yet they are unpredictably superb as well.

What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight. In its faces, its scenery and its plain satisfactions it makes us feel like we've been somewhere, when we get to the end of that line.

Some of the comic inventions are inspired: Muntz has a pack of dogs equipped with electronic voice boxes, which means they're talking dogs, only they speak as if they've learned English from a poorly translated Berlitz guide.

Braga isn't quite the whole show in Aquarius, but she's certainly a lot of it.

Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.

May Marvel learn its lesson from Black Panther: When a movie like this ends up feeling both personal and vital, you’ve done something right.

It's one of the most satisfying films of 2015.

What Baldwin does with words, Jenkins does visually. It’s what Blanche DuBois says in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” In “Beale Street” that magic can be crushing, and soul-stirring, sometimes simultaneously. Jenkins’ epilogue, not found in the novel, may go a little far in its embrace of the affirmative. But that’s hardly the worst thing you can say about any film, let alone one as lovely as this one.

Birdman proves that a movie — the grabbiest, most kinetic film ever made about putting on a play — can soar on the wings of its own technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it back down to earth.

Wisely, Heller doesn’t inflate the tone or impart an overt message. But by the end, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has truly brought you into this woman’s life, head-space, longings and tastes, and I found the whole of it quite moving.

The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time.

It treats Freddie not as a problem to be solved, but as a peripatetic life to be followed. What begins as two weeks in another town, in search of the past Freddie never knew, becomes a reminder that there are feelings, longings, connections in life that remain not impossible, but certainly elusive, and precarious.

It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.

Some of it’s pleasingly old school in its reliance on formidable stunt work. Enough of it, though, gets a digital effects assist for the amazements to scale the heights of plausibility and then leap, like a gazelle, to the adjacent mountain of sublime ridiculousness.

Seeing these actors, the late Boseman chief among them, relish the opportunity to try to get a daunting stage-to-screen adaptation right: That’s a privilege to behold.

McKay has worked mostly in episodic television in recent years, and “On the Seventh Day” marks his confident, neatly ordered but freshly observed return to feature filmmaking. He’s working with nonactors here, in a fruitful halfway point between documentary and conventional fictional narrative.

While there’s little or no outright expression of religious faith in Nomadland, Zhao and company have given us a glancing but evocative state-of-the-nation character study. In its own spiritual fashion, Fern’s story becomes one about the character of a nation, and an America desperately searching for the ribbon of highway (to quote Woody Guthrie) to take us all the way home.

Modeled on Martin Scorsese's engaging first-person documentaries on the cinema, this one has its own avid personality and scholarly charm. Whoever you are, you'll learn a lot.

Uncommonly good ensemble storytelling.

Movies concerned with the life, the mind, the body and the dawning self-respect of a 15-year-old girl running every sort of risk — these are rare. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of them, and it's terrific.

It blends cinematic Americana with something grubbier and more interesting than Americana, and it does not look, act or behave like the usual perception of a Spielberg epic. It is smaller and quieter than that.

The film has a quietly relentless quality. Redford is fully engaged and vital. I'll leave it to others to read greatness into All Is Lost. It's enough that it's good.

The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.

Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is compact, modestly budgeted, sublimely acted and almost completely terrific.

Above all, there’s Collette, who sometimes can overdeliver a dramatic moment or an aghast reaction, but in this storytelling context she’s fabulous. It’s a fierce performance with a human pulse, racing one minute, dead still the next.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

It is a black comedy, among the blackest. It is also more grueling in some stretches than anything in "United 93."

While there are plenty of influences afoot, ranging from Jenkins to Terrence Malick to Toni Morrison, “All Dirt Roads” is guided, fragment by fragment, by a new director’s way of seeing and listening to a woman’s life — in all its puzzle pieces.

This is the first film the Dardennes shot in the summertime. Excellent choice of seasons. I'm not sure I could've handled Cyril's travails without it, or without de France's smile.

It’s zippier than “Incredibles 2,” and nearly as witty as the first “Lego Movie,” with whom it shares a very funny screenwriter, Phil Lord.

Stripping “Macbeth” for parts, keeping the focus on the main narrative lines of political assassination and what Macbeth himself refers to as “supernatural soliciting,” Coen turns out to be ideally suited to a straight-ahead, let’s-get-on-with-it rendition.

This is a big-hearted, absorbing documentary about a writer who kept on writing until very near the end. Anyone who cared about Roger Ebert will find it necessary viewing.

A sexy, violent, preposterous, beautiful fantasy, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro’s most vivid and fully formed achievement since “Pan’s Labyrinth” 11 years ago.

It’s nearly impossible not to respond to The Color Purple and Celie’s odyssey, in any version. But it’s also possible to wish for a movie that felt more like real life, and real lives, in all their emotional colors, without so much showbiz.

Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.

Both funny and sad, often in the same glance-averted instant. See it with someone you'd trust to stick around in an avalanche. It's one of the highlights of 2014.

It’s harder than it should be to describe Kent Jones’ Diane in a way that makes it sound distinctive or special, which it is.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.

The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.

As a visual capture of a tour supporting an album, “Renaissance” may not hold a candle to her remarkable, 65-minute visual album “Lemonade” that appeared, more or less out of nowhere, in 2016. But it’s holding an entirely different sort of candle, or rather two candles. One’s a concert movie; the other’s a how-I-made-the-concert-and-this-movie movie.

Fallen Leaves, by contrast, strikes an adroit balance between dark and light, stoicism and optimism. There’s a stealth buoyancy at work.

Much of Nebraska is ordinary prose, but the best parts are plain-spoken comic poetry.

If Across the Spider-Verse falls an inch or two short of the earlier film, it’s because screenwriters/producers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham pack the second half of a pretty long movie (24 minutes longer than “Into the Spider-Verse”) with an increasingly dark and heavy threat level.

We need films such as Kennedy's as a corrective.

The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.

Here's one of the strongest feature film debuts in a long time, in any genre.

Any film with Jennifer Ehle, perfect as the tightly wound but loving therapist, tends to be worth seeing in the first place.

"All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.

The cave exists to provoke awe in mere mortals. The camera pauses at one point to take in a stalagmite reaching up to touch, nearly, a stalactite and the inevitable association is with Michelangelo's Adam and the hand of God.

The grace, elegance, carefully muted color palette and gradual acknowledgment of life's milestones lift The Red Turtle far above the average so-called "family-friendly" animation.

From a terrible epidemic comes a beautiful documentary.

The movie has a tiny motor of a narrative, but it’s just enough. Nothing is overstated, and a lot of Showing Up isn’t even stated; it’s simply shown, on the fly or with the merest emphasis on what Lizzie goes through as she completes her work.

Museo is the work of a genuinely creative directorial talent, and the early family scenes, richly detailed and shrewdly acted, provide just the right emotional context for this squabbling, indecisive gang of two.

What you’re left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.

Deliver Us From Evil has a few things wrong with it, including an egregious musical score, but without resorting to sucker punches, it takes your breath away while making your skin crawl.

Yes, May December exists in an uncomfortable realm. Haynes isn’t afraid of that, and American movies are better for it.

It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.

Gyllenhaal’s work with her actors is quietly spectacular, and she takes the best of Ferrante’s fearlessness while letting Colman and Buckley unfold the character’s secrets through action and reaction.

The Big Sick has the confidence to let the audience come to Nanjiani and Gordon's fictionalized real-life situation, rather than yank us in, kicking and screaming.

In the populist vein of Ron Howard's "Apollo 13," Affleck's rouser salutes the Americans (and, more offhandedly, the Canadians) who restored our sense of can-do spirit when we needed it.

It all comes together as formidably detailed and easy-breathing craftsmanship.

Cronenberg knows what he’s doing, and this is his most assured act of science-fiction effrontery to date.

The Master is brilliantly, wholly itself for a little more than half of its 137 minutes. Then it chases its own tail a bit and settles for being merely a fascinating metaphoric father-son relationship reaching endgame. It may not all "work," but most of it's remarkable.

The Wild Pear Tree may be the one film out there with the uncanny, gorgeously ruminative ability to take you away from everything cluttering a Chicagoan’s head space right now.

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.

But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.

Death, dying, hearts in winter, the thrill of a sexual reawakening: Sandra’s life, as “One Fine Morning” delineates, makes room for it all because it must. Hers is an ordinary life, in the end, full of small, extraordinary grace notes. Thanks to both filmmaker and star, it’s a consistently screenworthy one.

A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.

Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.