Michael Phillips

The film is a master class in reactivity, and Calamy manages it with perfect dramatic pitch.

It’s an unnerving portrait in forbidden desire and matched wills, sometimes acting as one barely controlled organism, often at fierce odds.

It's an odd, hermetic and fascinating picture.

Whether Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One turns out to be a massive hit or merely a hit, it’s certainly the franchise action picture of the year, the one that truly knows what it’s doing, front to back.

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.

The movie proceeds in quiet, reflective tones, subtly energized by a fully realized visual environment and a clever variety of editing rhythms. Nine Days transcends the potential limitation and occasional strain of its premise.

Best of all: the musical score by Alfonso de Vilallonga. It's terrific — witty, symphonically lush and shrewdly informed by flamenco strains throughout.

I greatly prefer this cleverly sustained and efficiently relentless remake to the '73 edition. It is lean and simple.

All of Us Strangers is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.

The Wrestler works for the same reason "Rachel Getting Married" works. The way they're acted, shot, edited and scored, both films deploy a loose, rough-hewn documentary style to great dramatic advantage. The corn isn't hyped. The performances click without going for the jugular.

It’s a specific sort of achievement, without the full dimension or larger resonance of a classic. That’s a lot to ask of any film, especially one that does so much so rigorously and well.

It's a nerve-wracking visual experience of unusual and paradoxical delicacy. And if your stomach can take it, it's truly something to see.

Tilda Swinton’s a tightly wound riot as Copperfield’s snappish aunt, living seaside and fending off stray donkeys while her serenely mad lodger Mr. Dick resides in his own universe. He is played by Hugh Laurie, beautifully, as if Bertie Wooster had taken a few wrong turns.

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.

I prefer my horror with a chaser of wit, and Severance, a modest but very lively British import, serves it up in harsh but high style.

It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.

Get on Up hits all these high points. But the Butterworths fracture the order, fruitfully. They're more interested in making musical and dramatic connections across time and space — something in the '70s triggering a childhood memory, for example — than in laying them out predictably.

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.

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.

Nina Paley's delicious Sita Sings the Blues finds solace in autobiography and an animated gold mine in the caverns of an ancient Sanskrit epic.

Gigante represents the sort of artful low-budget accomplishment that could, and should, be coming out of distressingly stingy Chicago once a year — whatever the subject, whatever the sensibility.

You wait for months, sometimes, for a movie to show you something new. "7 Boxes" does exactly that, and while it's no more than a briskly managed bit of escapism, it's a really good example of same.

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.

One of the pleasures of Magic Mike is its egalitarian spirit and dedication to the ensemble.

This is an elegant and eloquent love letter from one master filmmaker to two of his prized idols.

The acting is wonderful throughout, but Alidoosti creates an especially haunting depiction of one woman's adversities in a country, and a marriage, that may not have her best interests at heart.

This exercise in racked nerves makes most of the year's thrillers look like flailing maniacs by comparison.

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.

Already, McKenna-Bruce can work wonders in terms of assured technique and complicated emotions and she’s magically right as Tara.

The documentary carrying the same name as Schiele's painting works like a suspense drama and a slippery chronicle of ownership, theft and vaguely unsettling resolution.

A genuinely charming comedy about real people challenging themselves to create new realities for laughs and a little truth, one made-up scene at a time.

Sunshine is near-classic modern science fiction, hobbled only by a chaotic final reel and some casting missteps in the white-male department.

Watching Loeb opposite Berg, you're reminded of the miracles of chemistry and the luck of the draw when it comes to casting a show -- any show.

The most charming comedy in town, writer-director-editor Katsuhito Ishii's 2003 piece is a modern Japanese variation on "You Can't Take It With You," with some lovely fantastical flourishes.

The most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year...It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.

The film is a remarkable experience on a purely sensory level, and the best of its archival footage - on the track, in private meetings with drivers before the races, from the white-knuckle, over-the-shoulder perspective of Senna himself - is pure gold.

There’s something of the harlequin in Leigh’s conception of this bright, manic young woman.

The film itself isn’t dorky in the least. It’s an elegant and witty rumination on one woman’s quest for romantic fire.

Shooting largely on New Zealand’s South Island, Caro has a beautiful knack for fluid transitions: the witch entering the body of an unsuspecting traveler in silhouetted shadow, for example, or a simple, fixed composition of Mulan riding from one side of the screen to the other, in extreme long shot. The dizzying wuxia martial arts action, with warriors sprinting up, down and sideways, defying gravity, propel the action scenes without overwhelming them.

If The Image Book is just a great whatsit, like the thing everyone’s trying to find in the Mike Hammer picture, why is it bracing and finally very moving?

I can't imagine Anvil! not appealing to anyone interested in any aspect of showbiz, and the drug of fame, and the lives people lead in pursuit of the next fix.

Schwartzman’s film is a strong, cogent examination of outrage, coolly and carefully documented, one text, tweet and reckoning at a time.

This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.

The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

Jenkins and The Visitor”make lovely music together. It’s a case of a veteran character actor slipping on a leading role like the most comfortable pair of pants in the world.

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

One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.

This is a film driven by what makes its characters and conflicts tick. It’s freely fictionalized, and some of it’s overpacked. But “The Woman King” feels human-made, not machine-learned.

Without playing with anyone’s life, A Photographic Memory makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries.

Here's what I most appreciate about Shannon's work with the writer-director Jeff Nichols: the subtlety.

A true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year.

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

Lowery creates a spiritual cousin to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, torn between taverns and common folk and his highborn destiny. There’s a lot here, either on the surface or bubbling beneath it. In its Christianity vs. paganism square-off, The Green Knight lands on a note (and an event) very different from the poem’s.

The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.

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

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

Chalamet is excellent, saving his purest acting for the killer final shot several minutes in length, when we finally see what these weeks with Oliver have meant to him.

Mainly it’s a very solid dance picture, which is the point.

Here's a funny, poignant oddball of a movie, existing on a galaxy far, far away from the likes of "Pacific Rim" or "World War Z" or anything whose computer-generated actions speak louder than words.

The movie finds what solace it can in giving voice to those who escaped this church's grasp.

Vivid, assured and extremely suspenseful.

This is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. You will come out the other side of it a markedly enriched filmgoer.

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

Strange is a word that pops up frequently in Claire’s Camera, a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most of the human interactions, which never go entirely smoothly.

As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak--the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of fun.

Chomet himself has written the gentle waltz theme and other music. The piece glides by, effortlessly.

I Am Love makes no apologies for its style. None needed: The film, a two-hour swoon, is a cry for romantic freedom, perched on the edge of self-parody, as all good melodramas are.

Muylaert's picture relates to many other South American domestic comedies pitting "the help" against the economic overlords, but this one has the grace to humanize everyone on screen. The results are both smart and curious.

If Beyond the Gates were merely a well-intentioned bore, the reality might seem jarring. As is, the coda fits and feels like the only possible ending--proof that surviving to help tell the story of a genocidal nightmare is the best revenge.

As a director Hedges is smart enough to allow his actors to share the frame and interact and let the material breathe.