Michael Phillips

This is the most satisfying thriller of the year, capping the Bourne trilogy.

It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.

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

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.

It's a little of everything: unnerving, funny in just the right way and at the right times, serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus, straight-up populist when it comes to an increasingly (but not sadistically) violent climax. That's entertainment!

Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ‘61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion.

Amy stays above the tabloid fray, up to a point. Kapadia hasn't made a groundbreaking documentary; it's more like a classy, high-end edition of "Behind the Music."

It's a vivid ensemble experience, and the acting is wonderful.

The film version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came out in the year in which An Education is set, and beyond the hairstyles, there’s something of the willful, gleeful Golightly reinvention expert about Jenny.

It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.

This is one of Zhangke’s peak achievements: pure cinema, and a story of the underworld unlike anything you’ve seen before.

By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.

Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year.

Eighth Grade works you over, audience wincing followed by audience gratification, narrative tension followed by release, crises leading to just-in-time catharsis.

The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself.

Knocked Up is more verbally adroit than it is visually. But Apatow's awfully sharp as a chronicler of contemporary romantic anxieties.

The Departed exists in a movie-place about as far from personal statements as a storied director can get. Maybe those days for Scorsese are long gone. But Scorsese's sense of craft remains sure.

This is one of the finest achievements of the year, and while it's easy to lose your way in the labyrinth, I don't think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is most interesting for its narrative pretzels. Rather, it's about what this sort of life does to the average human soul.

Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Robot already has been pumped up into the contradictory “instant classic” stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique.

No halves about it: Half Nelson is a wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.

The Sun sheds only so much literal light on its chosen subject; it's a film of shadows and silence, the calm before and after the storm. But everything you see and hear carries weight and an eerie poetic undercurrent.

There’s life, lived with serenity and purpose and, yes, plenty of money and property, in the lives depicted in Hung’s film. Binoche and Magimel see to it in every scene, with or without utensils.

A vividly acted, dramatically rich depiction, harsh and beautiful, of life and death in 1940s Mississippi, following two families of intertwined destinies.

A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned Passing into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.

Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, Holy Motors is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer.

Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, The Dark Knight elevates pulp to a very high level.

While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.

The film doesn't so much build as glide, in a pleasing, half-stumbling way, to the first day of school, which links Everybody Wants Some!! to Linklater's previous film, the gentle masterwork "Boyhood."

The miracle is that even with a bit of dramaturgical clunkiness The Past is fluid, intimate cinema. Few directors today can shoot in such tightly confined spaces, with such a determined control over his actors' movements, and make the drama work so well.

Black Bag may be modest, and frivolous, but it’s sharp-witted. Every performance feels right.

In a very full and riveting 85 minutes, One Child Nation assembles a huge story together from many small, crucial pieces.

In the end, both Dahl’s stories and Anderson’s movies require a few common but difficult skill sets of the actors. Wit. Technical precision. Verbal facility. Adroit timing. And some fun, even if it’s tightly prescribed and carefully confined to a certain place in a fastidiously arranged, ever-shifting picture frame.

Hampton and Wright have been more than sensible when it comes to Atonement. They’ve responded intuitively to a tale that is half art and half potboiler, like so many stories worth telling.

This may be the most overtly Christian mainstream picture since "The Passion of the Christ." Unlike that one, though, Malick's comes with a generosity of spirit large enough to get all sorts of people (including non-believers) thinking about the nature of faith and what it's all about.

Decision to Leave, director and co-writer Park Chan-wook’s dazzling, confounding, gorgeously crafted variation on a dangerously familiar film trope, takes its component parts and comes up with something no one has ever built before.

It's unlike any other war film, in any language.

This filmmaker has earned the right to make a movie about why he makes movies the way he does. And with Williams and Dano, especially, he gets performances that can match the technique.

The tone of The Host is slippery in the best way; you're never sure if you're in for a joke or a shock, yet nothing feels random.

The film is unusually free of cant and the usual trappings of war docs. There is no voice-over narration and very little dramatic underscoring. Right or wrong, the filmmakers shave matters of political policy and contextual analysis clean off the finished product, which runs a tight 94 minutes.

The film is about bargains made and broken and re-negotiated. You watch it in an anxious, protective state, regarding the fate of these characters, and this fallout.

Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.

The film is not for the frantic of spirit. Its steady rhythm and even-handed tone threaten occasionally to stultify. But little things mean a lot in this universe, as they should.

Fruitvale Station works because Coogler and his leading man present a many-sided protagonist, neither saint nor unalloyed sinner.

Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching.

A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.

After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.

More than a female singing cowboy, Vargas was ranchera incarnate, whether singing the material of drinking companion Jose Alfredo Jimenez or her own cathartic cries from the heart. The film is a fond but clear-eyed tribute.

Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.

“Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.

It has the air of an officially sanctioned tribute rather than a probing study, but it's stirring all the same.

The result is a narrow slice of a much, much larger story, somewhat akin to the hands-off, eyes-wide-open documentary approach of Frederick Wiseman — if Wiseman were a war correspondent. Rarely has recent global history seemed so far away, yet so present. It’s one of the year’s essential documents.

This book deserved a really good film version, and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (”The Edge of Seventeen,” also really good) captures Blume’s humane wit and spirit, while adding some new emotional and narrative wrinkles.

It is that rare futuristic thriller: grim in its scenario, yet exhilarating in its technique.

Judas and the Black Messiah is my kind of dramatized Chicago history. It’s a real movie, for one thing — brash, narratively risky, full of life and sneaky wit (even if the dominant tone is one of foreboding) and brimming with terrific actors.

Revanche has an unusual rhythm: Once it leaves the grotty urban despair behind for the deceptive calm of the countryside, it relaxes and explores the character’s interior lives.

The results? More evocative than provocative. But evocative is not nothing.

First-time Anderson performers such as Willis, McDormand and especially Norton fold effortlessly into the melancholy end-of-summer vibe.

Sinners is all over the place yet somehow all of a piece. Its themes aren’t new, but the variations feel fresh.

Mainly, Booksmart works because Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are so magically right together.

It is an actors' showcase, without being showy, and Moreau and Tukur reveal radically different personalities with just enough in common to make things interesting.

Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.

It sounds sentimental, icky, even, but Heart of a Dog sparkles with its creator's wisdom and droll philosophical insight.

Much of the action takes place in the couple's haphazard apartment, but the movie really does feel like a movie, with Farhadi's camera unobtrusively energizing the close-quarters exchanges, both verbal and non-verbal. The acting is splendid.

While we all, as moviegoers, experience franchise and sequel fatigue on our own unpredictable timetables, this film brightens the summer without simply going through the motions.

The Marx Brothers in one of their messiest, sloppiest, greatest Paramount comedies. [27 Feb 2015, p.C5]

Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.

Haneke’s vision is gripping. The craftsmanship, classically shaped narrative and icy visual beauty cannot be denied.

Like the modest but wholly winning precursor to “Hamilton” it is, In the Heights works as an essentially apolitical embrace of the American possibility and the American roadblocks to that possibility, in a canny variety of musical styles, from hip hop to salsa

Eighty-four minutes is about right for this style of animation. Even at that trim running time, the silhouette approach won't be for everyone. Ocelot's unity of vision, though, cannot be denied. Your kids, even the preteens, will likely fall headlong into his worlds.

Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" film isn't likely to go bonkers in the popular culture the way "Blair Witch" did. But it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant and more unnerving horror film — the best since "The Babadook," and very likely a 21st century classic in its hardy yet malleable genre.

For about an hour Looper really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point.

A beautifully spun and morally searching tale of interlocking compromises.

It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.

The story lurches forward in spasms. We’re fully in the head space of a messed-up, hollowed-out psyche. Backed by Jonny Greenwood’s sinister wash of a musical score, You Were Never Really Here feels like a waking nightmare.

David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.

Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.

You always get more than one genre with this filmmaker. Volver draws upon all sorts of influences -- a little Hitchcock, a little Douglas Sirk, a little telenovela -- but from those sources Almodovar and his collaborators, both on screen and behind the camera, make an improbably organic whole.

For all its cynicism, the movie floats on a darkly exhilarating brand of escapism. It’s one of the year’s highlights in any genre.

Some may find the film underpowered. Not me. With elegant understatement, Cohen creates a humane testament to reaching out, whatever our habits and routines.

It's one of the year's most pleasurable American movies.

I’m glad Chazelle’s film offers some fresh points of view on its subject; it’s proof he’ll be able to keep his filmmaking wits about him, no matter what genre he’s exploring. He has made his Apollo 11 movie. And it’s a good one.

The best thing in Diggers, besides the close-up of the back end of the Vista Cruiser, is the interplay between Rudd and Tierney. They really do seem like brother and sister, adults yet not entirely grown up.

Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. “Eephus” acknowledges that, but it’s a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.

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

The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.

Are the results funny? In the margins, yes.

Several aspects of Weiner, from Jeff Beal's sardonic music (interpolating, among other cues, the theme from "S.W.A.T.") to the shock-cut editing strategies, nudge the movie toward entertaining if facile mockery mixed with just enough empathy to prevent curdling. It's pretty irresistible viewing, though, which is a pretty sad thing to concede.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

Weirdly touching documentary.

At its best, Wright's film is raucous, impudent entertainment.

For me, it's a sign that a filmmaker is on to something if you love hanging out with the characters as they eat and drink and talk and reveal little bits of themselves through everyday action.