Michael Phillips

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 is not an easy film to watch, nor should it be. It is, however, beautifully made. Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, the co-directors, wrangle their information and lay it out clearly, vividly and with a sharp sense of focus.

See it, and see what you make of this new and quite wonderful example of this in-between cinematic tradition — and of Tony, Micah, Nichole, Nathaly and Makai, both real and imagined.

Painful and unforgettable — a serious and honorable form, perhaps the highest, of "gotcha" journalism imaginable.

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.

The documentary infers a good deal about Mulvihill’s underworld connections and political maneuvers without quite nailing them down.

The results are pretty gripping and occasionally brilliant; its peaks, particularly when Nolan suddenly changes gears, cuts out the sound and reveals the full weight of Oppenheimer’s tormented psyche, reach higher than anything this filmmaker has scaled to date.

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.

Stronger is a movie you need to see, no matter how much you think you don’t need to see it.

Farmiga's film doesn't state things directly, but we sense what is happening to Corinne, and how some turn to fundamentalism for complex and interconnected reasons.

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.

Sing Sing exerts a strong pull on the heartstrings — but without the hard sell or the crafty, manipulative exertion.

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.

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

The acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance.

Wiseman's film allows everyone their say, so that In Jackson Heights becomes one of the truest images of gentrification and its costs on film.

Green has made two very different, extraordinarily efficient and compact movies in a row. That, too, may look easy but is anything but — unless you’re a filmmaker and writer of her particular gifts.

Even with some padding, it’s a whodunit canny enough to take the human stakes inside the artifice seriously. And that allows a fine ensemble of side-eye champs the leeway to make Knives Out funny, too.

There are moments in the second half of After Yang when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after.

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.

Malick's nature documentarian impulse has never been more flagrant than in The New World, yet it has never made more organic sense. The film, which is superb on every technical and design level, has both greatness and fuzzy-headedness in it.

“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.

This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some beautiful actors.

Accomplishes what "Snakes on a Plane" did not: It offers a merrily idiotic movie to go with its willfully idiotic title.

The Coens' film is a wisenheimer, a mordant black comedy. Eden is utterly different, more muted and humane in tone. It won't be enough for some audiences.

Part Joel & Ethan Coen and part John Millington Synge, this grotty little fairy tale casts a deft line and reels you in. I'd see it again just to hear the drug smugglers argue over the use of the Americanism "good to go."

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.

The movie is full, assured and extremely wry.

Crucially, Wang and company found all the right actors to populate a semi-autobiographical tale of familial deception.

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.

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.

Cooper's performance is his best yet. As is Lawrence's (the more crucial role, in fact).

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.

Folk standards such "500 Miles," "The Death of Queen Anne" and "Dink's Song" infuse the movie, and as in the Coens' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" T Bone Burnett has done first-rate work supervising the musical landscape. The film, I think, falls just a tick or two below the Coens' best work, which for me lies inside "A Serious Man" and "Fargo."

David Fincher's film version of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl is a stealthy, snake-like achievement. It's everything the book was and more — more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer.

Certain things in Three Monkeys can only be described as brilliant.

Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at Zombieland. It’s 81 minutes of my kind of stupid.

The movie we have is a movie that works, blending seriocomic domestic material with the larger, more pointed social observations about white liberal guilt, code-switching Black authors (Issa Rae is most welcome as Monk’s primary foil) and a lot more.

Engrossing and weirdly funny.

The Trip isn't much, but it's more than enough.

It fascinates both as film history and as a sobering reminder of how little credit a woman like Lamarr received, even at the peak of her popularity.

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

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.

I don't know if what the Safdies endured growing up was akin to what audiences experience in Daddy Longlegs. But I'm very glad they survived to make a very good film about it.

It's also gorgeously acted by all, and while this may not be one of Kiarostami's finest, the craftsmanship nonetheless is so high, it makes everything else currently in theaters look slovenly.

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

The latest, meticulously atmospheric and wonderfully acted Potter adventure lands happily--broodingly, but happily---near the top of the series heap, just behind Alfonso Cuaron's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

You buy the concept, from start to finish, because it feels strong and purposeful and in sync with Shakespeare's own vision of a malleable, fickle populace and a leader raised by the ultimate stage mother.

Remarkable documentary filmmaking, unflinching and full of unlikely grace.

The funniest American comedy of the summer.

It’s one of the essential titles of the year so far, if only for its sheer kinetic assurance.

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

As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic.

As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we’ve ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen. Only “Fargo” is more satisfying (it’s also a comedy, which this one isn’t).

Shine a Light is one of those lions-in-winter affairs, and Jagger, who has a body fat count of negative 67, can still dance like a maniacal popinjay, and Richards still looks like a satyr who has stayed up all night every night of his adult life.

Each performance in this plaintive work is superb, but Kyoko Koizumi's gently melancholy portrait of the businessman's wife keeps Tokyo Sonata true and affecting, even when the later passages go a little nuts.

Not everything here is perfect; the musical score, by Norwegian composer John Erik Kaada, favors ambient sonic wanderings that smooth over the conflicts on screen. But by the end, you feel as though you’ve truly gotten to know a full range of Kabul residents through their daily routines, joys, recreational diversions (kite-flying, slingshots, the international language of soccer) and bone-deep skepticism about the future.

The movie is madly, wonderfully at odds with itself.

Scorsese has rendered a tragic, forlorn piece of American history, indebted equally to classical Hollywood craftsmanship and the director’s own obsessions with honor, guilt, family, criminal codes and America’s centuries of greedy bloodshed.

This complicated but absorbing tale is not told through primarily American eyes ( Willem Dafoe plays a CIA. figurehead); primarily it's about French and Soviet brinksmanship, and those who succeeded at it, or failed, and one man who died for the risks he took.

To millions, Stritch is the Emmy-winning actress who did "30 Rock," playing Alec Baldwin's mom. Those people who don't know the rest of her story should take the 82 minutes to see this.

This movie, a diary of a freewheeling, far-flung installation art project, combines chance and intuition and a humane eye.

At the end, director Wright wraps the whole thing up with a fairy-tale coda more Shakespearean than Austen-tine. Yet it all works.

Much will be resolved by the final chapter of the trilogy, to be directed by Abrams. As much as I enjoy his brand of canny populism, I prefer Rian Johnson’s wilder, generous, far-flung imagination.

Michael Clayton is a here’s-how-it-happened drama, cleverly but not over-elaborately structured.

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

Keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.

It's fascinating and unexpected both in its simple, looming images and its storytelling priorities, which may not intersect with the priorities of audiences who couldn't get enough of "Se7en."

It's a crazy amount of ground to cover, but only rarely does 13th sacrifice clarity for cinematic energy.

The performances, including a sweetly sincere and easygoing turn from the deaf actress Simmonds, become the audience’s way into Wonderstruck.

But for the performances, and for just about everything Sallitt is up to, the film nonetheless feels full and true.

Nair's film, her best in a long time, is hardly the first to use a chessboard as a symbol of one life's struggles. It is, however, one of the best.

Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.

I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.

I’m inclined to agree with a colleague who told me he could swing with Antichrist when it was simply unstable but couldn’t go with it when it turned insane.

Takes you places an ordinary documentary filmmaker might’ve gone to yet missed completely.

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.

It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama.

The movie belongs to the women, for once, and The Conjuring doesn't exploit or mangle the female characters in the usual ways. Farmiga, playing a true believer, makes every spectral sighting and human response matter; Taylor is equally fine, and when she's playing a "hide-and-clap" blindfold game with her girls, she's like a kid herself, about to get the jolt of her life.

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

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

The rhythm and plotting of Misericordia subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte.

The stage version, the one recorded for posterity here, succeeds primarily as a performance showcase for Waller-Bridge. She’s a fabulous actor and a true stage animal, with a wonderfully expressive voice.

You can go into Anselm knowing roughly as much as I did (very little, or less), and Wenders’ latest nonfiction portrait of an artist and their environment will work, effortlessly, because it’s just plain beautiful.

Sweeney Todd may haunt you in ways you’re not used to with a movie musical. At least not since “Mame.”

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.

The Wall is no endurance test; rather, it presents the facts of the case, adding an eerie low hum to the soundtrack whenever Gedeck's character edges near her outer limits.

Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem, reminding audiences that once upon a time media personalities used to fight The Man, not be The Man.

It makes the dream of flight itself a vehicle for bittersweet enchantment.

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.

The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable.

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.

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.

A real charmer, Me and Orson Welles is the work of a director who takes nostalgia, romantic possibility and the theater seriously, without being a pill about it.

It all flows from the shum. The man's musical and political influence was no illusion.

I've seen the fabulously acted Italian thriller The Double Hour twice now, and for all its intricate manipulations, it stays with me for a very simple reason: The love story at its bittersweet heart is played for keeps.

I admit it: I went into “Barbie” with no firsthand usage or any practical knowledge, even, of Barbie, or Ken, let alone Allan or Midge. “Barbie” is my first Barbie. So. It’s kind of a big deal.

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