Michael Phillips

Not all the anachronisms work, but Corsage works anyway because Krieps makes Elisabeth a dimensional woman for all seasons.

Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much anguished history, and Aleichem's inspired literary response to that history, has difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length. Yet Dorman's touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous.

Much of the material in “Ennio” will be a revelation to the garden-variety American fan of film music (i.e. me).

An exorcism movie for the rest of us, the gripping German drama Requiem contains not a single special effect. It doesn't need one. It has terrific actors fully invested in a casual-seeming, docudramatic brand of storytelling, notably Sandra Hueller.

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.

Parts of Sunset Song rank with Davies' very best work.

After the Wedding defies the odds: For once, the bigger the emotion, the truer the moviegoing experience.

We meet a variety of interdependent characters, from tuna vendors to rice experts, all in thrall to Jiro and his sons. I really wish Tokyo were closer.

Project Nim is practically irresistible. The story keeps getting odder and richer and more complicated.

It is a fine and plaintive experience, more modern-day folklore than ethnographic study, and a wonderfully assured piece of cinema.

Polanski turns a conventional conspiracy thriller into a triumph of tone, ensemble playing and atmospheric menace.

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.

Finally! A romantic comedy that works. And not just because of Shakespeare.

Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's remarkable Beyond the Hills stands alone.

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.

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.

The movie putters near the end, but it's a film lover's delight.

Everything within the film connects to neighboring elements, performance to performance to cryptic absurdity (the opening is one of the strangest of the year) to surprisingly heartfelt acknowledgment of the power of love. Whether things work out or not.

Throughout Lady Macbeth we see Pugh's eyes, full of possibility and optimism at the outset, gradually darken. Even her breathing changes. It's a wonderful performance in a very fine film.

Weirdly touching documentary.

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.

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

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.

Half the film, written by Coogler and Aaron Covington, revels in cliches, skillfully. The other half sidesteps them and concentrates on scenes and relationships that breathe easily and draw us in the hard way: not by narrative fiat or bald calculation, but through well-written and shrewdly acted encounters.

It's worth seeing just for the banter between Segel and Hader, which recalls the peak conversational riffs from "Knocked Up."

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

It’s heartbreakingly good.

Priscilla, the movie, exists in a state of hushed wonderment, magical one minute, bittersweet the next.

All I can tell you is this: It’s more than movie enough to justify the theatrical experience.

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.

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

Director/co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton’s film accomplishes something akin to what “Black Panther” accomplished in better times. It broadens the scope of superhero representation and storytelling. It offers an adversary, and a father figure, of teasing ambiguity and complicated rooting interests.

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.

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 consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise.

The film is a mite thin, and occasionally glib. But Baker knows where the bittersweet human comedy lies in this mother, and this daughter.

The director thinks visually, which sounds redundant until you realize how many monster movies are flat, effects-dependent factory jobs. Edwards knows how to use great heights for great effect.

The stakes are important, but the film is carried by a stream of small, acutely observed moments, and the way these actors move, converse, relate and enliven Powers’s best dialogue. It’s a case of getting the best of both worlds: a strong, mellow film of urgent, historically prescient ideas expanded from a juicy theatrical premise.

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

The wonderful thing about Fassbender and Mortensen? Several things, actually. They're effortlessly convincing in period, and they know how to make recessive characters intriguing.

Any movie with the sense, the wit and the visual instincts to introduce Kong the way this one does is fine with me.

The life of Riley is not exotic; her troubles are not unique. But they are rendered with serious imagination by Docter and company.

It is craftsmanship incarnate and the embodiment of tonal unpredictability.

Looks, feels and flows like a real movie. It's better than the last few Pixar features, among other things, and from where I sit that includes "Toy Story 3."

Premium Rush is great fun - nimble, quick, the thinking person's mindless entertainment.

It’s tough-minded and tender-hearted in equal measure. It’s also slyly insightful on the theme of chance elements in solo travel, and unexpected, emotionally tricky connections along the way.

Gripping, visually assured and working far above its summer-sequel paygrade, War for the Planet of the Apes treats a harsh storyline with a solemnity designed to hoist the tale of Caesar, simian revolutionary — the Moses of apes — into the realm of the biblical.

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.

The main thing with Cedar's film, I think, is to approach it not as a farce, not as a drama, not as a mystery, not as any genre in particular. It's a comic nightmare, in the vein of the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," and Cedar proves masterly at playing the stakes for real.

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

A seriously entertaining highlight of the fall season.

The Messenger is not itself grueling, which is practically a miracle. Rather, this pungent little chamber piece offers a full yet delicate range of emotions, and it humanizes its characters so that polemics are left in the background.

Hinds has been ready for a role of this size and shape for years; it was simply a matter of finding it, and its finding him.

Like all good horror films (though it's more of a psychological thriller with a teeming, festering wealth of body-horror preoccupations), this one takes its central theme — cannibalism — as a way into a variety of other matters, other indicators of a society and a psyche under extreme duress.

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.

Lerman's excellent as Marcus, capturing his principles as well as his bullheadedness. Sarah Gadon's Olivia is no less fine.

Not since “Out of Sight” has a sort-of-crime-thriller, sort-of-romantic-comedy led with its sensual interests over its violent ones. That’s my idea of a good trade, and Powell is more relaxed and easygoing on screen here than ever before.

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.

Kim evokes everything from "Seconds" to "Nip/Tuck" here, but his sureness of touch and lack of melodrama make the themes pertinent and vivid. A heartening step up from Kim's previous film, "The Bow."

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.

Do not expect dynamic filmmaking from Love Is Strange. It's about other things, and Lithgow and Molina are splendid, their eyes full of wisdom and experience.

It’s frequently gripping and finally very moving. The director’s innate decency and forthright sense of craft does justice to a painful subject — one with unexpected connections to the 2020 pandemic moment.

Most crime movies, even alleged indies, make it easy for the audience to take sides and establish clear rooting interests. Good Time is better than that: It’s not always easy to take, yet you can’t look away.

The National Society of Film Critics recently cited Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, the nuttiest lil' picture ever released in 3-D, as the best film of 2014, nosing out "Boyhood" by a single vote.

More than any previous screen role, this one affords Damon a chance to work his sly comic chops.

Perry may never make a movie for the masses, whoever they are. But his truest work burrows into weird, blackly comic places few other filmmakers would dare explore.

A functioning, funny, weirdly touching fable of artistic angst and aspiration, a meditation on fame and its terrors and the metaphoric usefulness of masks and huge fake heads.

Throughout Becoming Astrid, August acquits herself brilliantly; the woman we come to know is a tangle of impulses and qualities, and feels vibrantly alive.

The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual.

Good and creepy, The Mist comes from a Stephen King novella and is more the shape, size and quality of the recent “1408,” likewise taken from a King story, than anything in the persistently fashionable charnel house inhabited by the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises.

Jordan Peele’s Us begins so spectacularly well, and sustains its game of doubles so cleverly for most of its two hours, it’s an unusual sort of letdown when the story doesn’t quite hang together and “deliver” the way Peele managed with his 2017 debut feature, “Get Out.”

A tough-minded, empathetic portrait of dreamers on the edge.

Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.

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.

The picture’s gliding energy is something to behold, and when Tyler’s predicaments turn to panic, and then worse, the suspense becomes nearly oppressive. In the second half, it’s a different style and a different focus entirely. There’s a scene in that half, a reconciliation of sorts between father and daughter, that’s just about perfect. And that scene is not alone.

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.

Some may find Results a little light on plot (it is). But with the Smulders character, we're treated to a refreshingly dimensional female lead. Kat isn't one of those aggravating Type A Katherine Heigl cliches. Nor is she a mere attractive doormat. She's prickly, a little lost, but running her own show, and on the road to something better.

As is, Cotillard (nominated for best actress) scrupulously avoids melodrama. There's enough without it, in watching a story of an ordinary woman argue for her dignity, her colleagues' better instincts and her own livelihood.

Marguerite achieves what the protagonist herself never managed: perfect pitch.

A welcome surprise: a supernatural romantic comedy that works, graced with a cast just off-center enough to make it distinctive.

Is Black Swan high-minded? I'm happy to say: No. It is extremely high-grade hokum, which is to say it offers several different and combustible varieties.

It’s a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.

At 85 minutes, it's a tight, sharp achievement, yet one of the things I love about it is simple: It moves to a relaxed rhythm, in sync with its slightly otherworldly subject.

In every good way, thanks primarily to Wong and Park and their chemistry, Always Be My Maybe is pure commercial product, yet it feels authentically alive where it counts.

The movie feels both expansive and confining, depending on the story chapter. Anderson’s visual facility by now has become so intuitive, so fluid and effortlessly right, if you’re at all susceptible to the allure of a moving camera you’ll fall headlong into Phantom Thread.

Be warned: Thirst is one of those pictures that tacks on another chapter just when you think it’s wrapping up.

The film is gripping---an honorable and beautifully acted addition to the tradition of homefront war stories.

The film goes pretty easy on the royals in the end, and it's a flattering portrait of Blair. But it's not credulous. Frears may swim in the political mainstream with The Queen but he does so like a champion channel crosser.

An unusually strong crime thriller, Eastern Promises comes from director David Cronenberg, a meticulous old-school craftsman of a type that is becoming increasingly rare.

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

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

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.

Like "The Notebook," but with an elephant, the unexpectedly good film version of Water for Elephants elevates pure corn to a completely satisfying realm of romantic melodrama.

Wasikowska is wonderful here, unaffected and affecting, but then she has long been a young actress conveying a rich and shadowy interior life on screen. She humanized the Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland," so clearly she can do nearly anything.

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.

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.

Except for the tractors, and the tanks in the later desert battle sequences, Flanders could be taking place centuries ago. Or centuries from now.

The picture's visual style is clean, exact and beautifully photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis.