Michael Phillips

The result is a splendid black comedy that marks a stylistic leap for its director. Second only this year to the upcoming “Roma,” it’s a reminder of how the movies can imagine a highly specific yet deeply idiosyncratic vision of the past.

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.

What are the odds that the year's most compelling mystery would end up hanging its hat on the year's richest love story

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.

Baumbach’s achievement stings. It also has the sureness of tone and direction of a Chekhov story.

Watching Lady Bird is like flipping through a high school yearbook with an old friend, with each page leading to another anecdote, another sweet-and-sour memory. It’s a tonic to see any movie, especially in this late-Harvey Weinstein era, that does right by its female characters, that explores what it means to be a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, and that speaks the languages of sincerity and wit.

This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.

I never felt emotionally exploited by the terrors on screen. Rather, Beasts of No Nation is an act of gripping empathy.

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.

Some films aren't revelations, exactly, but they burrow so deeply into old truths about love and loss and the mess and thrill of life, they seem new anyway. A Single Man is one such film, one of the best of 2009

It’s dumb to measure the worth of anything by its ability to make you cry, but by the end of Driveways the feelings of the characters spill over into your own experience of watching a small, very quiet, very powerful 83-minute short story of a movie.

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.

The superb United 93, from the British writer-director Paul Greengrass, does not waste time defining the undefinable. Nor does it strain for poetry when, with this story, prose is enough.

It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

It’s best not to expect a life-changing experience from Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. But its tenderness, along with its best jokes, are most welcome right about now.

Geyrhalter made, among others, “Our Daily Bread,” an equally arresting visual essay on industrial food production. We need filmmakers such as this one very badly these days. We need to know what we’re up to as a species, in the name of comfort, convenience, attractive home furnishings and hazardous disregard for the global house we live in.

Whiplash is true to its title. It throws you around with impunity, yet Chazelle exerts tight, exacting control over his increasingly feverish and often weirdly comic melodrama.

The first great film of the year. It’s beautiful but so much more—full of subtle feeling, framed by a monstrous, eroding landscape.

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

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

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

It takes something like a miracle to unlock the magic in his exquisite aggravations, the essence of the human comedy. This film is indeed something like a miracle.

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

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.

Even with its limitations, I find Silent Light spellbinding.

I doubt Gerwig read the 1868 Tribune classifieds, but her film is, in fact, fresh, sparkling, natural and full of soul.

Stone is spectacular, and she's reason enough to see La La Land. Chazelle is a born filmmaker, and he doesn't settle for rehashing familiar bits from musicals we already love. He's too busy giving us reasons to fall for this one.

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.