Michael Phillips

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.

A rich and troubling documentary highlight of the year.

It is a bracing and chaotic and memorable experience.

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.