Michael Phillips

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.