Michael Phillips

The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.

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

Above all, there’s Collette, who sometimes can overdeliver a dramatic moment or an aghast reaction, but in this storytelling context she’s fabulous. It’s a fierce performance with a human pulse, racing one minute, dead still the next.

This is a poetic-realist vision with grace notes of wit and surrealism. It is a calm, visually assured statement of shared rage.

It is a black comedy, among the blackest. It is also more grueling in some stretches than anything in "United 93."

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.

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.

It’s zippier than “Incredibles 2,” and nearly as witty as the first “Lego Movie,” with whom it shares a very funny screenwriter, Phil Lord.

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.

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.

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 nearly impossible not to respond to The Color Purple and Celie’s odyssey, in any version. But it’s also possible to wish for a movie that felt more like real life, and real lives, in all their emotional colors, without so much showbiz.

Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.

Both funny and sad, often in the same glance-averted instant. See it with someone you'd trust to stick around in an avalanche. It's one of the highlights of 2014.

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.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.

The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.

As a visual capture of a tour supporting an album, “Renaissance” may not hold a candle to her remarkable, 65-minute visual album “Lemonade” that appeared, more or less out of nowhere, in 2016. But it’s holding an entirely different sort of candle, or rather two candles. One’s a concert movie; the other’s a how-I-made-the-concert-and-this-movie movie.

Fallen Leaves, by contrast, strikes an adroit balance between dark and light, stoicism and optimism. There’s a stealth buoyancy at work.

Much of Nebraska is ordinary prose, but the best parts are plain-spoken comic poetry.

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.

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

The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.

Here's one of the strongest feature film debuts in a long time, in any genre.

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

"All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.

The cave exists to provoke awe in mere mortals. The camera pauses at one point to take in a stalagmite reaching up to touch, nearly, a stalactite and the inevitable association is with Michelangelo's Adam and the hand of God.