Michael Phillips

Your kids may will fall in love with it, if you help them find it.

The film is a gem — a supple, unpredictably structured and deeply personal portrait of its primary subject, the photographer, visual artist and activist Nan Goldin.

In the end, both Dahl’s stories and Anderson’s movies require a few common but difficult skill sets of the actors. Wit. Technical precision. Verbal facility. Adroit timing. And some fun, even if it’s tightly prescribed and carefully confined to a certain place in a fastidiously arranged, ever-shifting picture frame.

The result is a mixture of unified atmosphere and lived-in character study, and while Vasiliu’s role is not as indelible as that of her co-stars, Marinca’s Otilia and Ivanov’s steely abortionist are just about perfect.

The style is brash, and it works. Tucker and Epperlein illustrate Yunis' account of his eight-month imprisonment, much of that time spent at the notorious Abu Ghraib compound, with literal illustrations--pages seemingly torn out of a Frank Miller graphic novel.

It sounds sentimental, icky, even, but Heart of a Dog sparkles with its creator's wisdom and droll philosophical insight.

A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit.

If all this sounds difficult to track, well, sort of. But not really. It’s a flow, not a plod, and Stratman isn’t after conventional linear storytelling.

Dear White People isn't perfect. And yet the flaws really don't matter. This is the best film about college life in a long time, satiric or straight, comedy or drama.

It’s a rare movie that settles, quietly, into some part of your own experiences and memories without a speck of narrative contrivance gumming up your response to the story on the screen. Past Lives is that rarity.

Writer-director Perry has made a bracing and very Roth-y study of ambition and itchy literary yearning. In another time and another world, Robert Altman captured the essence of William Faulkner's landscape by filming a non-Faulkner crime story, "Thieves Like Us." This is comparable to what Perry has done here.

It's more than a first-rate film showing up and doing its job. It's cathartic, and moving, without any of the usual obvious contrivances or manipulations.

Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year.

It's one of the year's most pleasurable American movies.

Leigh's film — one of the year's best — honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

The stories we hear in 24 City belong to its specific place, but they are universal.

Flight is exciting - terrific, really - because in addition to the sophisticated storytelling techniques by which it keeps us hooked, it doesn't drag audience sympathies around by the nose, telling us what to think or how to judge the reckless, charismatic protagonist played by Denzel Washington.

Unnervingly good, Little Children is one of the rare American films about adultery that feels right--dangerous, hushed, immediate.

It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it'll seem.

It's unlike any other war film, in any language.

See it, and I dare you not to care about what happens to these kids, these Yankees of chess.

Roma gives you so much to see in each new vignette, in every individual composition, in fact, that a second viewing becomes a pleasurable necessity rather than a filmgoing luxury.

Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone.

Fruitvale Station works because Coogler and his leading man present a many-sided protagonist, neither saint nor unalloyed sinner.

Beautiful, witty, sad and hopeful.

Nickel Boys is a subtly radical act of adaptation, with a striking intuitive and meticulous visual strategy, and the result is fully equal to Whitehead’s achievement but in a new direction.

Dense like a detailed graphic novel in the Chris Ware or R. Crumb vein, but a real movie in every way, Consuming Spirits is a strange and wormy accomplishment, the sort of personal epic only the most obsessive of cinematic madmen undertake, let alone complete.

The whole movie, a feast of ensemble wiles and stunning hair, is juicy, funny and alive.