Peter Debruge

There’s no reason a movie about a devil dress should work, and yet Strickland strikes the right tone, inviting laughter by taking it all so seriously.

An immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage... A bloody hilarious (and hilariously bloody) Christmas counter-programmer.

Terrifying...The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.

As princess movies go, this one broadens the studio’s horizons, and as Moana herself sings in the film, “no one knows, how far it goes.”

While Leon’s script can’t help but be episodic as the characters scheme their way out of one scrape after another, their shenanigans are compulsively watchable, brimming with enough details to make this modest film grow large in the memory.

While Premature may seem less professional than your average Sundance movie (much less entry-level studio fare), that doesn’t diminish what’s fresh, vulnerable and true about the film.

Putting the "intelligence" in MI6, Skyfall reps a smart, savvy and incredibly satisfying addition to the 007 oeuvre, one that places Judi Dench's M at the center of the action.

Elements that might feel frivolous on first mention invariably pay off later, as Elliot brings things around in thoughtful and emotional ways, to the point you forget you’re watching people made of Plasticine.

This vividly realized and emotionally satisfying feature ought to make Shinkai a household name — certainly in Japan, and with any luck, in other countries as well.

For all the tyrannical disdain he's shown other filmmakers over the years, von Trier once again demonstrates a mastery of classical technique, extracting incredibly strong performances from his cast while serving up a sturdy blend of fly-on-the-wall naturalism and jaw-dropping visual effects.

Brazilian director Gustavo Pizzi crafts a warm and wonderfully universal love story that comes across surprisingly unconventional for something so familiar.

Director JD Dillard dazzles with see-it-in-Imax airborne sequences, but the meat of the film focuses on the friendship between Brown (“Da 5 Bloods” star Jonathan Majors) and his white wingman, played by Glen Powell, the “Hidden Figures” actor who most recently appeared in “Top Gun: Maverick.”

From the squarish Academy ratio and unconventional framing to composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s tense, bracing-for-conflict score, Warren’s choices frequently surprise, building to an ending that does exactly the right thing with the showdown we could feel coming all along.

Shooting in sleek 35mm, Franz and Fiala have dreamt up a home-invasion scenario where the aggressors lived there all along.

I’d hazard to say it’s one of the most original and creative animated features I’ve ever seen: macabre, of course — how could it be otherwise, given the premise? — but remarkably captivating and unexpectedly poetic in the process.

In light of my own experience with the film, I recommend the following. See it twice: a virgin viewing, simply to take in the strange counterintuitive way the story unfolds, and then again, with a bit of distance, knowing where the journey is headed, so that you might fully appreciate the genius of its construction. I’m convinced that A White, White Day is the work of one of the most important voices of this emerging generation, arriving at a stage where we have yet to learn his language.

The pic owes its believability to Asser, who served as a therapist similar to Oliver’s character, drawing from his experience to shape the world. Asser brings more than just realism, however, crafting the central father-son relationship on the foundation of classical Greek tragedy.

Inspired by prize-winning French author Ernest Pérochon’s 1924 novel, director Xavier Beauvois’ emotionally devastating adaptation — which some may find as arduous as the wartime chapter it depicts — dispenses with a fair amount of the suffering to be found in the book, forgoing the contemporary tendency toward gritty, handheld realism in favor of a more timeless, almost painterly aesthetic.

It’s the work of a true auteur (in what feels like his most personal film yet) presented as innocuous family entertainment.

Director Christopher McQuarrie delivers a formidable concept and several hall-of-fame set-pieces while somehow also managing to tie the storylines back into these movies’ core mythology.

Living isn’t nearly as subtle as it purports to be, although it can feel that way, considering how much these characters hold back — and this, one supposes, is what audiences want from an Ishiguro script.

For those who wish they’d just slow it down and tell a decent story, The Croods: A New Age feels like an assault on the cranium, a loud and patently obnoxious 21st-century “Flintstones” with far more sophisticated technology, but nothing new to offer in the script department.

Racing Extinction tends to be far more effective when presenting its enlightened activists as heroes.

Ruthlessly entertaining ... Lane is a master archive digger, unearthing priceless artifacts, some damning, others endearing.

This sweeping period drama may be up to its eyeballs in costumes and carriages, but it plays with all the brio and jeopardy of a modern-day gangster movie, featuring hack journalists as its antiheroes.

Though the fate of his journey isn’t terribly well communicated, it’s a privilege to have observed Menashe’s world from the inside.

Movies almost never deal with the intricacies of marriage: finances, schooling, finding the right work-life balance. By contrast, The Nest burrows into the minutiae, and the rewards of going along with the O’Haras are worth it, at least for those willing to risk the frustration of a movie that plays by its own rules and doesn’t necessarily believe in happy endings.

Watching Bale and Damon channel those two speed freaks in all of their surly, testosterone-spitting glory is a reminder of how much fun it was to watch Bale play a similar character opposite Mark Wahlberg in “The Fighter.”