Peter Rainer

Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.

Past Lives, the graceful debut feature from the Korean Canadian playwright Celine Song, stands a world apart from most of today’s slick movie fare.

It is quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever and, except for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s also Welles’s greatest film – which is saying something.

Jackson is rare among the makers of epic movies in that he knows how to do the small stuff, too. The Return of the King has “heart”--how else could it pump out all that blood?

The sensuous atmosphere often preempts the drama. Neither Elio nor (especially) Oliver are quite rich enough as characters to outshine their surroundings, and, although it’s rare to see a movie of this sort that is so markedly nonjudgmental, the lack of sharp conflict doesn’t make for a terribly invigorating experience.

The fact that neither Stone nor Gosling are tip-top song-and-dance artists is, in some ways, integral to their appeal. If they were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, we might not feel as much of a kinship with them.

Frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating.

High among the film’s many standout virtues is how fully Kapadia has captured the faces of this trio.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

It’s all fitfully sharp and amusing but hardly a masterpiece.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

Sprawling yet cramped, There Will Be Blood may not be the best movie of the year, but it's certainly the strangest. It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime.

It plays out all the usual tropes of the investigative-journalism genre – the hot tips, the clandestine meetings, the hand-wringing about ethics, etc. – without adding a jot of novelty.

In a film that overwhelmingly avoids happy-faced pronouncements, this one sticks out.

Wherever you were schooled, in public schools or private, in the slums or in the suburbs, you will recognize yourself in this film and laugh and beam and cower.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

At one point, Val bemoans how stupid the country is, how dumbed-down everything has become. Allen's new movie is far from dumb, but it has an air of abdication about it.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

Sissako, a Muslim, frames his story as a cry against religious intolerance. One of the characters, speaking of jihadism, says, “Where is piety? Where is God in all this?” It is the central question of this movie – and of much more now than this movie.

The effect is intended to be ghastly – which it certainly is – but I was equally repelled by this film’s conceit. Oppenheimer allows murderous thugs free rein to preen their atrocities, and then fobs it all off as some kind of exalted art thing. This is more than an aesthetic crime; it’s a moral crime.

It's an elliptical tragedy in which the fate of its characters takes on a larger significance while never losing its intimacy.

Smashing for much of the way; as a piece of fantasy moviemaking, franchise-style, it beats the bejesus out of "Harry Potter."

Yes, we can draw links between then and now, but, in a way, Glazer’s film contradicts his own public sentiments. His depiction of this agonized world is so enveloping and unrelenting that, at least for me, it stands wholly alone, untethered to our current traumas.

Leviathan is, in the widest sense, a horror film.

Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.

At its best, the film compares favorably to its obvious antecedents, "Rififi" (which Melville once hoped to direct) and "The Asphalt Jungle."