Peter Rainer

Jackson has a genuine epic gift: Few filmmakers have ever given gross-outs such resplendence.

Sonia may seem happy-go-lucky at the start, but grief steels her. It makes her grow up very fast. She becomes a kind of heroine in the course of the film, which ultimately owes its stature to her presence.

This is a movie about people trying to make sense out of the senselessness of what happened.

For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct.

A movie with ambitions as high-flying as its superhero but a success rate decidedly lower to the ground.

Given the slam-bang slapstick featured in so many of her movies, I have to admit the subtlety and fullness of [McCarthy's] performance in this film did hit me as a shock to the system.

It’s a hyper-aestheticized meditation on the meaning of history, visually astonishing, dramatically stilted. No masterpiece, but quite a feat (and quite effete).

Garrone's messy storytelling compounds an already messy history. He's a powerful filmmaker, though, and a fearless one.

The emotional honesty of this movie rescues it from sentimentality. To Be and to Have is about more than a dedicated teacher and his pupils; it’s about how difficult and exhilarating it is to grow into an adult.

In the Mood for Love has novelty value, I suppose, and plenty of pretty camera moves, but it's not really a movie you can warm to.

Lynch needs to renew himself with an influx of the deep feeling he has for people, for outcasts, and lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while. Mulholland Drive is the product of David Lynch, Inc.

There’s something borderline dishonest about the way Rosi intercuts the oblivious, life-goes-on Lampedusans with the harrowing, too-brief footage of Africans inside the immigration center and aboard the rescue ships. His stylistics keep these two groups cruelly apart, but who knows if this is the way things actually play out?

As summer franchise movies go, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is near the top of the heap.

A film director doesn’t have to shoot the works to hold an audience. If the drama is galvanizing enough, that’s all you need. And what we have here is more than enough: Viola Davis in one of her greatest performances, and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final and most powerful appearance.

[Berger] honors the animation medium by investing it with a full range of feeling – just as if he were making a movie with real people. This is another way of saying that “Robot Dreams” is a film for adults perhaps even more than for children. I

For most of the way, One False Move is taut and sure-footed.

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane brings Goodall’s ineffable and incredible story to vivid life, starting with the aforementioned anecdotes as, now in her 80s and still seraphically beautiful, she recalls with an almost ethereal calm the extraordinariness of her days.

One of the funniest and happiest movies I’ve ever seen about early adolescent girls and their wayward, fitful joyousness.

The role of Fern gives McDormand license to indulge an opaqueness that is often more gnomic than expressive. Perhaps she and Zhao felt that being more demonstrative would shatter the film’s wayward poetic mood.

It’s a great introduction to French cinema for all those who have yet to make its acquaintance.

The dense interweave of relationships, a Farhadi specialty, is continually compelling.

It’s not that this material is, or should be, off limits in a movie. But The Diary of a Teenage Girl isn’t exactly “Lolita.” Heller must think that taking a moral stance is tantamount to selling out. Commercially, she may be right. In every other respect, she’s wrong.

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

If one buys into the whole grace under pressure thing, All Is Lost – the title is its own spoiler alert – is first-rate.

The result is an unprecedented voyage into the tortuous life of our greatest actor, with the actor himself serving as narrator and navigator, as dissembler and penitent.

A heartbreakingly powerful masterpiece.

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.