Peter Rainer

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.

One of the most dreamily unsettling documentaries ever made.

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

DiCaprio's performance is a revelation only for those who have underestimated him. In Scorsese's previous films, "The Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator," he seemed callow and miscast, but here he has the presence of a full-bodied adult. He's grown into his emotions.

Kim exalts nature--life’s passage--without stooping to sentimentality. He sees the tooth and claw, and he sees the transcendence. Whether this is a Buddhist attribute, I cannot say, but the impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

Best where it counts the most - in its recognition of how difficult it will be for Dan and Drey to turn their lives around.

An amazing, galvanic experience. It's about the hushed-up story of Benito Mussolini's first wife and child, but no one will ever mistake this movie for a standard biopic. It's too raw, too primal.

As one of Booker's supporters notes, it's a sad day when academic success is used to denigrate an African-American.

Harrowingly straightforward.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.

So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast

The film periodically risks turning into a swoony fantasy. But it is a fantasy we can favor because it’s one we all can share.

All in all, a visual and musical feast.

The movie is admirable in its ambitions; in its execution, less so. The difficulty in making an “intimate” epic is that the characters have to fill out the frame in ways that are both highly individualized and symbolic. They have to be both lifelike and larger-than-life. In Mudbound, this combination works only fitfully.

The film is a real rarity, made even more so by the fact that what has moved us so profoundly are a bunch of pop-eyed plasticine figures.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

This comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.

It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not, on some level beyond reason, succumb. The Pursuit of Happyness is an expert piece of calculation: a male weepie engineered for the whole family.

The emotional stakes are large-scale, and Farhadi honors them by delving into their intricacies.

One of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made.

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

If I had to give a two-word review of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, it would be: "Wow! Huh??"

Spielberg is such a supersleek craftsman that what might have been intended as a deep dive instead comes across for the most part as a sprightly gloss.