Richard Brody

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

It may be a hectic, giddy, absurd movie—but, in its evocation of a conspiracy so logical that it is beyond belief, the film dramatizes the power of such an idea to attract true believers.

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

Lady Bird, daring, distinctive, and personal in text and theme, is recognizably conventional in texture and style.

Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity.

Misericordia is, fundamentally, a snappy and satisfying entertainment, a thriller that thrills.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.

For all the film’s roiling action, its inner life is in little grace notes that open enormous vistas of time.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

Along with the wild psychology of “Suburban Fury,” Devor evokes the era’s wild politics, which, for all its ideological phantasmagoria, create unimpeachable realities.

Farsi hasn’t made a rhetorical film of persuasion—anyone who needs a name and a face to be moved by reports of killings is beyond persuading—but a personal memorial for a friend and a public archive of that friend’s work.

It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

The movie seems lived-in; its virtually tactile details and its trenchantly analytical dialogue feel like intimate aspects of the filmmaker's audiovisual, emotional, and intellectual experience.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.

It’s a freestanding, freewheeling work that relies on familiar characters to tell a story closer in substance and tone to the sexual fury, social outrage, wild humor, and outlaw freedom of John Waters’s films, and it has a vociferously didactic streak that’s playful yet focussed.

The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.

For all the movie’s kinetic thrills, “The Fall Guy” is a romantic comedy, and it succeeds in delivering that genre’s patterned gratifications in a fashion that does more than reheat them.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.

Jerry Schatzberg directs the film with a sleek yet relaxed precision that mirrors Joe’s own breezy confidence.

The impasse implied in “The Novelist’s Film” gets a strenuous and sardonic dramatic workout in "Walk Up," which is both a work of art and a theory of art—or, rather, several theories, which emerge in the course of the discussions between characters who are themselves artists or former artists.

Linklater’s direction keeps “Hit Man” brisk and jazzy, as does the jovial force of Powell’s performance.

Amanda Rose Wilder’s nuanced and passionate documentary, about the first year of a “free” elementary school in New Jersey, reveals the glories and the limitations of unstructured classrooms and observational filmmaking alike.

In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.