Sam Adams

The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.

The Zone of Interest is a movie about what you don’t see, and what you are forced to imagine.

It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.

Despite its promise to find fact in fiction, the movie’s made-up characters offer little in the way of ecstatic truths, but there’s a moment when Stefan van Dorp says he realized that the way to keep Dylan from clamming up was to never ask him a direct question. Rolling Thunder Revue leaves it to us to ask the questions, or just sit back and enjoy the show.

It’s easy to make The Meyerowitz Stories sound tortured, and less so to convey the immense but not blinding affection with which Baumbach treats his characters.

Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.

Like the Maysles’ brothers documentaries about Christo and Jean-Claude, which followed the environmental artists and life partners over the course of several decades, Dosa’s movie makes the case that their private bond is inextricable from their public work, and it’s a toss-up as to which is the greater monument.

The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.

This isn’t just a hand-drawn animated feature. It’s a movie that wants you to know it was made by hand.

It’s a movie whose minor characters are cleanly etched without resorting to types, so richly detailed that you can imagine them living full lives off-screen, yet it reminds you that one of the virtues of movies is, or at least can be, their conciseness.

Miyazaki so effectively captures the feeling of a child’s life, inside as well as out, that little ones are often mesmerized by the movie, and adults are returned to a time when they could enjoy mystery for its own sake.

Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations.

Keep The Lights On feels less like a memoir than a collage made from diary scraps, evocative but not prescriptive.

The heart of any concert movie is the concert itself, and in the case of Neil Young Journeys, it's a great one.

It’s almost impossible to conceive of a movie better suited to the present moment of reckoning with sexual abuse, and one better equipped to extend and complicate that extraordinarily necessary conversation. The time for The Tale is now.

Even at his most indulgent, Malick brings something to the movies that no one else ever has, a way of looking at the world that is easily imitated but has never been equaled. It’s worth sifting through the sometimes half-baked philosophizing and breathy poeticism to see through his eyes.

The movie works on you cumulatively, wearing down the impulse to roll your eyes at its familiar parts and leaving you to appreciate how snugly they fit together, and the way the whole thing purrs.

Good One is a quiet movie, not because it has little to say but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what’s left unsaid as to its meticulously crafted dialogue, and to the way silence can be a power as well as a punishment.

Moore’s overarching points hit home with such force that sweating the details would be like picking fleas off a charging grizzly.

For a massive summer tentpole, Fallout’s pleasures are gratifyingly straightforward, direct without being dumbed-down. It’s a meat-and-potatoes banquet, one that doesn’t need to be interesting to be satisfying.

It’s a brief wisp of a movie, but one that’s not easy to shake.

Shot with tiny digital cameras to minimize the sense of intrusion, The End Of Love sometimes feels like a home movie, but that’s also the source of its strength.

It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.

Newcomer Følsgaard is the wild card, but he manages to make the king both villain and victim, sometimes a vindictive schemer, at others far-eyed and helpless, a puppet for the forces behind him.

It’s not a flawless movie, but there’s real magic in it, and that’s more important, and no less rare, than perfection.