Stephanie Zacharek

This is a teasingly complex political thriller, but it's also a sort-of romance.

Even by the out-there standards of "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls," Paul Verhoeven’s latest, Elle, is a thing to behold. Part thriller, part obsidian-black comedy, part cerebral firebomb, it’s confrontational, terrible and glorious. You almost can’t believe such a picture exists.

Borat is an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is.

Minari is a gentle, lovely picture, one that acknowledges there really is no “immigrant experience,” beyond the pure human experience of finding yourself adjusting to a new environment.

The film Hawke has made — which borrows its title, though little else, from J.D. Salinger — works both as a celebration of Bernstein, whose spirit is at once gentle and boldly generous, and as a way of exploring creativity and the meaning it can have in our lives.

Through it all, we’re supposed to relish the emotional complexity of the story, or maybe even just its dark humor. Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core—though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality.

The director's last film was the superb 2012 Barbara, also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld, another romance with a mystery built in; Phoenix is an even finer piece of work, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect.

This is a movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.

It's a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way - by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.

Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.

Johnson and her father share a sense of humor, and the bond between them informs the finest moments of Dick Johnson Is Dead. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the friend crying, alone, in the church, so verklempt he forgot he was in a movie — one place where this documentary’s joyful dark humor isn’t as amusing as it should be.

Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history.

Once you start reckoning with Anomalisa’s obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off. A little puppet pain goes a long way.

It's a cross between confidence and vulnerability that's hard for an actress to pull off, but Streisand hits the note perfectly. And her greatest moment of acting, I think, is also the picture's strongest musical number.

Suspenseful in a few places and absurd in plenty of others; if she were a real person, Lisbeth Salander herself would have no patience with it.

If Stigter’s film is at times somber, it’s more often ruefully poetic.

A lush, modern valentine to old-fashioned sentiment, and to old-fashioned moviemaking, too.

While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.

That’s the magic of Leigh; it’s white magic, not the dark kind, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.

Huppert is extraordinary — she reveals everything even when you think she’s showing nothing — and she’s the perfect actress, right now, for Hansen-Løve’s fine-grained perceptiveness.

Train Dreams is stunning to look at, the kind of film where each blade of grass, each jagged tree branch, each mini ripple of a rushing river, seems to sing out as an individual. Yet somehow, none of these images come off as overdone or fetishistic. What Bentley keys into, above all else, are his actors, particularly Edgerton.

It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us; telling a story effectively is hard enough. Best of all, Cooper has succeeded in making a terrific melodrama for the modern age.

It’s a pleasure — both a delight to watch and a great piece of pop scholarship, an entertainment informed by a sense of history and of curiosity.

Sordi is an elegant comic actor in the vein of America's William Powell; the world may confound him, but it can never rumple him.

The Father is a horror movie with not a single supernatural element: All of its terrors are implied, drawn from the tricks the human mind plays on itself, even more so in old age.

There’s no such thing as perfect love in families; often it’s the fine threads of tension that actually hold things together. Granik’s "Winter’s Bone" was greatly admired for the way it presented “ordinary people” of the Ozarks. But Leave No Trace is better.

A direct and heartfelt piece of work. It's conventional, maybe, in its sense of filmmaking decorum, but extraordinary in the way it cuts to the core of human frustration and feelings of inadequacy, reminding us how universal those feelings are.

Parallel Mothers is a movie of infinite tenderness, that rare ode to motherhood that acknowledges mothers as women first and mothers second.

Bridges knows just what he’s doing, and with the splendid West Texas waltz of a drama, Hell or High Water, British director David Mackenzie has given him the perfect hook on which to hang his hat.

Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.

Poor Things might have benefited from some trimming—it takes a little too long to get cooking—but it’s Lanthimos’ finest movie so far, a strange, gorgeous-looking picture that extends generosity both to its characters and the audience. And Stone—so dazzling in The Favourite—provides its thrumming pulse.

It’s sometimes boring and pretentious and often a little silly, almost to the point—almost—of parody. But even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it.

The movie is smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive.

It’s been said that if the U.S. couldn’t tighten its gun-control laws after Sandy Hook, it never will. But Newtown refutes hopelessness, making its case less with words than with faces it’s impossible to forget.

Birdman is a marvelously entertaining picture, a work of "look at me!" bravado that's energized every minute. Its proficiency, the mechanically fluid kind, works against it in some ways.

If Lorne is nothing else, it’s a portrait of a guy who knows when to zig and when to zag.

The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.

Everything about Pain and Glory is awake and alive, and Almodóvar’s nerve endings become ours, too.

Gordon's best not-so-secret weapons, though, are his two stars: Vaughn and Witherspoon are an inspired pairing, not least because they're such a mismatched set of salt-and-pepper shakers.

Lord of War skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.

Smolders with more reserved passion than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Lynch's Hollywood is a grand old girl, but she's one with some very treacherous curves. To trace the contours of her sensuality, you need a camera as sensitive as a set of fingertips. Lynch's is.

Mission: Impossible—Fallout may be the best Mission: Impossible movie since the first, made in the dawn of the cat-Internet age, 1996, by Brian De Palma. Or perhaps it’s just the one with the mostest: even by the franchise’s extravagant standards, Fallout throws off Hope-diamond levels of grandeur.

This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making.

Brash and sweet, We Are the Best! captures perfectly the aimlessness of adolescence, the waiting to become something that's so often intertwined with the desire to make something, to leave your mark on the world in some small way.

It’s the most truthful movie you’ll see in 2019, because it swears on nothing but the Gospel of Bob, and in more than 50 years of singing, songwriting and much, much touring, he has never promised us anything beyond pleasure and illumination.

It’s meditative, mournful and gently funny, and celebratory, too, but in a muted way. If you don’t know what kind of movie you’re in the mood for, this may be the one. It’s a tonic for listless times.

Nomadland isn’t a manifesto — there’s nothing dutifully somber about it. And although it doesn’t romanticize life on the road — for one thing, it shows that you need to be comfortable defecating in a bucket — joyousness is its chief characteristic. Like "The Rider," it’s a window into a specific world, with one key character as a guide.

So much modern animation is technically brilliant and yet comes off as cold and indifferent. But Wallace, Gromit, and the people and creatures in their world always look warm to the touch. Someone made, and moved, all those bunnies by hand. It's impossible NOT to believe in them.

Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.

There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.

There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.

If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.

Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.

The real strength of The Kid with a Bike is the cautious but generous warmth of its storytelling. Not much happens in The Kid with a Bike, but it leaves you grateful that the worst doesn't happen - with these characters, you might not be able to bear it.

To see this movie in the theater is a special, shuddering pleasure, a tilting-at-windmills affirmation of what movies, seen big, can mean. This is movie as black magic. To give yourself over to it feels a little dangerous. It also feels great.

James — the director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters — gives us a sense of Ebert as a man who kept reinventing life as he went along — out of necessity, sure, though he also took some pleasure in adapting. It couldn't always have been easy, but that, too, is part of the story.

There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.

The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one.

So intrinsically rich that it doesn't need any metaphors.

Now that Pitt no longer has brash youth on his side, he's digging deeper and doing more with less. It's the kind of acting - understated but woven with golden threads of movie-star style - that gives us more to look at rather than less.

Strickland builds the film, artfully, into a complex and ultimately moving essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love.

Roy-Lecollinet’s face, both haughty and welcoming, both anchors the movie and sets it free in the wind. No wonder Paul can’t shake the memory of it. It’s the thing that will age him before his time—and also keep him young forever.

Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight.

In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.

But even here, in a role that doesn't ask much of Wahlberg, I find plenty of evidence that he's among the finest actors of his generation.

The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR - and not human lives - were the most important consideration during wartime.

Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs.

Sometimes a movie reaches the unreachable in us, not because it’s a grand masterpiece but because it’s as quiet and intimate as air.

What really registers is how frustrating Krisha’s erratic, furtive behavior would be if she were part of your family — and how deeply sympathetic she is because, thankfully, she is not. Fairchild’s performance is key to the movie: Krisha is witty and chatty one moment, and shut down like a deserted fairground the next.

More universal than it is alternative, except in one sense: There's nothing else on the contemporary movie landscape like it.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is compelling, sometimes in a hypnotic, sleepy-bye way.

The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape—a shape you could almost trace with your thumb, as if it were made of clay and not images, air, and feeling.

Luhrmann has sourced some rare Super 8 footage from the Graceland archives. This newfound footage, painstakingly restored, forms the fabric of EPiC, which, despite Luhrmann’s penchant for hurtling over the top—or maybe even because of it—manages to feel profoundly intimate.

May December could have more fire; it could be even more twisted. But it’s seductive enough to keep us following along, one betrayal after another.

Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.

It’s an unyielding picture in some ways; you might long for a sliver of optimism tucked amid its layers of grim truth. But then, all its hope lies in Anne’s face, as uncompromising as an early crocus. This is the face of a woman who deserves much more respect—for her body, for her very life—than her society affords her.

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

The Big Sick succeeds in doing so many things that romantic comedies — to the extent that they’re even made anymore — have failed to do for years.

The magic of Summer Hours is that even in its elusiveness, it gives us something to hang onto.

Talk to Her is much better than Almodóvar's "bad" movies. But it never soars as freely as his best ones do -- it has a very trim, manicured wingspan.

Gripping, and it's moving, but it isn't particularly subtle. There's a strong thread of tabloid drama running through its core -- but at least it's sensationalistic storytelling with a heart.

It's a performance that screams "Look at me!" louder and bigger than an elephant dick. And every bit as subtle.

Sentimental Value is a drama about one family, but it could also be a message in a bottle for the greater world. Larkin, a proto-punk, poked fun at the way humans, just by procreating, pass their worst traits to their children and beyond, through infinity. Trier has much more hope, and his tender punk manifesto echoes something the English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller said more than three centuries ago: Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there.

To live with, and in, All of a Sudden is to match heartbeats with these two women for a few hours. There are worse ways to spend your time.

Whatever allure The Son has lies in its very remoteness, in its resolute refusal to show us all but the most delicate emotional vibrations. It also moves very sluggishly.

His (Miyazaki) stories, and often his character design, just leave me cold. I know I'm supposed to be magically transported by his fanciful tales and his whimsical grandiosity, but they make me listless.

Part of the movie’s understated triumph lies in its casting: Hawke is an actor who clearly cares, and worries, a lot–the tree of life is practically etched into his forehead.

Wright has orchestrated every swerve and near smashup—and one glorious foot chase—with precision, a rarity in action filmmaking these days.

As co-director LeBrecht, himself a Jened attendee, puts it in the film, “This camp changed the world, and nobody knows this story.”

This is a big movie served up in a surprisingly small, intimate package.

No Other Choice is both too dully observed and too aggressively slapsticky to hit its mark. It’s a missed opportunity dressed up with proficient filmmaking.

Something of an odd bird, a cross between a documentary, an art film and a personal reflection on aging.

It's the perfect marriage of music and animated movement. But even when there's no music playing in Waking Life, the movie's lyricism is sustained by the way it looks and feels.

Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Old Man & the Gun), in addition to fleshing out the story, puts his stamp all over it so confidently that the results could be annoying, if they weren’t so enchanting.

A great action movie, exhilarating and neatly crafted, the kind of picture that will still look good 20 or 30 years from now.

The movie's final moments are the equivalent of the half-jubilant, half-mournful thrill you get when you close the cover of a book you've savored.