Stephanie Zacharek

One of the greatest fantasy films of all time.

Instead of taking control of the movie in any overt way, Clooney commands our attention by swimming just beneath its surface. He's a disappearing act with staying power.

This is a movie in which expertise and good sense win the day; no one is rewarded for stupidity or cruelty. And in that sense, Knives Out isn’t just a beautifully made diversion. It’s also a utopian vision.

Movies don’t have to be bigger and bolder than we ourselves are. Haley’s films are things we can reach toward – there’s an intimacy and candor about them that feels welcoming.

Florid, passionate, frequently hilarious and loaded with messy emotions that nobody in his or her right mind should even attempt to explain, it's operatic in its nutball intensity.

It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.

Working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino takes pleasure in teasing us, toying with us, getting us all turned around. This is his most buoyant movie.

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it.

By the end you feel you've learned something about the man, yet his mystique emerges intact.

Le Havre proceeds from the usual Kaurismäkian premise: Things are only going to get worse, so why not just go with it?

Like most of Payne’s movies (Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska), The Holdovers is merely coated with a thin veneer of misanthropy that Payne methodically buffs off to reveal actual human feelings. It's the mechanism that works for him, but that doesn’t make it a good one.

The majesty of nature is Embrace of the Serpent’s true star, and Guerra captures the glory of every leaf, every inch of sky, in pearlescent black-and-white as luminous as the lining of a clamshell. In Guerra’s eyes, as in Karamakate’s, the forest is magic itself—and it’s no less remarkable for having sprung from something as lowly as the earth’s soil.

The picture has an ungainly shape, and certain dramatic notes don’t resonate with the boldness they need: when a tragedy strikes, the characters barely react. The story keeps moving like a freight train chugging along the track, and the effect is disorienting. But even when Lee makes a flawed film, his spirit is a kind of braille, a code you can feel and see.

This isn’t just a story about displaced communities, it’s about displaced souls, people so connected to history that they never feel quite at home in the present. Majors and Fails give fine performances here, in tune with each other but also with the pulse of the city that surrounds them.

This is a supreme example of how a filmmaker can make a work of fiction based on fact that, without didacticism or heavy-handed moralizing, leaves us feeling more connected not just with history but with what makes us human in the first place.

Isle of Dogs...buckles under the weight of its own finicky whimsy. By the end, you might feel exhausted, like a border collie who’s worn a circular groove in the carpet. And you didn’t even make the movie–you only watched it.

You don't have to believe all of it - or even any of it - to enjoy the rascally charms of Mr. Nice.

Tillman is clumsy in his handling of a few scenes, and considering what these kids are up against—junkie moms, drug-dealing pimp neighbors—the ending might be a little too implausibly upbeat. But Tillman seems to know that we need to go home feeling hope for Mister and Pete, who, it turns out, aren't so easily defeated.

Sachs and his performers know that the perfect marriage is a thing of phantom beauty — it doesn't exist, yet we persist in believing that someone out there must have it.

Hou uses very few close-ups here, preferring to tell his story mostly through movement: combat, dance, the act of passing through a landscape of satiny green firs or silvery birch trees and just watching. Shu conveys complicated feelings — longing, regret, anxiety — with little more than the tilt of her chin or the set of her shoulders.

Even if Captain Phillips treads into some ideologically rough waters, there's one thing that's hard to find fault with: Hanks gives a performance that goes from good (through the first 124 minutes) to extraordinary (in the last 10).

As usual for Farhadi’s films, A Hero is beautiful to look at. Even the interior scenes are brushed with a golden light, and sometimes that light feels like a benediction. But as humanist works go, A Hero demands extra measures of patience on the viewer’s part.

The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

To be bewildered by Upstream Color is to be human; the story is obtuse by design, though the filmmaking is X-Acto precise. But it's a bloodless movie, and its ideas aren't as tricky or complex as Carruth's arch, mannered approach might suggest.

Even if Blade Runner 2049 never forgets where it came from, it somehow keeps losing its way. The picture’s moodiness is excessively manicured; this thing is gritty only in a premeditated way. Mostly, it feels like a capacious handbag, designed with perhaps too many extra compartments to hold every cool visual idea Villeneuve can dream up.

Realistically, it’s probably not possible to dance your cares away. But the determination of these girls makes you believe in it.

A quiet, raggedly beautiful mini-epic, Eden isn't a success story; it's a failure story. But it's also a glittering acknowledgement of the fact that failing is the only path toward growing.

It's a fine-grained picture that goes for the sideways laughs rather than the straight-ahead ones. This is sketch comedy as method acting.