Stephanie Zacharek

It's Mescal who gives the movie’s surprise stealth performance.

Although Eggers is discreet – the things you don’t see are more horrifying than those you do – the picture’s relentlessness sometimes feels like torment. But if you can survive it, The Witch is a triumph of tone.

Disquieting and skillfully crafted thriller.

Lowery can't always keep the movie from drifting through the mists of pretension, and the tremulous, too-precious score, by Daniel Hart, is sometimes intrusive. Still, the picture's visual imagery--the cinematographer is Andrew Droz Palermo--is so restlessly poetic that it's hard to turn away.

Part noir-comedy, part ghost story, but it's mostly a potent reflection on how where we come from shapes us, in ways we can't understand until we've been away for a long, long while.

A thriller for modern women who identify more with the messiness of human lives than with flattened slogans about how great women, as a monolithic group, are.

It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.

The Descendants is an ultra-polished picture in which every emotion we're supposed to feel has been cued up well in advance. There's nothing surprising or affecting about it. Not even Clooney, who works wonders with the occasional piece of dialogue, can save it.

This is a respectful movie, even a genuflecting one; there’s never a moment when Chazelle fails to let you know he’s doing important, valuable work. But that’s the problem: The movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero.

Even as dystopian dramas go, the picture is arid and lusterless in its more serious moments and unpleasantly kitschy when it tries to soar over the top.

Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in Happy-Go-Lucky. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it.

Am I alone in thinking that computer animation is the work of the antichrist?

At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, Dave Chappelle's Block Party feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism.

Noyce takes a great deal of care with this adaptation. For one thing, he includes as much of Greene's potent shorthand as he can without weighing the movie down.

Step over to the liquor cabinet and mix yourself a good, stiff drink - if you plan on seeing this godforsaken thing, you'll need it.

Mystic River is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.

Together is the kind of picture that makes you feel that there are many good reasons to actually LIKE mankind.

The picture does, in places, feel like an unspoken homage to Kurosawa, though it's certainly its own distinct creation. But I wonder if it more closely resembles another end-of-an-era picture, Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch."

Bridges performance in Crazy Heart, for my money the finest male performance of the year, reels us right back to understanding why: Instead of dressing up words, he sends them out naked. It's everything he subtracts that matters.

Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

There are whispers of Chekhov and Shakespeare in His Three Daughters; both of those writers knew a thing or two about the fractiousness, and the durability, of sisterly connections.

With Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness.

This Barbershop is simply a place where we can all laugh together, sometimes at ideas that veer close to being explosive.

I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.

Tricked up with so many points that there's barely any flow to it.

Anderson has pulled off the most elusive of goals: He's made a nonchalant masterpiece, a movie that feels dog-eared and loved before it's even reached our hands.

Limbo, tender and searching, shows what can happen to people when they’re between points A and B, a nowheresville that can change the shape of a life forever. It’s also about the meaning of musicianship, of how songs and sound can define who we are and where we come from.