Steve Macfarlane

Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.

Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.

The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.

By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.

Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.

Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship.

The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.

Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.

Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.

Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.

The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.

The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody.

When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.

Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.

The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.

As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.

What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.

Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.

The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.

The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.

It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.

Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.

A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of "self-defense," enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.

Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.

It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.

The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.

Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.

The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.