Ty Burr

It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.

It’s when Toy Story 3 becomes a jailbreak movie that it comes into its own.

A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.

Synonyms turns increasingly oblique in its final half hour, as it dawns on Yoav that the door he’s hammering at may never open and let him in. But the sight of this desolate young man strutting about Paris in a borrowed orange trenchcoat is not one you’ll soon forget, nor the exhilarating film that swirls around him.

Baby Driver is the best time I’ve had at the movies in months, and, if the world is too much with you (as it is for many of us these days), you may feel the same. It’s a dazzling diversion, a series of cinematic highs that achieve the giddiness of not great art but great entertainment (and thus art through the back door).

This is a slacker detective story, emphasis on the slack, and if you can downshift into its loping rhythms, it's pretty wonderful.

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

The movie sprawls, almost entirely in a good sense, and it lets the audience draw its own conclusions. None of them is likely to be rosy.

Whenever a band plays in “Persian Cats,’’ the director treats us to a fast, vibrant montage of Iranian faces and street scenes -- as if to say, look, this is who we REALLY are.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.

A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

On the whole it’s daring and committed, and in Röhrig’s tremendously focused performance, it honors all the saints we’ll never know. And that’s worth any risk.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

You don’t get groundbreaking cinema from Fences, but what you do get — two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama — makes up for that.

Queen of Versailles is still worthwhile, not because it questions all-American entitlement but because it prompts us to think hard about what, exactly, we believe we're entitled to.

Good One takes advantage of the summer lushness of the Catskills, Wilson Cameron’s nature-centric cinematography and Celia Hollander’s ruminative acoustic score to cast a spell over its 89 sure-footed minutes.

Soul is messy, maudlin, funny, ridiculous, and poignant. In other words, it has soul.

An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.

A work of quiet, crystalline empathy, I’ll See You in My Dreams is notable for reasons that nearly overshadow its modest yet indisputable charms. It’s a drama about the kind of people invisible to the movies and much of our culture — senior citizens in the early evening of their lives — and it grants its characters individuality in ways that are almost wholly free of cliché.

It is a joy for audiences seeking entertainment, an ingenious work of craft for those paying close attention, and a wallop of feeling that’s still too rare coming from a cartoon.

Crowley and his creative team — cinematographer Yves Bélanger, designer François Séguin, composer Michael Brook, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux — build a cinematic snow-globe of nostalgia, a portrait of two worlds that aches with family lost and freedoms found. It is a beautiful film to experience.

The film is valuable for gently insisting on both the indignities and the dignity of old age, and it’s invaluable as a keepsake of a most individual screen presence. It is, simply, a lovely time at the movies.

A mesmerizing coming of age adventure in an elemental setting, Theeb becomes both more allegorical and more specific to our historical moment the more you think about it.

The movie’s a social history, a love story, and a call to arms. It’s very sad and it’s very good.

Think of it as "Glee" without music. Without a net, too.

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head.

The only question his movie doesn't ask is "What do you want your next car to run on?" That's up to you.

Essential viewing for anyone who wants to know the roots -- and perils -- of modern political dissent.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

Crazy Love doesn't downplay the awfulness of what happened , but it also knows a good media circus when it sees one.

The Butler is a remarkable, even exhilarating movie not for its inherent Gump-itude but for the social portrait that gimmick allows.

What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.

A cleareyed, disarmingly tender adolescent romance that bears comparison with the best of its genre.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th.

A broad, foursquare piece of populist filmmaking that happens to be tremendously moving.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why the film was never produced: The director was a lunatic.

It’s well worth seeking out for older kids who don’t mind reading subtitles, their parents, and any adults who can appreciate a good story movingly and creatively told.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

If The Trip to Italy begins shakily, it ends with expansive bliss, a father and son reconnecting off the shores of Capri as Gustav Mahler’s art song “Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (I Am Lost to the World)” sends everyone heart-stoppingly home.

Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.

Should you see it? Of course you should. Anything Miyazaki does is worth your time. But the movie’s a gorgeous, problematic anomaly in an illustrious career.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

This may not be the greatest movie version of the novel, but it's possibly the truest.

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

The deeper Tim’s Vermeer takes you, the peskier and more profound the questions get.

Trust me on this: Go.

The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.

Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”

American Sniper may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.

No one, but no one, makes movies like Bong, a South Korean master who combines baroque concepts, epic visuals, international casts, and a sense of humor that can make you laugh out loud in the middle of the darkest doings.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

The Babadook remains a potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood. The ending, remarkably, gets to have it both ways, reminding us that some of the scariest monsters are the ones we learn to live with.

Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

As the sensation of imminent doom spreads from character to character to character, She Dies Tomorrow takes shape as an allegory with just enough genre trimmings to keep us off balance.

Australian rocker Nick Cave talks of how discovering Cohen during his small-town youth "just changed things." Bono calls the singer "our Shelley, our Byron."

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

As a movie, The Post is engrossing and enjoyable, if falling slightly short of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” As a period piece, it couldn’t feel more eerily of the moment.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.