Ty Burr

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

A cruelly precise, often bleakly comic account of upper-middle-class privilege coming unglued when the cosmos throws a curveball.

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.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

The lead character has been aptly renamed Walker, and, as played by Marvin in what may be the actor’s most emblematic performance, he strides through Los Angeles like a gangland golem: watchful, unstoppable, frighteningly silent.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

Room unfolds with the privilege of seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time, which is maybe the best we can ever expect from a medium like the cinema.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

Krisha sucks you into its gradually worsening family dynamic with a confidence of style and a maturity of observation that is remarkable in a home-brewed Kickstarter movie. At times you laugh in horror. At other times you shrink from the screen. There are truths here.

Haute Cuisine proves the limits of cinema: It’s a movie that needs Taste-o-Vision.

The Inheritance is a welcome reminder of film’s flexibility as a medium of protest, a vessel of cultural history, and an agent of change.

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.

Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of Little Men, but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.

A haunting experience, one that requires patience (and then some) but that offers spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic rewards beyond the immediate power of words to describe.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

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.

Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

Trust me on this: Go.

Odd, moving, strained cinematic poetry.

The echoes of Chekhov are earned, the strains of Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor don’t feel at all out of place. The final sequence leaves Sinan and the audience at a crossroads between giving up and carrying on, as absurd as the latter is and always will be. That choice haunts everyone: The hero, his creator, and all of us watching in the dark.

Despite a similar setting-the never-never land of the Arabian Nights — the new movie is hipper, faster, more topical.

As its title implies, This Is England isn't a hyperstylized head-trip a la "Trainspotting" but a straightforward calling to account.

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

Hollywood political thrillers have absorbed this movie's you-are-there filmmaking grammar. Rarely have they re-created its fire.

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).

All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

She's (Hushpuppy) trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does. That balance is the key to the movie's magic.

A miniature masterpiece of documentary observation.

The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.

Here, [Park] takes a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” and applies it to his home country with malice aforethought. The result is an entertainment that draws blood.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

Atlantics is a stunner that sneaks up on you: A folk tale, a police procedural, a ghost story, a love story, a fable of empowerment — Mati Diop’s directorial debut never stops evolving in new directions and meanings. It’s a work of magical realism close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other masters of the game, and the confidence with which it has been made is thrilling.

Wake in Fright is a monster movie, and the monster is us.

So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood.

A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.

Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.

There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest.

Mitch Winehouse has disavowed this movie and his portrayal in it, but it’s hard to argue with the scene where he shows up on St. Lucia, where Amy has fled from the hounds of the global media, with a reality-show camera crew of his own.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.

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

It’s not her greatest work but it’s warm, witty, and thorough. It’s a little like visiting a beloved old aunt who you suddenly remember has more smarts and creativity — more balls — than anyone else you know.

At times, Eighth Grade plays like a nature documentary about life and death on the savannas of suburbia.

One of the best, most karmically satisfying comedies of the year, much to the chagrin of the people who are in it.

The movie captures that heady adolescent sense of time stopping and the moment mattering while standing far enough back to let us acknowledge all the pitfalls Marieme is moving too fast to see.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

A delightfully deranged steampunk adventure.

In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, "Tinker Tailor'' is a movie for grown-ups.

The Wild Robot has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same.

Gosling may be the soul of Half Nelson, but Epps is the film's heart.

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act.

Mudbound is four-square and unshowy, and you might mistake it for old-fashioned. But the presence of an African-American director behind the camera affects everything in front of it.

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.

A documentary about a Macedonian beekeeper doesn’t sound like one of the best films of the year, does it? But few movies capture the great wheel of nature turning with as much beauty and empathy as Honeyland, and fewer still show how easily the wheel can slip its track and come crashing to pieces.

You come away impressed, oppressed, provoked, and beaten down, holding on to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the darkness.

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

A nice long soak in the Proustian detritus of its era.

The Past, the new film from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, is taut, quiet, democratic, observant — a fine meal made with rare and subtle ingredients.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

Just don't expect the truth. An extremely bent, highly amusing form of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. 24 Hour Party People shares with the current Robert Evans documentary ''The Kid Stays in the Picture'' an awareness that a good anecdote often trumps the facts, but here the cheats are cheekily laid bare.

The movie ultimately seems to suggest that the evils unleashed upon Mexico come from a place beyond humankind, which seems an easy way out after all Magdalena and Miguel have been put through. That said, this remains a terrifying cinematic vision that can’t be ignored, from a young filmmaker who won’t be.

The movie never goes as deep as the novel (no movie could), but it's a worthy approximation: a Merchant-Ivory movie that turns in on itself with a lucid and painful sigh.

Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.

The movie is floating into a fierce war of wills between Iya and Masha, one in which their locked stares gradually seem to become an eerie, eternal bond of sisterhood. They can’t look away. Neither may you.

There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.

Writer-director Coogler could easily have turned Fruitvale Station into a work of agitprop — a film to work you into a froth of anger — but he’s after things that are harder to grasp: the measure of a man’s life and the smaller struggles, satisfactions, and injustices that can fill it.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

Elegantly depraved and immaculately degenerate, Park Chan Wook’s The Handmaiden is an astonishment. The filmmaking is masterful, very near to Hitchcock in its sly, controlled teasing of the audience.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

Even when the meager story line falters — more on that in a bit — the music and visuals mesh into a dazzling whole.

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

The Hero may not be a great movie but it’s a welcome tribute to a lanky, taciturn presence — a love letter to an actor that reminds us of why we ought to love him, too.

The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.

A ferocious and first-rate drama.

The byplay between DiCaprio and Pitt is delicious and finely drawn — you’d better believe Tarantino knows he’s dealing with two of our last old-school movie stars and sneakiest actors.

A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.

In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.

Booksmart registers as an instant classic that doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as refurbish it from within, and it matters very much that the writers, director, and stars are all women. Also that they’re having a hell of a good time.

Remembered for being the best Boston movie of all time. [27 Feb 2005]

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

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

A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.

At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”

Nancy is an eccentric, pungent gift of a film about a woman without identity played by an actress without persona.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant pleasure for audiences of all ages.

Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.