Ty Burr

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

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.

Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

Extremely enjoyable true-life drama featuring some of our most deft actors having the time of their lives.

Takahata and his animators balance aspects of nostalgia and the present day, urban modernity and rural timelessness, love and regret with a visual and aural sensitivity that draws a viewer in from the first frames.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

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.

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

Jason Schwartzman is a fine actor, but he has a knack for creating characters you want to punch in the face, and Philip, who has a second novel coming out and is intent on burning all his bridges, is almost marvelously obnoxious.

Visually, sonically and thematically, “Evil Does Not Exist” is a rich and subtle experience.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.

An electrifying, at times heartbreaking documentary from the Egyptian-born, Harvard-educated documentarian Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”).

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

Anvil! is one of the sweetest, funniest films I've seen this year. Also the loudest and most foulmouthed.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

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

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

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.

Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

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.

What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence.

First Man plays a different and arguably more rewarding game, one that looks for the man behind the hero. It’s a movie that shows how the most personal moments can coexist within and alongside the most momentous events. It’s a film that insists history is made from private lives.

A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." It also does something that, if you're from around these parts, seems downright perverse. It takes the Boston out of George V. Higgins.

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

This startling, assured feature debut from New Hampshire-born, Brooklyn-based writer-director Robert Eggers has one foot in early American history and another in legend and fairy tale.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

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.

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

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.

Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

Coco is a day-glo firecracker celebrating a country and a culture that has been (and continues to be) much maligned, and it’s at its most vibrant when it journeys into and beyond the shadow of death. That’s a paradox I can live with.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

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

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.

One of the more entertaining yet profoundly disturbing documentaries of this or any year.

After a while, you may suspect that things aren’t adding up. Later still, you begin to realize they may never add up.

Coriolanus leaves an acrid, unfinished taste. Fiennes, making his directorial debut, gets into the meat of the thing, and he takes advantage of the bluntness of the text; even Shakespeare newcomers will be able to follow along.

Taken as a whole, Dunkirk invites comparisons to the works of Kubrick and Spielberg, but it’s neither as scalding as “Full Metal Jacket” nor as clear-eyed, as aware of war’s terrible randomness, as “Saving Private Ryan.” Instead, a streak of honest sentiment, earned under the most hellish of circumstances, courses through this movie and provides it with spine and a soul.

What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.

Selma is at its very best when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces.

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

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

Clemency observes its characters with a steady, unmodulated pace and a minimum of frills.

On the level of a popcorn thrill ride, Snowpiercer is a beaut.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

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.

The movie takes its place alongside Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” (2016) as a work of true solemnity, one that wonders what we owe the divine in our worldly life. If the Scorsese film is arguably about the profoundest of doubts, A Hidden Life is something different. It’s an act of faith. Maybe Malick knows we’ll be needing it.

Capernaum is a hard, hard watch meant to force comfortable moviegoers out of their bubbles of ease. The rewards, in no particular order, are the central figure, the young actor playing him, and the film’s magnanimous windows onto suffering and resilience.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

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

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.