Ty Burr

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

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.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.

The movie is genuinely creative, genuinely outside-the-box, and often genuinely scary; parents of toddlers and nightmare-prone children are herewith warned.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

Deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.

It is violent, sad, tender, and alive, and it is as assured a piece of moviemaking as you’ll ever see.

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

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

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.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie this year that simultaneously depressed the hell out of me and filled me with hope like Boys State.

Ang Lee's film of the Jane Austen novel slavishly follows the gospel according to Merchant Ivory, swooning over characters declaiming modestly while surrounded by topiary.

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.

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.

The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.

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

Eephus belongs with the great baseball movies not because of any major league ambitions but because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns, among average people and weekend players.

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.

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

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

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.

Alec Baldwin is on camera for barely eight minutes in Glengarry Glen Ross, the tightly wound — and actually very fine — film adaptation of David Mamet’s play. But his big speech, whipping up the assembled real estate salesmen with reptilian gung ho, could stand as a compressed version of what makes Baldwin, when bad, so good.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.

The music is terrific, as it should be in a movie where T Bone Burnett wrote the songs with Stephen Bruton.

Short, suspenseful, funny, and profane, the film's a throwback to the neat little B-level thrillers the entertainment industry used to crank out by the dozen in the post- World War II era and the early days of TV.

De Palma is a cinematic sampler that makes you want to gorge on the whole unholy buffet.

The movie’s also a salve to anyone who has watched a parent die and felt panic about everything left unasked and unsaid. It’s a love letter to the siblings who know us too well and not at all. And finally, it’s a profound act of letting go — of resentments and of fear and of the people who stand us on our feet before sending us out into the world.

Visually dazzling and dramatically trite -- it's virtuoso piffle.

The movie is of this precise moment and you should probably see it now, since it will be dated by next Tuesday.

It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.

The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

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.

It’s a tricky balancing act to find humor in stereotypes while seeing the human beings behind them — affection and a few years of distance can help — but “Between the Temples” walks the tightrope with wobbly yet confident grace.

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.

By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.

As a ranking cabinet minister in the brutally funny political satire In the Loop, actor Peter Capaldi unfurls dazzling verbal ribbons of the foulest language imaginable, thunderbolts of vulgarity that carry the force of precision carpet-bombing.

Is Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets exploitative or enabling? On the contrary, it is friendly, clear-eyed, and wise — tender about our follies and unsentimental about where they lead us. A heap see but a few know, and the Ross brothers are among the chosen few.

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

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

Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.

Harvey is so thin it barely registers as a movie, yet these two actors - British apples and American oranges in their respective approaches to character - almost miraculously weave something memorable out of nothing much.

The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

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

The movie’s not all glorious noise.

20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.

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 fairly standard coming-of-age saga on its face, with an effectively pained performance by 15-year-old Lucas Jade Zumann holding center stage.

Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.

You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.

An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.

The first great cinematic experience of 2014.

If the movie’s about anything, it’s about the tension between what we owe our families and what we owe ourselves.

It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.

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

The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.

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

Doesn't derive its power from the turning wheels of plot suspense but from the simple act of looking and not blinking.

To be successful and Black in America, this movie says, is to tell your own story even as you live it, in the pages of a book or the grooves of a record, in the end zone of a football field or the battleground of a boxing ring. To understand the weight and importance of having to be an example. And to understand when being an example just isn’t enough.

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.

A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.

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.

What’s under the film’s surface is intriguing enough, but it’s the surface itself that holds you in a dark trance. A portrait of alienation filmed from the alien’s point of view — or is it just a woman’s? — the movie’s a cinematic Rubik’s Cube that snaps together surprisingly easily, yet whose larger meanings remain tantalizingly out of reach.

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.

Blistering and brilliant work.

Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.

This is the first time, though, his (Mortensen)performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.

A startling psychological horror story with a breakout performance by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark.

Even if such murky doings aren’t your cup of absinthe, the skill with which Guiraudie weaves his web is mesmerizing.

Because its gaze is so level and so unyielding, it stands as one of the better dramatic films made on this subject (although it's not nearly as fine as Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants."

Made in England is more than a great filmmaker’s genuflection. It’s a welcome introductory immersion for newcomers to Powell and Pressburger and, for old hands, a way to connect the dots of their films and their singular place in the history of cinema.

Mustang is a damning portrait of the lot of women in rural Turkish society, but its outrage and empathy spill over the sides of the movie to embrace the planet as a whole — anywhere a woman is condemned for all the thoughts others have about her.

What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.

Low-budget, sure of itself, and creepy as hell, the film actually scores quite low on the gore meter. Like the best nightmares, though, it proves nearly impossible to shake.

Dennehy had completed two more films before dying, at 81, on April 15, but Driveways is coming out on streaming platforms closest to his passing and it is the one to raise a glass to and maybe shed a tear over.

Don’t Think Twice is comedy inside-baseball, and it’s pretty delicious.

Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.

Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.

A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

The seductively gripping cinematic stunt that calls itself Locke bears a slight resemblance to the recent “All Is Lost.”

It’s a relief to find a rock-doc that eschews the usual grainy hand-held wobble for steady camerawork and crisp compositions. The movie looks gorgeous — an artful frame into which Cave can pour his demons.

There's a quiet metaphor here: How do you teach children without touching them - their minds, their souls, their sensitivities?

This is a movie that wants to reflect the limbo of war refugees and the greater limbo of life itself — the circles we run in while believing we’re walking a straight line. It does so with a precise, observant tone that’s cool, sometimes cruel, and ultimately coldly reductive.

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed afterward.

A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, “Hit Man” should be seen with a crowd grooving on its devilish comic energy, its off-the-charts sexual chemistry and the star-making turn at its center.

Made without stars or much of a budget but with a lot of heart and good vibes, it’s an exemplary and moving independent film.

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

The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

Just because David Foster Wallace would almost certainly have hated The End of the Tour doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile movie. And in fact James Ponsoldt’s dramatic adaptation of Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s memoir about his 1996 road trip with Wallace is pretty excellent: heartfelt, probing, funny, above all touching.