Ty Burr

Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.

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

The producers include Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the inspired duo behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines has the same breakneck gift for comic timing and a willingness to throw anything at the screen if it’ll get a laugh, including an angry Furby the size of an office tower.

He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

Nearly four decades after its release, The Wild Child remains startling for its humane clarity, for Nestor Almendros's brilliant black-and-white photography, and for the sense that Truffaut is achieving filmmaking mastery on a very small scale.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

The movie’s an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us—even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.

Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.

The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

Now “the best British band to ever come out of America” gets the documentary treatment from director Edgar Wright, himself a cheeky bugger (Sean of the Dead, Baby Driver), and it is superbly entertaining whether you love Sparks, hate them, or just have never heard of them.

Fair warning: I had to see The Girlfriend Experience twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape.

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

Remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe.

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

As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]

A delightfully deranged steampunk adventure.

A visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.

A ferocious and first-rate drama.

Someone walking cold into a movie theater showing Paprika might be excused for thinking the screen was having a Technicolor seizure. Fans of Japanese anime and filmmaker Satoshi Kon will simply feel dazzlingly at home.

They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

The movie is more pure, profane enjoyment than a body should have in the dog days of August.

A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.

Violence in Green Room is just bad. Unfortunately for its heroes and for us all, it’s also sometimes inevitable.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

Rashomon truly is a warhorse of US art-house cinema, and by any yardstick it's the film that opened the door for Asian filmmaking in this country. [23 Apr 2010, p.12]

Notes on a Scandal is a nice mug of poisoned eggnog for the holiday season -- a movie so smart and entertaining you almost don't feel its chill sicken your bones.

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

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie's delight, obviously, and best seen either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

No Sudden Move is a terrific movie — an unflashy near-masterpiece of professionalism on both sides of the camera.

As debuts go, Lady Bird is as strong as they get: funny, ferocious, and wise. It does, however, drape its restless energy and witty observations atop an overfamiliar framework of coming-of-age movies.

Neruda is a dream of Chile, of what it was and might have been, brought to the screen by a master dreamer.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Good Time is a prime example of what the cynical or the uninterested might dismiss as “feel-bad cinema” — low budget, kitchen-sink realism about unpleasant people in worse situations. It also happens to be one of the most uncompromising movies I’ve seen all year: vibrant and desperate and alive, it’s a work hanging on by its fingernails.

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

Entertaining and enraging.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

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

These documentaries are a time-lapse study of human life. They are a gift.

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

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.

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

The Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart.

Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.

Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.

Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).

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

Somers Town, is a trifle: A short black-and-white lark with sharp edges and a soft center. It has its raptures, though, and then some. A disarmingly slight tale of adolescent friendship, Somers Town is one of those rare movies that seems to discover itself as you watch it.

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 superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.

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

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.

A transporting cinematic experience with a churl at its center, and how you feel about the movie may depend on how you feel about the churl.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

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.

One of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.

It’s all as entertaining as it is outlandish.

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

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.

There are the serious Coen brothers movies, like “No Country for Old Men” and, um, “A Serious Man,” and there are the not-so-serious ones. Hail, Caesar! is the opposite of their serious ones, and it is delightful.

Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.