Ty Burr

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

Because it’s an Icelandic movie, and absurdism seems to bubble up in the hot springs and the bloodstreams, Woman at War exudes a puckish sense of humor even as it deals with dire matters.

Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

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

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.

She’s a diva — she knows it, we know it, the director knows it — but over the years Stritch seems to have learned that the only way to deal with that is honestly. So she’s a paradox: a diva with no illusions about herself.

Does Antarctica attract dreamers or create them? It's a thread that runs throughout the film.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

Is it worth crawling across the broken glass of the initial hour to make it to the balm of the second? That’ll be up to you, as will the incantatory visual style of Waves — a powerful artistic undertow that sucks viewers in and spits them out gasping.

The Martian really, truly works — not as art, necessarily, but as the sort of epic, intelligent entertainment the mainstream film industry has supposedly forgotten how to craft. All that, and the movie’s a valentine to creative collaboration as well as an example of it. It’s enough to make you almost grateful.

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.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

It’s the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula’s so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect.

A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

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.

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

JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising.

Quiet, observant, and intensely moving whenever Heiskanen is on screen, and it has a valedictory sweep that feels like a summing up.

At the technical level, The Secret World of Arrietty isn't as ambitious as the studio's finest work, and the animation is stronger on texture than detail.

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.

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.

A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.

The result is a clattery, unfocused affair that at times is more irritating than fun.

The movie is enraging, necessary, and above all, useful.

The word “feminism” itself has become toxified. For young women who might be despairing as they fight the good fight, this film provides context, roots, and the wisdom of elders.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

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.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

Not all of Nine Lives clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.

A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.

Despite the lumps in the batter, Love & Mercy ends up involving and affecting, because the performances are honest and the stories it tells are inherently dramatic.

Ironically, the film itself is as gentle and unexploitative as they come. Yes, it deserves the rating, and yes, it depicts teenagers doing things the grown-ups would rather not admit they actually do, but it does so with a poetic curiosity and a sense of what it’s like to be young, poor, and rootless — both future-less and free.

The Boss of It All finds the common ground between business and acting -- panicky improvisation -- and wonders whether applause or an executive comp package is the greater reward.

At its best, The Sleeping Beauty reclaims fairy tales as a kind of oral folk REM state, chewing over anxieties about adulthood, behavior, sex, and belonging in potent symbolic form.

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.

In temperament and technique, the writer-director Noah Baumbach occupies a niche exactly between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. Baumbach’s films are almost all about his own tribe of neurotic upper-middle-class white New Yorkers, but while he has a more novelistic distance on his characters than Allen, his visual style is less antic and whimsical — more traditional — than Anderson’s.

A hugely entertaining personal documentary about what steroids mean to American pop culture.

Abrams understands what George Lucas never quite figured out: that we’re less interested in the science fiction future than we are in revisiting the past. We don’t really want to see what happens next in that galaxy far, far away. We want to recapture what it felt like the first time we arrived, in 1977, with a movie called “Star Wars.” We want to go home. Star Wars: The Force Awakens takes us there.

At its most unsettling level, Spellbound asks us to consider what words are for and what childhood should be. It's as profound as anything you'll see this year, and, yes, it should have won the Oscar.

What saves the movie are those sequences of massed animals running riot through Budapest, overwhelming squadrons of police sharpshooters, and taking over a student performance of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” Hardly subtle, yet the scene yields one shot — of dogs glaring down from the box seats of a fancy concert hall — that’s nearly worthy of Buñuel.

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

Like last year's Inuit sensation ''The Fast Runner,'' the Maori drama Whale Rider is based on a folk myth, and it's told with an elemental timelessness that feels like a swan dive into prehistory.

It is hard and empathetic and bleak and often beautiful — not far off from a prairie “400 Blows.”

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

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.”

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.

A look at Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is enough to remind a viewer how engaged Fred Rogers could be and was. By contrast, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood comes a little too close to turning him into a magical sprite. That’s a fairy tale that grown-ups may need, but something tells me the children know better.

All in all, quite impressive for a debut. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 40 years for the next one.

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.

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

Ham on Rye will frustrate literal-minded audiences, but it’s a work of gentle, genuine American surrealism — a lo-fi love song to those left behind by character and chance.

The movie's still a wickedly droll put-on. Better yet, beneath the fun lurks a dry and weary sigh at life's refusal to match the tidiness of art.

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

While Crosby is painfully frank throughout this documentary about his knack for destroying friendships and driving people away (we learn in one brief aside that there’s a daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in years), one senses that it’s easier for him to say these things now than to have done the hard, human work of repair. David Crosby: Remember My Name is a testament of achievement and a portrait of ego, but it never quite gets past its subject’s illusions to properly consider his art.

The Dardennes resist the expected cliches: The climactic scenes gather force and purpose and the movie seems headed for a breakthrough of some sort, but then it glides softly and unexpectedly to a halt.

Honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.

A meditation on fame, acting, aging, and acceptance, “Clouds” is a multilayered rapture on the subject of woman, performing. Not only does the film demand repeat viewings, it rewards them.

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

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.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

While the “Paradise Lost” films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, West of Memphis has the luxury of at least partial closure.

It's a bit of a mess but strong stuff nevertheless -- a mournful, often wickedly funny religious satire that suggests what Kafka might have come up with had he been raised Catholic.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up.

Far from perfect but completely unique, the film could best be described as a paranoid South American metaphysical political thriller -- you heard me -- and whatever its failures, they're not ones of nerve or imagination.

Yet Crudup does good, mercurial work despite a silly surfer-dude haircut.

The movie feels loose and unpredictable. You're never sure where Paul or the story is going, and while that makes The Big Picture unexpectedly gripping for much of its running time, the shapelessness ultimately wins out.

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

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.

Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.

If you haven’t left your house since March, this movie counts as a legitimate vacation.

The achievement of this simply told, exceptionally fine film is the clarity with which it portrays the drama of a good soul in an inert body.

Mank is one of the year’s best movies if you’re the kind of person who genuinely loves movies and damn close if you’re not.

Harrowing and inexorable, the film recaptures the progressive insanity of Jim Jones and the hundreds of worshipers in his thrall, and it certainly gives you willies to last for days.

The film’s energy is contagious.

I wish Hotel Rwanda felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie.

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

Midnight Traveler unfolds in many kinds of limbo, and the one between living a disaster and recording it for the world to see is the least problematic. Like its makers — all four of them — the movie is flawed, human, hopeful, and desperate for a place to land.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

One of the smarter, more unexpectedly touching documentaries of the year, and I recommend it to you whether you love Rivers or loathe the very thought of her.

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.

A Most Violent Year, then, is something of a science experiment, with Abel the good rat trying to make it to the other side of the maze, uneaten and in full possession of the cheese. In its weaker moments, the movie struggles to get out of the lab. At its best, it reminds us that the maze is as big as the world and as timely as today.

If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.

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.

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

The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.

The catch in Gabrielle is that the audience pays as well.

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

I like this movie a lot, but it may be too intimate, too slow for some moviegoers.

The movie’s being promoted as the third in the director’s unofficial trilogy of faith, after “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and “Kundun” (1997), and it feels like a self-conscious masterpiece, a summing-up from a filmmaker who, at 74, may be thinking of his legacy.

A novelist and screenwriter, Claudel's directing for the first time here, and he leans on melodramatic contrivances more than he needs to. Still, he gives us a lean and observant weepie, and the mystery of Thomas's Juliette pulls you in.