Ty Burr

Quo Vadis, Aida? has the narrative beats and the intensity of a classic thriller: a cornered protagonist, an implacable villain, a breathless pace, hair’s-breadth escapes.

For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

Days of Being Wild shows Wong discovering his own cinematic language, and he's as astonished as we are.

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.

One of the reasons that Spotlight is so deeply, absurdly satisfying to this newspaper writer — is that Tom McCarthy’s movie doesn’t turn its journalists into heroes. It just lets them do their jobs, as tedious and critical as those are, with a realism that grips an audience almost in spite of itself.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

Citzenfour is prosaic in its presentation and profoundly chilling in its details, and if you think Snowden is a traitor, you should probably see it. If you think he’s a hero, you should probably see it. If you haven’t made up your mind — well, you get the idea.

Is Dr. Strangelove Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely.

One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.

The movie works as a twinned character study, a moral suspense thriller, and an indictment of an America stacked against its working classes.

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

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.

So compelling is The Painter and the Thief — and ultimately so powerfully moving in its faith in human resilience — that you may not notice the illuminating ways in which Ree plays with form and viewpoint. The documentary won a special jury award for creative storytelling at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and it comes to streaming video as one of the year’s most affecting and subtly radical movie experiences.

On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.

Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.

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.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

The Fits is what independent moviemaking should be and can be in this country. Like its heroine, it’s slight but it’s built to last.

The shock, really, is how tender Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately becomes. The film just wraps that tenderness in one of the most epic action extravaganzas of recent years. It's enough to renew your faith in movies.

That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead.

The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.

Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.

It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.

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.

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