Ty Burr

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.

Entertaining and enraging.

Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.

War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.

An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.

A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.

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.

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.

This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.

If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.

Utterly adorable.

In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

The smarter, scarier horror movies know it’s not how much you show an audience but how little. A Quiet Place takes that maxim in a surprising direction: The tension in this movie — and it’s nearly unbearable at times — comes from how little we hear.

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.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.

A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.

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

What on earth is The Trip, besides hugely enjoyable?

Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.