Ty Burr

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

A miniature masterpiece of documentary observation.

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.

A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.

Because Demme genuinely likes people and is interested in them, Ricki and the Flash feels like “Stella Dallas” as remade by Jean Renoir — it’s a humanist suburban fable.

Arrival would be nothing without Adams.

Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.

Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.

It’s noted that General Tso himself was a guardian of Chinese tradition and would himself shudder at what the dish named for him has become. On the other hand, what does “authenticity” even mean when it comes to cuisine that has assimilated into another culture along with the people who make it? The best food — the kind we want again and again — always tastes like home. Wherever that is.

The Hunting Ground does a fine and fierce job of portraying campus sexual assault as a national disease. It never dares to suggest that it’s a symptom.

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.

It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.

Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.

The first great cinematic experience of 2014.

Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.

Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

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

Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.

Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.

There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.

Director Bahrani has always buried his social concerns in story and character; he’s one of the very few American filmmakers to pay attention to this country’s poor, and he applies his creativity to the paradoxes of India without missing a step.

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.

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