Ty Burr

It’s rooted in observed reality and idiosyncratic individuals. It’s possible, Silva is saying, to live among people and still be terribly, crushingly isolated.

The dark nihilism of Sicario masks a reliance on easier solutions, ones we’ve been fed by decades of genre films and that feed our need for justice dispensed with violent, vengeful directness. The movie promises to clear the fetid air around the drug wars. In the end it’s just another drug.

There’s a reason this movie was a critical and popular success in Brazil: It resonates. And despite the beauty of the weathered local faces this movie celebrates, it resonates for anyone, anywhere, watching it. “What do they call the inhabitants of Bacurau?” a young boy is asked. “People!” he responds. Just so.

Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.

So swollen with purpose, so titanically self-conscious in its mythmaking, that at times its nearly paralyzes itself with solemnity.

Mao had it wrong; in ''Revolution,'' political power comes out of the barrel of a TV tube.

Arrival would be nothing without Adams.

That smart, hip, human comedy you've been waiting for all year.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

The opening 15 minutes of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are so well crafted that they restore your faith in commercial cinema.

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

It’s a slap-happy movie and often scurrilously funny — the sound of a gifted comic mind finally finding its onscreen voice.

So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York.

A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint.

Coco is a day-glo firecracker celebrating a country and a culture that has been (and continues to be) much maligned, and it’s at its most vibrant when it journeys into and beyond the shadow of death. That’s a paradox I can live with.

Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.

Most bewildering of all, Bridge of Spies is a moral drama driven by an insurance lawyer. That it works at all is a miracle — or would be, if anyone other than St. Steven were involved.

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

The movie’s tone is hushed, restrained; emotional damage is crammed way back where no one can see it yet defines everything through a murky prism.

Bright Star is a thing of beauty and a joy for a movie season that needs it.

Jackie is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered.

It’s all as entertaining as it is outlandish.

After a while, you may suspect that things aren’t adding up. Later still, you begin to realize they may never add up.

One of the more entertaining yet profoundly disturbing documentaries of this or any year.

Tina is celebratory and glossy, with no mention of her recent health issues, her son’s 2018 suicide, or other painful subjects. The life is still more than eventful enough.

Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.

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

In Fabric is good bizarre fun, but after a while that’s all it is.