Ty Burr

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

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

Takahata and his animators balance aspects of nostalgia and the present day, urban modernity and rural timelessness, love and regret with a visual and aural sensitivity that draws a viewer in from the first frames.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

Booksmart registers as an instant classic that doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as refurbish it from within, and it matters very much that the writers, director, and stars are all women. Also that they’re having a hell of a good time.

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

Jason Schwartzman is a fine actor, but he has a knack for creating characters you want to punch in the face, and Philip, who has a second novel coming out and is intent on burning all his bridges, is almost marvelously obnoxious.

Visually, sonically and thematically, “Evil Does Not Exist” is a rich and subtle experience.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.

An electrifying, at times heartbreaking documentary from the Egyptian-born, Harvard-educated documentarian Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”).

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

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

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

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

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.

Wake in Fright is a monster movie, and the monster is us.

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.

Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

Writer-director Coogler could easily have turned Fruitvale Station into a work of agitprop — a film to work you into a froth of anger — but he’s after things that are harder to grasp: the measure of a man’s life and the smaller struggles, satisfactions, and injustices that can fill it.

What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence.

First Man plays a different and arguably more rewarding game, one that looks for the man behind the hero. It’s a movie that shows how the most personal moments can coexist within and alongside the most momentous events. It’s a film that insists history is made from private lives.

A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." It also does something that, if you're from around these parts, seems downright perverse. It takes the Boston out of George V. Higgins.

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

This startling, assured feature debut from New Hampshire-born, Brooklyn-based writer-director Robert Eggers has one foot in early American history and another in legend and fairy tale.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

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

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

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

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

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.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.

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

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

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.

Taken as a whole, Dunkirk invites comparisons to the works of Kubrick and Spielberg, but it’s neither as scalding as “Full Metal Jacket” nor as clear-eyed, as aware of war’s terrible randomness, as “Saving Private Ryan.” Instead, a streak of honest sentiment, earned under the most hellish of circumstances, courses through this movie and provides it with spine and a soul.

What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.

Selma is at its very best when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces.

A nice long soak in the Proustian detritus of its era.

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

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.

Clemency observes its characters with a steady, unmodulated pace and a minimum of frills.

On the level of a popcorn thrill ride, Snowpiercer is a beaut.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

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.

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.

Capernaum is a hard, hard watch meant to force comfortable moviegoers out of their bubbles of ease. The rewards, in no particular order, are the central figure, the young actor playing him, and the film’s magnanimous windows onto suffering and resilience.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.

Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

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

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers they ain’t. Stone’s singing voice is a soulful wisp of a thing. But this is the moment that convinced me the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, knew exactly what he was doing. What his stars lack in training they make up for in relatability. They sing and dance just a little better than we would.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.

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.

In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.

Wild Tales rockets along with sleek, amoral charm and a masterful sense of cinematic storytelling; it’s worth noting that one of the producers is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar.

What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.

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.

I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.

Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

The joke's on us, it turns out; as a director, Affleck has come through with a sharp, morally ambiguous piece of pulp crackerjack.

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

Like a nightmare you recall during waking hours, and then only in its vast outlines, Antichrist has the power to haunt beyond words. For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema.

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

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

A proudly Calvinist work - I mean the comic strip character, not the philosopher - that understands the delights of deep play.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

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

I have seen the future of Hollywood movie stardom, and its name is America Ferrera.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

Please Give is a moral comedy that feels at times like one of the late Eric Rohmer’s deceptively breezy miniatures, or a mid-period Woody Allen movie minus the fussiness.

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

The Fighter is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place - Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s - and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward's battles with the family that almost loved him to death.

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen. It may also be the most exhilarating — a profound trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare’s comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light.

It makes politics exciting again.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.

Ends on a note of triumphant populism, but the film’s bitter aftertaste hints that when we ignore the details, we only ensure they’ll be repeated.

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.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

Utterly adorable.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

Just don't expect the truth. An extremely bent, highly amusing form of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. 24 Hour Party People shares with the current Robert Evans documentary ''The Kid Stays in the Picture'' an awareness that a good anecdote often trumps the facts, but here the cheats are cheekily laid bare.

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.

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.

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

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

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 quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's "Crash," and arguably a better one.

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.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.

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.

Burma VJ’ retorts that eyes and ears are everywhere in our ever-tightening global communications mesh. Voices, too, and they get heard. The generals and the ayatollahs have every right to be scared.

The film has an epic sense of devastated wonder that can only come from standing as far back from the parade as one possibly can while still holding on to one’s empathy.

Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.

Why revisit Shoah 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.

The movie is genuinely creative, genuinely outside-the-box, and often genuinely scary; parents of toddlers and nightmare-prone children are herewith warned.

It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.

Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.

At times, Eighth Grade plays like a nature documentary about life and death on the savannas of suburbia.

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.

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.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

Nearly four decades after its release, The Wild Child remains startling for its humane clarity, for Nestor Almendros's brilliant black-and-white photography, and for the sense that Truffaut is achieving filmmaking mastery on a very small scale.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

The movie’s an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us—even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.

Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.

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.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

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.

Fair warning: I had to see The Girlfriend Experience twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape.

The music is terrific, as it should be in a movie where T Bone Burnett wrote the songs with Stephen Bruton.

Remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe.

A startling psychological horror story with a breakout performance by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark.

As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]

A delightfully deranged steampunk adventure.

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

A ferocious and first-rate drama.

Someone walking cold into a movie theater showing Paprika might be excused for thinking the screen was having a Technicolor seizure. Fans of Japanese anime and filmmaker Satoshi Kon will simply feel dazzlingly at home.

They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

The movie is more pure, profane enjoyment than a body should have in the dog days of August.

A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.

Violence in Green Room is just bad. Unfortunately for its heroes and for us all, it’s also sometimes inevitable.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

Rashomon truly is a warhorse of US art-house cinema, and by any yardstick it's the film that opened the door for Asian filmmaking in this country. [23 Apr 2010, p.12]

Notes on a Scandal is a nice mug of poisoned eggnog for the holiday season -- a movie so smart and entertaining you almost don't feel its chill sicken your bones.

Remembered for being the best Boston movie of all time. [27 Feb 2005]

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie's delight, obviously, and best seen either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

No Sudden Move is a terrific movie — an unflashy near-masterpiece of professionalism on both sides of the camera.

As debuts go, Lady Bird is as strong as they get: funny, ferocious, and wise. It does, however, drape its restless energy and witty observations atop an overfamiliar framework of coming-of-age movies.

Neruda is a dream of Chile, of what it was and might have been, brought to the screen by a master dreamer.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous "Fahrenheit 9/11."

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.

In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, "Tinker Tailor'' is a movie for grown-ups.

Entertaining and enraging.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

De Palma is a cinematic sampler that makes you want to gorge on the whole unholy buffet.

These documentaries are a time-lapse study of human life. They are a gift.

The seductively gripping cinematic stunt that calls itself Locke bears a slight resemblance to the recent “All Is Lost.”

Sachs doesn’t push the tragic aspects of Little Men, but they’re there, looming behind the life-goes-on vibe of the final scenes and waiting for you to work it out on the way home.

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

The Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart.

Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.

Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.

Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

Somers Town, is a trifle: A short black-and-white lark with sharp edges and a soft center. It has its raptures, though, and then some. A disarmingly slight tale of adolescent friendship, Somers Town is one of those rare movies that seems to discover itself as you watch it.

What’s under the film’s surface is intriguing enough, but it’s the surface itself that holds you in a dark trance. A portrait of alienation filmed from the alien’s point of view — or is it just a woman’s? — the movie’s a cinematic Rubik’s Cube that snaps together surprisingly easily, yet whose larger meanings remain tantalizingly out of reach.

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

A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.

It’s a tricky balancing act to find humor in stereotypes while seeing the human beings behind them — affection and a few years of distance can help — but “Between the Temples” walks the tightrope with wobbly yet confident grace.

A transporting cinematic experience with a churl at its center, and how you feel about the movie may depend on how you feel about the churl.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.

One of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.

It’s all as entertaining as it is outlandish.

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.

There are the serious Coen brothers movies, like “No Country for Old Men” and, um, “A Serious Man,” and there are the not-so-serious ones. Hail, Caesar! is the opposite of their serious ones, and it is delightful.

Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.