Ty Burr

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

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.

Ball's trying to be honest about adolescent coming of age, but since he's dishonest about everything else, the movie collapses in on itself.

The movie’s of a piece with shaggy recent westerns like “The Sisters Brothers” and “Slow West,” and it owes a debt of gratitude as well to the work of Robert Altman, especially the classic “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” (That First Cow marks the final appearance of Altman regular and “McCabe” costar Rene Auberjonois is a lovely poetic touch.)

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.

It's those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America.

A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning.

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

Gorgeously stoic art film.

If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.

The movie is pricelessly comic -- the Harvey/Joyce scenes catalog the couple's neuroses with glee -- but it just as often reaches for something richer.

Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, an effortless display of poise from its camerawork and costumes to the characters and the things they say.

In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.

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

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

Cold War is a ravishment, a cinematic feast for the senses, and it packs an epic inner landscape into a dense 88 minutes.

Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.

Paterson the movie doesn’t mine the dross and drab of our everyday lives for gold — it says they already are gold, and all you have to do is look. “Say it! No ideas but in things.” See it.

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 film that many consider the finest of its decade, Raging Bull, has aged well, and not just because it was filmed in black and white.

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.

As the Friedmans split apart like fissile neutrons, their story becomes five stories, none of which is remotely like the others.

It’s a juggling act that Russell can’t sustain and doesn’t: The last 20 minutes feel aimless, and the movie doesn’t end so much as coast to a halt. And still you walk away giddy and full. American Hustle takes your money and makes you glad you were fleeced.

What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?

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.

This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation"

A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.

At Sundance, Whiplash quickly picked up the nickname “Full Metal Juilliard” on the basis of scenes in which Andrew, plucked from a late-night practice session to be the orchestra’s drummer, is raked over the coals by his new mentor. Horrifying as they are, these sequences are dazzling exercises in total humiliation.