Ty Burr

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

This is a small, compassionate gem of a movie, one that’s rooted in details of people and place but that keeps opening up onto the universal.

The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

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

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

Like her heroine, Wang straddles the fence and argues from either side of it; like her, the movie is profoundly Chinese-American, speaking to both audiences and able to be enjoyed by both.

It’s a gentle epic, based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, that uses pencils, ink, and impressionistic washes of color to convey a glowing visual otherworld, one that stands in contrast both to Takahata’s earlier work and the hard-edged lines and bright tones of much anime.

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

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

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.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

A film that goes where many others have gone (yes, this is Scrooge for Ph.D.s) but with a subtlety few have dreamed of?

The acting is strong (especially that of 13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the youngest son and Maureen O’Hara as the lovelorn daughter), and Arthur Miller’s Oscar-winning photography gives the images a spooky luster, but a little bit of Ford’s salt-of-the-earth piety goes an awfully long way.

It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’

Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.

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

Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.

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.