Ty Burr

It’s not a perfect movie, but it may be a great one.

It is a love story. Also a profoundly metaphysical meditation on what it means to be human. Also one of the more touchingly relevant movies to the ways we actually live and may soon live. Oh, and the year’s best film, or at least the one that may stick with you until its story line comes true.

The byplay between DiCaprio and Pitt is delicious and finely drawn — you’d better believe Tarantino knows he’s dealing with two of our last old-school movie stars and sneakiest actors.

About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.

Carol is a movie to drink in with eyes, ears, and sensibilities.

It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year, and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, this country and the world.

From the opening shot of a burnt-orange GTO cruising a high school parking lot to the strains of Aerosmith's ''Sweet Emotion,'' Richard Linklater's film nails mid-'70s adolescence so precisely that you'll need Clearasil by the end credits.

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 lead character has been aptly renamed Walker, and, as played by Marvin in what may be the actor’s most emblematic performance, he strides through Los Angeles like a gangland golem: watchful, unstoppable, frighteningly silent.

The film captures how the constant turnover of students keeps educators poised between loss and rebirth, fuddy-duddyism and eternal kiddishness. That balance is there, most pleasurably, in Dreyfuss’ performance. The wonders of makeup and hairpieces have taken 20 years off his age, and his acting feels 20 years younger, too. He has an edgy vigor here that recalls his ebullient star turns of the late ’70s.

The Good Son delivers its knuckle-gnawing set pieces with a skill that makes other thrillers look logy.

Honey has enough charm, good humor, and wry gut laughs to smooth over the dull patches and flaws in logic.

Paul and Mary Bland stop at nothing to open a restaurant in Paul Bartel’s scabrous black comedy.

It’s a tale as old as time and a story ripped from the news feed; a dream of connection and an anvil to the heart. See it for the arrivals of a directorial talent and a stunning young actress, and see it to remind yourself of this country’s ancient and eternal sins.

If you look fast, you'll see Waters himself in a cameo (as a flasher; what else?), proof the new film is in touch with its dyed roots.

If the movie’s about anything, it’s about the tension between what we owe our families and what we owe ourselves.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.

Confident enough to simply go with the exotica of average middle-class Americans who are well-intentioned, flawed, and dog-paddling like crazy to keep their heads above water. There's nothing at all unusual about them, and that's unusual.

Those who’ve followed Panahi’s career over the decades will catch echoes of and references to his earlier movies, and at times Taxi is as much a tour of his filmography as it is of Tehran.

It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.

It’s when Toy Story 3 becomes a jailbreak movie that it comes into its own.

A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.

Synonyms turns increasingly oblique in its final half hour, as it dawns on Yoav that the door he’s hammering at may never open and let him in. But the sight of this desolate young man strutting about Paris in a borrowed orange trenchcoat is not one you’ll soon forget, nor the exhilarating film that swirls around him.

Baby Driver is the best time I’ve had at the movies in months, and, if the world is too much with you (as it is for many of us these days), you may feel the same. It’s a dazzling diversion, a series of cinematic highs that achieve the giddiness of not great art but great entertainment (and thus art through the back door).

This is a slacker detective story, emphasis on the slack, and if you can downshift into its loping rhythms, it's pretty wonderful.

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

The movie sprawls, almost entirely in a good sense, and it lets the audience draw its own conclusions. None of them is likely to be rosy.