Ty Burr

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.

Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.

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.

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

The heroine’s voice-overs, delivered into the microphone of a Bell & Howell tape recorder in Minnie’s bedroom, are the movie’s motor. They’re proud and insecure, profanely comic, dripping with adolescent wisdom and self-absorption.

It makes politics exciting again.

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.

All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but pride of place goes to Bennett’s Sir James, an upper class twit of Pythonesque proportions. Rarely has a character this moronic been this happy.

It’s an eerie mood piece that slowly and surely tightens the thumb screws before all hell breaks loose; that and the fact that much of Hereditary takes place in one rambling dark house is evidence that Aster has spent a lot of time studying “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s nice to have a classicist back in town.

The result is something that feels fresh, even revelatory — a work of elegiac bio-doc impressionism. Listen to Me Marlon gets under the skin of the most mysterious performer of the 20th century and forces us to recalibrate all our feelings about him.

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.

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

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.

There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.

Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

A cruelly precise, often bleakly comic account of upper-middle-class privilege coming unglued when the cosmos throws a curveball.

Good One takes advantage of the summer lushness of the Catskills, Wilson Cameron’s nature-centric cinematography and Celia Hollander’s ruminative acoustic score to cast a spell over its 89 sure-footed minutes.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

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.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

Room unfolds with the privilege of seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time, which is maybe the best we can ever expect from a medium like the cinema.