Wesley Morris

Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.

Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.

I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.

There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.

Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.

This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.

This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets. But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish.

On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.

There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.

Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.

All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.

The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.

It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.

You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.

Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.

Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.

The trouble is that despite how earnest and committed Mr. Zahs appears to be, the story of what’s in the collection might be more be more fascinating than the man who’s collected it.

The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.

The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

The movie observes the general misery of needing serious medical treatment and the particular awfulness of needing medical treatment you can't pay for.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.

Cooper gives the performance just the right lunacy and doubt.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It's done persuasively enough that you wonder how you'd feel under similar circumstances.

It's delicately made, yet forceful in its delicacy.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

This is much too buoyant a movie for tragedy. But Koreeda's achievement is that he gives us children who might weigh more, emotionally, than their parents, yet they're still these little creatures learning how to wield and bear that weight.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.

What's refreshing about the Danish movie is how direct the girls are.

These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.

It's not much of a part for Henson. None of these characters makes real-world sense. They're walking chapter outlines.

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

How could the Farrellys not? It pleases me to report that the movie is far from a disaster – on a dozen or so occasions, it's even funny.

Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. The Deep Blue Sea has a scene like that.

Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.

The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.

So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.

The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.

The best thing about Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It's a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now.

I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.

Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

In the case of Jeremy Irons playing the aloof English billionaire who owns the bank, that's dinner theater. But it's of the highest caliber.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.