Wesley Morris

Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

The best movie Steven Seagal never made. Except that Statham, while just as marked for death, is harder to kill.

Judy Irving's terrific documentary 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.

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

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.

Enormously enjoyable.

Revanche was a foreign-language Oscar nominee this year, and it's a better movie than most of the films in the main race. The word "revanche" means "revenge" in German, but "waiting" would have been just as good.

In The Hurt Locker, the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don't realize how riveted you are until you're back on American soil observing James in civilian life.

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.

Antal is a professional who respects your dollars. In a season where the blockbusters are as flat as month-old soda, that’s the most romantic gesture a commercial filmmaker can make.

"Angélica" feels most like the film that argues Oliveira is this close to the beyond without ever bothering to knock first at death's door.

Washington hasn't been this relaxed in years. When he feels like it he can be the most charismatic star in the movies.

A chillingly effective documentary.

Frankly, the story isn’t remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara’s movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there’s a hellion’s joy in Cage’s cop.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. The film’s lateral movement continues a kind of class commentary.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

From Marber's fiercely polished writing, Nichols wrings every drop of acid, yet it's a show of the director's goodness that a movie fundamentally preoccupied with interpersonal ugliness is allowed to end on a convincing note of beauty.

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.

More a bleak docu-melodrama than an esoteric morality play.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

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

Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.

Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.

Soberly, deeply effective.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.

This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

It's hugely entertaining.

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

It's a gas, dude!

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.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

The film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.

Like "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies," and yes, 1971's "Bleak Moments," to name but three of Leigh's 10 semi-improvised character studies, Another Year is another frowning comedy.

What's astonishing is that the movie is not a half-baked production. The spectacle now LOOKS spectacular.

The movie isn't a critique of zoo life. But it's possible we have on our hands, in Nénette's captivity, a microcosm of celebrity star-gazing.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

The genius of Zulawski is that he's dispensed with all the buildup and explanation and logic. How many horror-movie explanations make any sense? He just made an entire movie out of the scary parts, the way a different genius concocted only the muffin top and some pop music producers give you 10 minutes of beats and chorus. Possession climaxes for two whole hours. It's as if, with "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick found 25 variations on "here's Johnny" and "red rum." [17 Nov 2012, p.G5]

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.