Wesley Morris

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

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.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

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.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

Ethereal.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When a movie about a guy who orders a sex doll off the Internet can turn vice into virtue, something miraculous has occurred. Lars and the Real Girl achieves that kind of miracle.

A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.