Wesley Morris

The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’

With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying.

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.

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

Nothing momentous happens here, but Philibert has a magical sense of how to find the simple poetry lurking in the universal routine of being a kid. A lot of the film's lyricism is extracurricular.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.

Spellbinding.

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 usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

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.

I left this movie with an exhilarated kind of heaviness. Here is a work of art that wants to know what makes us us. There’s no caution. I don’t sense any compromise, either. Nor do I detect judgment. We’re being trusted with these souls, entrusted with them.

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.

Freshly viewed, the movie's melancholy seems to fit uncannily well in the moment we find ourselves now. In the film there are mentions of nuclear annihilation and worries that heedless lust and wanton partying could bring Rome a second fall.

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

Setting aside, just for a moment, his general loathsomeness, there is a case to be made for a less apparent aspect of Benito Mussolini: He was once really hot.

This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.

Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.

Elegant.

The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.

It's a thrill to watch Posey incorporate, at last, some true emotion into her exuberant screwball wit.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

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

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

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.