Though you might have a hard time discussing some of the film’s verbal descriptions of torture with young ones, Persepolis will prove a worthwhile movie for thoughtful teens.

A bore... The film leaves you with the feeling, once again, of having enjoyed a lovely meal fit for royalty only to discover, too late, that the fruit was made of wax and the roast was little more than a Styrofoam mock-up.

By the end of this epic and thoughtful expedition, you’re left with the unmistakable feeling that some things – in this case, the natural splendor of the Rio Grande ecosystem – should and indeed must remain unsullied by cheap Washington grandstanding and election year promises.

A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.

A third-act revelation will knock viewers silly and cause them to reevaluate everything that’s come before, but even without that jaw-dropping information, Moss’ film is a righteous piece of empathetic, of-the-moment documentary filmmaking.

The leads’ prolonged, puffed-feathers sparring is entertaining while it lasts, but the sensation of something sizable is only fleeting.

Adapted from the Leonard Gardner novel, Fat City is long on character and short on plot (at times nearly playing like a Cassavettes film), but it's a crawl through the mud that'll stay in your psyche for days.

Like all great screen performances, Mühe's magic comes out most in its tiniest moments: a raised eyebrow here, a slight upturn of the lips there. It's a triumph of muted grandeur; it's like watching someone being born.

I don't know if the many plot swerves withstand a second viewing, but I suspect the meat of the matter – the swooning visuals, the expert choreography, the teasing love story – does.

Did I imagine a gloaming quality to this film, or was that just the influence of my own trudge toward middle age? That, of course, has been the steady brilliance of this series: No matter your own pace on life’s arc, you can always catch your reflection in the fishbowl glass.

There’s something inexplicably soothing about the wide shots of the boys rolling along, spiraling down the levels of a parking garage or swerving around city streets at sunset.

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a story that sounds, on paper, like something that shouldn't succeed as a movie but when played out so remarkably by all the parties involved, it becomes an unexpected treat.

The resulting film is an exceptionally crafted drama, anchored by the brothers’ mastery of their skills and Cotillard’s breathtaking performance.

After the facile mysticism of Silence, the tone-deaf anti-union cant of The Irishman and the self-indulgent cutesiness of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon feels like the work of a filmmaker who is doing more than just ticking off boxes on a decades-old wish list.

Hauntingly beautiful film.

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Michèle is a daring, complicated character – one that Isabelle Huppert brilliantly creates in concert with the director, Paul Verhoeven.

This is a movie to love, that touches you in places you never suspected, that shows you that the road less traveled is the road to your dreams.

If you’ve ever missed a beloved grandparent, the beautiful What We Leave Behind will hit home.

This feature-length expansion of Cohen's deliciously ridiculous character accomplishes what decades of Soviet propaganda failed to do: It points out and underscores issues of race, religious intolerance, classism, and all manner of very American social ills by giving the culprits just enough rope to hang themselves by their own petards (and then some).

That's the nuanced naturalism that makes Minari so captivating, so intimate: It doesn't tell a complicated story, instead letting the roots and branches of its family drama grow and become entwined with the audience's own stories.

Ryan O’Neal has never been better cast than as the shallow and opportunistic hero of Thackeray’s early 19th-century novel.

Sometimes, the movie argues, it’s the things we don’t say that prove how much we care. Billi’s path to acceptance of this makes The Farewell one of the most heartfelt homecoming films in years.

Chalamet clearly relishes this opportunity to play against his modern heartthrob persona. Win or lose, you’ll still kind of want Marty to take a punch to the schnozz. But at least you’ll understand why he’s that way.

This folk tale about a magical child has even been cited by some scholars as an early and elegant work of science fiction. However, it’s also possible to bypass all this baggage and just approach The Tale of Princess Kaguya as the gorgeous and expressive film that it is.

It's enough to make you weep.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

For his part, Hawthorne rushes pell-mell into the thorny valley of dementia and crawls out with every puncture registering on his worn face. The performance is rich and rewarding.

Phoenix mines a Hitchcockian vein, but it is Hoss' sensitive performance and Petzold’s intelligently paced direction that makes this film shine.

Bahrani's small marvel of a film.

Campion and her cast do an extraordinary job of bringing all these characters in midway through their own private traumas, and Dunst brings silent grace and sadness to a woman inherently doubting her own motivation.

Columbus avoids a sense of film geekiness by keeping our attention on the plights of the two central characters. The city of Columbus may, indeed, be a locus for modernism, but the film named after it becomes a jumping-off point for postmodernism.

Due more to how it makes you think rather than to what it shows, Night of the Living Dead gets under your skin and burrows into your blood and psyche.

What's so intensely pleasurable about The Artist, however, is not its predetermined seriocomic trajectory but the endless parade of smartly creative and self-referential gags, which include all manner of sly, silent delights; the inevitable Jack Russell; and even an extended orchestral cue of Bernard Herrmann's, cribbed outright from "Vertigo."

The wonder of The Piano is that such an outwardly simple story could emerge into such a complex swirl of lingering memories.

The three-and-a-half-hour-long movie revels in talk as this man ponders life, philosophy, the sexual revolution, the workers' revolution, love, death, and so on. He smokes, drinks, flirts, and talks –­ and the movie is exquisitely of its time.

It's been 40 years since James Dean essayed his quintessential role in as a troubled American teen and, along with co-stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, established an iconography of adolescence whose potency extends into the present.

It's an extraordinary, tiny, intimate, and deeply touching story of a childhood suddenly filled with that most fragile of gifts: hope.

The humanistic approach makes Eastwood's movie a war story for the ages.

We witness no darker horrors than the roar of a car wash, yet Haneke's static, panoptic camerawork – shot alarmingly close or disquietingly afar – conveys considerable menace.

The filmmakers don’t endorse Michael’s solipsism, but we’re stuck with it anyway – the film is entirely from his point of view, save a lovely, pacifying final shot.

It's a thumping good adventure.

As sequels go, Paddington 2 is up to the challenge. It’s neck and neck, or paw and claw as to which is the better, so why not just watch both back to back?

Marks the end of an era of good -- even very good -- Disney animated features, and the start (one hopes) of a new period of great ones.

I cannot think of another film that plainly and comprehensively lays bare the both the complex apparatus at work, and the people dedicated to serving its populace.

It is rich with ideas and contemplations and packed with the sort of existential jokes that tickle the Coen boys so.

The fault does not lie with Hoffman (who doesn't so much act out Capote's distinctive mannerisms and high-pitched lisp as channel them); his performance is undeniably great. Everything else – solid, satisfying though it may be – falls short of that greatness.

For all the pratfalls, this is a grim, dispiriting work. It dares not to be liked, and there’s a lot to like in that daringness.

There’s humor here – Mike Leigh has always found something darkly funny in our shambling human condition – but Hard Truths is not an easy watch.

However commanding and absorbing Three Billboards may be, the film is diminished by its neatness and unconvincing resolutions to the many dilemmas it puts into play.

Amid the increasingly horrific images of daily ghetto life are moments of utterly unexpected, haunting beauty, including a reel of color film that does more to humanize an inhuman situation than anything I've ever seen.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment.

Most of all, this rendition of A Star Is Born oozes with romantic chemistry between Cooper and Gaga, as well as the stunning command of rock & roll visual tropes evidenced by Cooper and his director of photography Matthew Libatique (Black Swan).

Citizenfour is obviously in Snowden’s corner, but as an example of pure cinema vérité, this is the finest – and most disturbing – political documentary since Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side."

Faultlessly truthful in its observations.

A phantom of a movie whose beautiful flakes fall into the deep crevices of memory long after the seasons change.

Odom Jr. won the Tony for his performance here, a fact that’s been somewhat dwarfed over the years by Miranda’s tsunamic success, but the neat trick of this filmed version is to time-machine viewers back to an extraordinary moment in American cultural history – to put us, to borrow from Miranda, in the room where it happened. It feels like such a gift.

This is the sort of masterpiece that will obliterate memories of lesser, later efforts in the "meeting the parents" comedy lineage. Brilliant.

Only those who have been through this experience – who have cared for a loved one who has dementia – can speak to the accuracy of this approach. For the rest of us, The Father will serve as welcome humanization of those suffering from a most alien disease.

With caustic wit and fantastic performances for all involved, the film is destined to be an anti-war classic.

The performances in this costume drama are wonderful.

Despite its reliance on some overworked symbolism, the screenplay by David Tranter and Steven McGregor is smart. However, the intercut flash-forwards and flashbacks do little to aid our understanding or appreciation of the story, and seem like artistic frippery.

Although the dramatic scale of Leave No Trace is small as well, that trait should not be mistaken for insignificance. This film raises more questions than it answers, which can prove a turnoff to some viewers, but others will soak in its ambiguities long after the closing credits.

Absolutely delightful filmmaking, chock-full of gorgeously goofy animation and a storyline that cleverly echoes everything from "Stalag 17" to "Cool Hand Luke."

It's a "keep calm, carry on" wartime melodrama of the first order, and stiff though it may be, it is never less than brilliantly done.

An immersion into the characters' world in toto, from the "Oh geezes" and the "Oh, yaahs" to the dark and flinty core beneath.

Melodrama mixes with light-hearted touches, moral dilemmas, and historical reckoning in Almodóvar’s latest.

Hell or High Water is a good but not great movie with sensational lead performances that elevate it to enjoyably memorable status.

We will be comparing Up with classics like "The Wizard of Oz" for years to come.

Poor Things is a revelation, a potent story about self-creation that’s worth seeking out, and that’s worth getting lost in.

What Mr. Soul! expresses is that we still need people like Haizlip to push Black stories so they are seen and heard.

Back to the Future entertainingly deals with the child's eternal question: If my parents had never met, where would that leave me?

If you (or your kids) loved Toy Story, you'll like Toy Story 2 as well. Just don't expect any big surprises.

Yes, Black Panther is a moment. But in 20 years' time (or 100 more Marvel films), when this moment has passed, it will still be the kind of resonant, rip-roaring crowd-pleaser to which all smart action films should aspire.

If you’re yearning to take a sentimental journey, Brooklyn is the perfect destination.

Nobody Knows is the rare film that successfully tells its tale of childhood from the children’s point of view.

Life Is Sweet observes this constellation of people without ever really commenting on their lots. Very little occurs and thus, if you don't find yourself drawn to these characters, you will find yourself wondering when it will all be over.

It’s a celebratory movie designed to rekindle awe and admiration for the accomplishments of the NASA astronauts and ground scientists, as well as a reminder of the endless realms of possibility that can be achievable when a country and its politicians work in unison toward a shared goal.

God forbid this should ever play on an IMAX screen -- the concussive soundtrack and relentless visuals would likely strike viewers deaf and blind (but what a way to go!). Simply breathtaking.

It is an observant and effective study in character and setting, suitably grave and distinctively realized.

While there is poetic grace, that's not to say that there's no didacticism. Like Baldwin, Jenkins has a rigorous sense of what is broken in society.

The film is so soaring, sometimes literally, I hardly missed the feeling of hard ground underfoot.

Armstrong presents a warm, funny, and believable rendering of the March family.

If, at times, Shine's luster reveals more elbow grease than internal radiance, the movie is still a moving tribute to the human capacity to overcome all odds.

A superlative cast vividly captures the turbulence of this classic drama about the constrictions caused by race in postwar Chicago.

Grant punctuates almost every piece of Hock’s dialogue with an absurd gesture or facial expression – the theatricality of his portrayal of this not-so-street-smart bullshit artist is fascinating.

So many strands, and when the full tapestry is unfurled, its captivating, beautiful, thrilling, and entrancing patterns are revealed. Wolfwalkers stands proud as a new classic.

The story is one of those great mad scientist tales in which the potion invented with the best intentions for its enhancement of human life becomes instead an evil force bent on its destruction. The visual effects here are pretty great - and at first comedic - as the Invisible Man smokes and brawls and rocks in a chair. Oh, but then the horror happens.

The film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes.

An abundance of color is present in Pain and Glory but the shades are more muted than Almodóvar’s early color-saturated work. Thematically and visually, this film has more in common with such Almodóvar dramas as "All About My Mother" and "Talk to Her." Pain and Glory is ultimately the story of an artist on the verge of a creative breakthrough.

A tour de force of modern cinema.

This isn't some pomo arthouse picture looking to score points by subverting the gangster paradigm; it's a killer film about killers who idolize film but are unable or unwilling to parse the doom that always crops up come Act III.

100 minutes spent watching children struggle and delight in learning is, at least in my book, 100 minutes happily spent.

In her assured film debut as Freddie, Park holds your rapt attention.

The Velvet Underground is exactly the movie the Velvet Underground deserves.

All That Breathes instills admiration and wonder while also subtly implicating human beings in a responsibility for the upkeep and furtherance of life.

Blue is a movie that engages the mind, challenges the senses, implores a resolution, and tells, with aesthetic grace and formal elegance, a good story and a political allegory.