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.

A History of Violence poses the right question: Are those who don't study history doomed to repeat it?

The images this war photographer shoots are beyond awful, but there's just no looking away.

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

The movie moves episodically, leisurely, through roughly a decade, and that feels like a gift: to nestle in with these extraordinary, ordinary people and get to know them.

The film’s greatest strength is its unabashed sentimentality. The look on these artists’ faces – their obvious pleasure in being in the room with their heroes, making great music? It’s not just good on the ears; it’s good for the heart.

There's a narrative of sorts in Mad God, but it's episodic and disconnected. It's less a story than an anthology built around exploration of an ecosystem.

Cameron makes you care for this place, for its residents, for its wildlife, and most especially for its whale analogs - a major element of the story, one that curtly reminds us that our own cetaceans may well be our intellectual equals.

Sorkin smashes the cradle-to-grave biopic mold with Steve Jobs. R.I.P., I guess. It’s called a mold for a reason.

On the strength of this sequel – a dense yet deft return to the high standards Yates set with the Potter films – count this Muggle’s heart and mind all in.

About a Boy knows exactly what it wants to do: It wants to make you smile, and grin, and then laugh with recognition, and it manages all three, again and again.

Director Michael Lehmann made a stunning debut with this sharp satire of teen cliques.

It is with immense pleasure that I can report that Disney's Muppet reboot movie is an absolute delight.

Spiral embodies the franchise James Wan and Leigh Whannell built, while being totally refurbished for a new generation.

This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre.

The deep emotional success of The Iron Claw all relies on a remarkable cast – most especially the four brothers, at ease with each other but fatally at odds with themselves.

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

It's a bit unnerving to realize that an entire life can be summed up so well in 20 minutes and that four generations can be fit into a mere 96 minutes without feeling cramped, but that's what's so beautiful about stories like this, too.

Fish Tank isn't an easy watch – it's like two hours of ache – but there are rich rewards to be had in the many ways Arnold and her terrific team rend us to and fro.

How the Dardennes, time and again, turn gritty, mundane subjects into transcendent moments of honesty and truth is one of the great cinematic wonders.

Diaz stays out of the way of her own lens, instead giving a portrait in context of Ressa's valiant struggle for truth, and her determination to simply do the job even as she becomes part of the story.

It’s this hunger for the entirety of a person’s life that makes Marjorie Prime one of the most riveting, moving films of the year.

While Cam feels authentic, it's not a documentary.

A bust-a-gut film experience that reveals Rodriguez as both a stylist versed in the mechanics of popular storytelling and a maverick whose ingenuity guides him along a singular path.

This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.

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.

Drawn from the true adventures of the Washington Post reporters and their illustrious editor Ben Bradlee, the movie heroically recounts the dogged journalistic sleuthing that cracked the story of the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

Riveting, and frankly it's great fun to see Leth best the smirky von Trier five times running.