The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.

As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.

It’s an empathetic yet forceful cautionary tale; we should pay heed to its message.

There’s an intimacy to this Macbeth that’s transfixing. Largely filling the frame with the actors doesn’t do just them a great service. It also does Shakespeare’s language a great service, making it that much easier for the viewer to attend to it.

A key point, though, is that all the scientists profiled have staked their careers on this one discovery.

A masterpiece.

Microcosmos is a microspectacular. [08 Nov 1996, p.C6]

Flow can be read as a climate-change parable, an empathic plea for understanding each other, or as a simple entertainment featuring cute animals and perilous situations.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

A tender genuflection to the women's energies that keep that spinning world from keeling over.

Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.

Crewdson's work is distinctive, and this film does a great job helping us understand the specific nature of his vision.

Bi Gan’s Resurrection is trippy cinema at its best, a nearly three-hour deep dive into experimental cinema.

I have not seen the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” but I doubt that it evokes the mystery, wit, and eroticism that Peter Strickland’s sumptuously claustrophobic fable of women in love does. All without nudity, bad dialogue, or the requisite wooden acting.

It's a meditation on life and death, but it's less somber and more light-handed, subtle, and mischievously funny.

Schreck matches the wit and fire of her writing with a riveting performance that often does not feel like a performance at all, but rather a cri de coeur wrenched up from a deep place where the personal, the historical, and the universal have met and merged.

A cruelly precise, often bleakly comic account of upper-middle-class privilege coming unglued when the cosmos throws a curveball.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

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

Subtlety and irony are not among the film’s virtues.

As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.

Room unfolds with the privilege of seeing and experiencing the world for the very first time, which is maybe the best we can ever expect from a medium like the cinema.

The movie’s presentation of her whole personhood adds sweetness to the spectacle, and drives home the outro of “My House,” a thumping new Beyoncé track that plays under the credits: “Pick me up even if I fall/ Let love heal us all, us all, us all.”