Atlantics is a stunner that sneaks up on you: A folk tale, a police procedural, a ghost story, a love story, a fable of empowerment — Mati Diop’s directorial debut never stops evolving in new directions and meanings. It’s a work of magical realism close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other masters of the game, and the confidence with which it has been made is thrilling.

Wake in Fright is a monster movie, and the monster is us.

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.

Each of these dames of the realm gets to play the choicest of roles: herself.

Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.

As often happens in films about putting on plays, life imitates art, but in this instance obliquely.

Satisfying in every respect, it's a piece of blue-collar chamber music, never treating the characters cheaply, allowing them a complex entwinement of emotions.

There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest.

Dahomey packs a lot of introspection and heart into its brisk 68 minutes.

It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.

Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.

There have been countless iterations of this masterwork (it was revived again on Broadway as recently as last year), but Spielberg and Kushner enable us to see it with new eyes.

Director Tomm Moore (the 2009 Oscar contender “The Secret of Kells”) crafts a traditionally rendered feature whose doe-eyed characters faintly echo Miyazaki yet offer a beauty all their own.

Mitch Winehouse has disavowed this movie and his portrayal in it, but it’s hard to argue with the scene where he shows up on St. Lucia, where Amy has fled from the hounds of the global media, with a reality-show camera crew of his own.

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.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

The impact of this stunning film - and the lessons to be learned from it - are as remarkable as when it was first released 30 years ago.

Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.

Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.

There are only two moments in Jia Zhang-Ke’s obliquely epic mobster (or “jianghu”) movie Ash Is Purest White when a gun goes off. Unlike the shots fired in Hollywood movies, these have consequences. As in many of the films Jia has made since his 1997 Bressonian debut, “Xiao Wu,” petty choices prove fateful and marginal lives are swept up by seismic social change.

Butler's approach is subtle: His documentary allows the story to unfold elegantly, without embellishment, and it is more powerful for that restraint.

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

It’s not her greatest work but it’s warm, witty, and thorough. It’s a little like visiting a beloved old aunt who you suddenly remember has more smarts and creativity — more balls — than anyone else you know.

At times, Eighth Grade plays like a nature documentary about life and death on the savannas of suburbia.