Here was a great artist. She enjoyed her life. She didn't complain at the time, she didn't complain when she went cold turkey, she didn't complain in her 80s.

Since Fitzpatrick is an actor (and "no ladies' man," he told Clark), this is a performance and, as such, one of the most effective I've seen. It's amazing how, watching the film, you dislike Telly so much you want to deny Fitzpatrick's accomplishment in creating him.

This astonishing documentary, so beautiful, so horrifying.

Watching Holbrook, I was reminded again of how steady and valuable this man has been throughout his career.

Dev Patel comes out swinging in the monumentally entertaining and bare-knuckled revenge flick “Monkey Man,” serving up a series of extended and elaborate fight sequences so bruising and hyper-violent they make the action in the “Road House” reboot seem like a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Civil Action is like John Grisham for grownups.

The movie is like a Dickens novel in which the hero moves through the underskirts of society, encountering one colorful character after another.

A feeling movie, a mood movie, an evocation of the kind of interaction we sometimes hunger for.

Even with the stretched-out running time, Prisoners is one of the most intense moviegoing experiences of the year. You’ll never forget it.

Mullen and Garfield anchor the film. Mullen, that splendid Scottish actor ("My Name Is Joe") and Garfield, 24, with his boyish face and friendly grin.

Thank the cinematic and music gods it was never destroyed or lost, as Summer of Soul is an absolute found treasure of golden onstage moments, interspersed with interviews from participants such as Gladys Knight as well as attendees and cultural commentators, along with celebrity artists such as Chris Rock and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.

Intended as a thriller of sorts, although Antonioni is, as always, too deeply involved in the angst of his characters to bother much with the story. (Review of Original Release)

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire

If six people walked into a screening of the Coen brothers’ Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs at six different times, they too would come away with vastly contrasting impressions.

For the most part, thanks in great part to Benson’s rich screenplay and Chastain’s nomination-worthy work, I was immersed in this story no matter who was telling the tale.

The acting is on the money, the writing has substance, the direction knows when to evoke film noir and when (in a trick shot involving loaded dice) to get fancy.

A first-rate post-World War I drama with a heavy dose of sentiment and a gripping storyline.

With Smollett, Howery and Merkerson infusing life and depth into the adult characters, and the young actors Blake Cameron James and Gian Knight Ramirez turning in natural and affecting work, “We Grown Now” will resonate with you for a very long time.

If you’re looking for a smart, insightful, slightly cynical yet warmhearted and consistently smile-inducing slice of life reminiscent of the best character-driven films of the 1970s, punch your ticket right here.

Lion is a beautifully told, uplifting story of courage and determination.

Someone like Petey Greene made a difference and made a mark, and broadcasting is better because of his transparent honesty. He helped transform African-American stations more, probably, than their mostly white owners desired. And talk talents like Howard Stern, whether they know who he was, owe him something.

With the chilling, creepy, bold and sometimes bat-bleep absurd Split, the 46-year-old Shyamalan serves notice he’s still got some nifty plot tricks up his sleeve and he hasn’t lost his masterful touch as a director.

Companion is darkly funny and has some great jump scares, but it’s also a meditation on how some men have a default switch that makes it far too easy for them to be manipulative and abusive.

It evokes Saturday afternoon serials in an age when most of the audience will never have seen one. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus.

The Tracker is one of those rare films that deserves to be called haunting. It tells the sort of story we might find in an action Western, but transforms it into a fable or parable.

Renier’s performance is the best thing in the movie, although all the actors, cast partly for their faces, are part of creating this desperate world.

Movies like Hard Eight remind me of what original, compelling characters the movies can sometimes give us.

What makes the film involving is that it doesn't depend on the mechanical resolution of the plot, but on the close observation of its effects on these distinctive characters.

Director Steven Frears deserves special mention. A lesser filmmaker could so easily have turned this project into mushy, sentimental junk. The tear-jerking moments here are heartfelt and real. It’s the kind of filmmaking we see too little of today.

Rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past.

It leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself?

The Rewrite is hardly shattering new ground, but the familiar path is strewn with a steady stream of smile-inducing moments, two terrific performances from the leads and a first-rate supporting cast.

Captain America: Civil War is a classic example of what the big-ticket summer movie experience is all about.

The real reasons to see An American in Paris are for the Kelly dance sequences, the closing ballet, the Gershwin songs, the bright locations, and a few moments of the ineffable, always curiously sad charm of Oscar Levant.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

This is one of the most fascinating of all true crime stories.

For all its sobering reporting and imagery, Fin also has moments of pure beauty, as when Roth literally swims among sharks, who greet him with mild curiosity and a benign approach. Despite the handful of stories every year about a shark attacking a human, we know the truth: We’re the predators, and they’re the prey.

An assured and very serious love story that allows neither humor nor romance to get in the way of its deeper and darker subject.

The movie is not so much about romance as about goodheartedness, which is a rarer quality, and not so selfish. And Cage has a certain gentleness that brings out nice soft smiles on Fonda's face.

Writer-director Nichols does a skillful job of paying homage to the glamour and bad-boy appeal of motorcycles and motorcycle movies, but also illustrating that while these guys are the stuff of feature films, in real life you’d most likely grow tired of their company after yet another day of drinking and petty crime.

These are fellow human beings who suffer, who are limited in their freedom to imagine greater happiness for themselves, and yet in their very misery they embody human striving. There is more of humanity in a prostitute trying to truly love, if only for a moment, than in all of the slow-motion romantic fantasies in the world.

For a time this movie will probably be best known for the behind-the-scenes drama. But the work itself deserves to endure as one of the better films of 2017.

Kate Mara delivers one of the best performances of her career in the title role.

If a movie like this had a neat ending, the ending would be a lie. We do not want answers, but questions and observations.

In this world, it seems as if every moment of happiness, every glimpse of a better future, is fraught with dangerous consequences.... But redemption and hope eventually shine through here and there, and when that happens, it’s a beautiful thing.

The Front Runner doesn’t hit us over the head with parallels to today’s political and media world. It doesn’t have to.

A Touch of Sin is humanist critique of the country’s turn to capitalism.

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated. Here he employs all of his art.

This is an action movie. It makes no apology for that. But it's high-style action.

Ford v. Ferrari expertly captures the essence of mid-20th century racing, and the spirit of the men who went to battle in Le Mans.

Space Jam is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.

A high-spirited charmer, a fantasy that sparkles with delights.

The Snapper sees its characters with warmth and acceptance, and earns its laughs by being wise about human nature.

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

You need to be strapped in and focused for director and co-writer Charlie McDowell’s ambitious, unnerving, slightly loopy and beautifully ambivalent gem, which only tackles the question: How would people react if there was absolute proof of an afterlife?

No one should have to endure the life that Aileen Wuornos led, and we leave the movie believing that if someone, somehow, had been able to help that little girl, her seven victims would never have died.

Body Double is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely. The movie is so cleverly constructed, with the emphasis on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, that we are neither faster nor slower than the hero as he gradually figures out the scheme that has entrapped him.

The Wife is visually arresting, but Runge wisely opts for a straightforward approach overall, giving center stage to the dialogue and the actors.

What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations. These are hard, violent men, risking their lives to save an animal species.

Thanks to the creative efforts of director Gerwig (who co-wrote the screenplay with her partner Noah Baumbach), the absolutely pitch-perfect casting starting with the gorgeous and talented humans Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, and a candy-colored, screen-popping production design that transports us to Barbieland and beyond, this is a truly original work — one of the smartest, funniest, sweetest, most insightful and just plain flat-out entertaining movies of the year.

The ending of the film is as calculated and cruel as a verbal assault by a Neil LaBute character.

Although the film has big structural problems and leaves a lot of loose ends, there was never a moment when it didn’t absorb me, because I felt as if I was watching the characters talk to one another, instead of to me.

Wise Guys is an abundant movie, filled with ideas and gags and great characters. It never runs dry. It never has the desperation of so many gangster comedies, which seem to be marching over the same tired ground. This movie was made with joy, and you can feel it in the sense of all the actors working at the top of their form.

On the basis of this second performance as Bond, Dalton can have the role as long as he enjoys it. He makes an effective Bond - lacking Sean Connery's grace and humor, and Roger Moore's suave self-mockery, but with a lean tension and a toughness that is possibly more contemporary.

A touching and effective film.

I think the answer is right there in the film, but less visible to American viewers because we are less class-conscious than the filmmakers.

Once in the jungle they have all sorts of harrowing adventures, and I enjoyed it that real things were happening, that we were not simply looking at shoot-outs and chases, but at intriguing and daring enterprise.

I firmly believe such illusions are never the result of psychic powers, but I am fascinated by them, anyway. The wisdom of this film, directed and written by Sean McGinly, is to never say.

Perhaps the documentary The War Room will bring a deeper dimension to the profession's image. At the very least, it may dispel the notion that campaign managers pervert the course of democracy with behind-the-scenes omniscience; the surprise in the film is that they're often as confused as their candidates sometimes seem to be.

Frame by frame, ’71 is one of those intense war thrillers where you know it’s fiction, you know it’s not a documentary, and yet every performance and every conflict feels true to the history and the events of the time.

Warren Beatty's Bulworth made me laugh -- and wince.

Apart from the other good things in Tightrope, I admire it for taking chances; Clint Eastwood can get rich making Dirty Harry movies, but he continues to change and experiment, and that makes him the most interesting of the box-office megastars.

A movie of introspection and defiance.

Writer-director-editor Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario has one of the most ingenious setups of any movie of the 2020s and, even more remarkably, delivers on that premise for at least three-quarters of the story, before it falls just short of greatness in a final sequence of events that feels just slightly, slightly underwhelming.

Although the movie seems happiest when it is retailing potential scandal, its heart is not in sex but in business, and the central value in the film is the work ethic.

In Erica Tremblay’s lean and quietly powerful “Fancy Dance,” a 13-year-old girl named Roki can scarcely contain her excitement about an upcoming dance, but the circumstances in this story couldn’t be more different than those old-school high school fairy tales.

The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.

This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I'm trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure.

To be sure, this is a special moment for movies, seeing as how this is a mainstream, theatrical release, R-rated gay rom-com featuring a cast of LGBTQ actors, and of course we should salute that — but for all its forward-thinking casting, cutting-edge references, sexual frankness and cultural awareness, “Bros” should also be celebrated for creating an instant near-classic of the genre, filled with so many of the touchstones we’ve come to expect from romantic comedies and featuring crisp writing and a host of richly layered performances from actors who can handle quick comedy as well as legit drama.

The Chaser is an expert serial-killer film from South Korea and a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days.

There are moments in Yagira's performance that will break your heart.

Circle of Friends is heartwarming and poignant, a love story that glows with intelligence and feeling.

The movie was mostly shot on two difficult locations: The streets of East L.A., and inside Folsom Prison. It knows these worlds. The language, the clothes, the attitudes, are all shown with the understated conviction of a director who is sure of his material.

Director and co-writer Rhyan LaMarr’s made-in-Chicago indie film Canal Street is a work of fiction, but it contains so many essential truths, so many recognizable situations and characters, so many (sadly) familiar moments of heartache, it rings as true as a documentary.

In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy.

The brief but informative (and kid-friendly whimsical) Island of Lemurs: Madagascar is basically a status report on the creatures, who exist nowhere else on Earth.

The director is Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot"), who is able to unwind the plot like clockwork while at the same time establishing the characters as surprisingly sympathetic.

The Mexican drug cartels have inspired countless films, but never one as final as Natalia Almada's documentary El Velador.

This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.

The Frears version is cerebral and claustrophobic, an exercise in sexual mindplay.

Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller "Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a stiletto concealed in his camera. Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's the same kind of character.

What Haynes does is take away the reassuring segues that argue everything flows and makes sense, and to show what's really chaos under the skin of the film.

Fat Kid Rules the World is a movie with a title that might be misleading: It's a lot better than it sounds like it has any right to be.

Risk is filled with dramatic scenes straight out of a spy thriller.