This is one of the most painfully realistic depictions of dementia in recent film history, and yes, that means The Father can be a tough viewing experience at times — but how can one be anything but grateful for the chance to see one of the world’s greatest actors doing such enormously moving work past his 80th birthday?

The Secret of the Grain never slows, always engages, may continue too long, but ends too soon. It is made of life itself.

Never Die Alone is [Dickerson's] best work to date, with the complexity of serious fiction and the nerve to start dark and stay dark, to follow the logic of its story right down to its inevitable end.

Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

This is a film in which characters make questionable and sometimes troubling choices right up until the final scene, and yet we understand why they do the things they do, and we root fiercely for things to work between them.

It’s a big puzzle that the filmmakers piece together in an intriguing and engrossing way.

In Sacrifice, about a father who loses his son to the power of the state, it is difficult to miss the parallels with Chen's own life.

The performances have a gravity about them that is unusual in the movies. How you respond to Butterfly Kiss depends on what you bring to it, and how much empathy you are willing to extend to these sad and horrifying women.

Foxcatcher is a disturbing and memorable film.

There's an unlikelihood so large in Future Weather that it nearly derails the film. That was what I admired the most about it.

It’s exciting to revisit the battles, starting with a blowout of a tough Greece team, a victory over the talented Argentina squad, and the epic final battle against Spain.

The movie was directed by Ted Demme, with a light touch that allows the humor to survive in spite of the gloomy thoughts and the bleak, dark, frozen winter landscape.

George Tillman says Soul Food is based in part on his own family, and I believe him, because he seems to know the characters so well; by the film's end, so do we.

The director, Joseph Ruben ("The Stepfather," "Sleeping With the Enemy"), uses a kind of flat, logical storytelling that leads us inexorably toward his conclusions.

If you told me Bird Box was based on a Stephen King story — yep, I could see that. It’s that chilling. That suspenseful. And oh yes, that scary.

Sit through the entire credits. There's one more shot still to come. Not that you wouldn't be content without it.

With Samy Burch’s razor-sharp script providing some fantastically flourishing dialogue passages, frequent Haynes collaborator Julianne Moore delivering the latest in a long line of magnificently calibrated and memorable performances, and Moore’s fellow Oscar winner Natalie Portman turning in equally layered work, this is an intricately crafted study of people who are experts at putting on facades and all too skilled in the art of deception.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

What makes Sick bearable is the saving grace of humor. Apart from the pain he was born with and the pain he heaped on top of it, Bob Flanagan was a wry, witty, funny man who saw the irony of his own situation.

I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.

“Fallout” just might be the best of the franchise, and what a rare thing that is for a long-running series.

Oddly enough, Crimson Tide develops into an actors' picture, not just an action movie. There are a lot of special effects, high-tech gadgets and violent standoffs, yes, but the movie is really a battle between two wills.

The One and Only Dick Gregory is a comprehensive biography of a mercurial, brilliant and wildly funny artist-activist.

Typical Spielberg. Pulling on multiple heartstrings at the same time, to great effect.

It’s a sharply honed, darkly funny, ultra-violent and wildly entertaining late 1960s period piece about the making of future made man Tony Soprano, the early criminal escapades of many key characters from the HBO series — and the blood oaths and ruthless betrayals that would set the checkered table for virtually everything that would happen to the Sopranos, their extended family and their associates some three decades later.

City Slickers comes packaged as one kind of movie - a slapstick comedy about white-collar guys on a dude ranch - and it delivers on that level while surprising me by being much more ambitious, and successful, than I expected. This is the proverbial comedy with the heart of truth, the tear in the eye along with the belly laugh. It's funny, and it adds up to something.

I saw it a third time. By then I had moved beyond the immediate shock of the material and was able to focus on what a well-made film it was; how concisely Solondz gets the effects he's after.

For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.

It is not about memories but memory. Yours, mine, Proust's. Memory makes us human.

The movie is astonishingly foul-mouthed, but in a fluent, confident way where the point isn't the dirty words, but the flow and rhythm, and the deep, sad yearning they represent.

What happens would not make sense in many households, but in this one, it represents a certain continuity, and confirms deep currents we sensed almost from the first.

The Czech writer-director Václav Marhoul has done an astonishing job of adapting Kosinski’s novel in all its brutality (and its moments of humanity), lensing the story through timeless, dream- and nightmare-like 35mm monochrome and delivering a near-masterpiece epic that will leave you exhausted after its 169-minute running time — but grateful you’ve seen one of the most memorable movies of the year.

Starts out with the materials of an ordinary movie and becomes a rather special one.

A movie filled with moments in which we recognize not movie stars, but ourselves.

Amores Perros will be too much for some filmgoers, just as "Pulp Fiction" was and "Santa Sangre" certainly was, but it contains the spark of inspiration.

Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. By understanding that, Mamet is able to deliver a G-rated film that is largely about adult sexuality.

Tomboy is tender and affectionate. It shows us Laure/Mikael in an adventure that may be forgotten in adulthood or may form her adulthood.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

Bad Words is the kind of pitch-black dark comedy that makes you wince even as you give up on stifling the chuckles.

If you’re going to go all-in with the gorgeous and chilling and sometimes ludicrous Ex Machina, if you’re going to buy into the lofty debates and the wiggy humor and the borderline misogynistic notion of the perfect woman, you’ll have to check your logic at the ticket counter.

It looks and listens to its characters, curious about the unfolding mysteries of the personality. It is a treasure.

It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.

At times the film overdoes it with the clown metaphors (including the use of songs such as “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Send in the Clowns”), and I had major misgivings about one particular subplot, but with Phoenix appearing in virtually every minute of this movie and dominating the screen with his memorably creepy turn, Joker will cling to you like the aftermath of an unfortunately realistic nightmare.

When we speak of "American health care," we should in fact be calling it "American sickness care." There's more money to be made in making people sick and healing them than in keeping them well in the first place. The documentary Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare makes this argument with stunning clarity.

You sit there, and the action assaults you, and using words to re-create it would be futile. What actually happens to Jason Bourne is essentially immaterial. What matters is that SOMETHING must happen, so he can run away from it or toward it.

Based on a short story from Joe Hill and directed with tone-perfect style by Scott Derrickson, who wrote the screen adaptation with his “Doctor Strange” writing partner C. Robert Cargill, The Black Phone is a hauntingly effective, perfectly paced, consistently chilling and wickedly warped horror gem.

Set It Off is advertised as a thriller about four black women who rob banks. But it's a lot more than that. It creates a portrait of the lives of these women that's so observant and informed; it's like “Waiting to Exhale” with a strong jolt of reality.

Like "Grizzly Man," Herzog's latest documentary, Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is mostly built around another filmmaker's priceless footage.

This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in.

What it does, and does so effectively, is remind us that the orchestrators of this genocide weren’t one-dimensional, psychopathic creatures out of a horror film; they were something far more terrifying. They were people.

It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

The remarkable if unorthodox life and art of the classically trained pianist Seymour Bernstein is explored with acute feeling and quiet tenderness in Ethan Hawke’s terrific biographical portrait, Seymour: An Introduction.

The Well Digger's Daughter is such a success that Auteuil has already been signed to direct three more Pagnol classics, and I eagerly want to see them.

From its opening moments through its pitch-perfect closing notes, Don’t Come Back from the Moon is a stunning and stark and beautiful thing to behold.

The movie is smart about journalism because it is smart about offices; the typical newsroom is open space filled with desks, and journalists are actors on this stage; to see a good writer on deadline with a big story is to watch not simply work but performance.

This is essentially Renee Zellweger's picture, and she glows in it.

Titane is a triumph of hallucinogenic, gender-switching, erotic and violent horror from writer-director Julia Ducournau.

River's Edge is not a film I will forget very soon. Its portrait of these adolescents is an exercise in despair.

Intriguing in the way it dances in and out of the shadow of Bergman's autobiography.

Bong, above all, is a world-class visual stylist, and he proves that again here with a few dazzling flourishes, despite Snowpiercer’s dismal gray palette and train-bound claustrophobia.

Richard Dreyfuss, who is sometimes too exuberant, here finds the right tones for Mr. Holland, from youthful cocksureness to the gentle insight of age. His physical transformations over 30 years are always convincing.

Owen Wilson is a key to the movie's appeal. He makes Gil so sincere, so enthusiastic.

The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke.

There's a universal story here about immigrant parents and children, and how American culture can swamp family traditions, and make parents and children culturally unrecognizable to one another.

Not only funny and wicked, clever and visually inventive, but . . . kind and sweet. Tender and touching.

This movie left me reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair. Those are the notes it strives for.

Directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes do nomination-worthy work in telling the story of what women had to endure in the years immediately preceding Roe v. Wade — and how one group of smart, independent, determined, resourceful and brave women in Chicago created an underground network to facilitate illegal but safe abortions for literally thousands of individuals from 1968-1973.

We can see every plot point rounding the turn long before the finish line, but that’s OK, because we’re having a (dare I say it) jolly grand time every step of the way.

A slick, scary, funny Creature Feature, beautifully photographed and splendidly acted in high adventure style.

A heartwarming film, not a political dirge. Much of this warmth comes from the actress Nisreen Faour.

Watch Jan Decleir's performance. He never goes for the easy effect, never pushes too hard, is a rock-solid occupant of his character.

With some genuinely insightful dialogue, a number of truly funny bits of physical business, and small scenes allowing us to get know and like a half-dozen supporting players, The Intern grows us on from scene to scene, from moment to moment.

One of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

Stone's most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense.

Most movies are made by males and show women enthralled by men. This movie knows better.

What all three of these stories share is the quality found in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: An attention to horror as it emerges from everyday life as transformed by fear, fantasy and depravity.

A breathtaking exercise in the macabre, a gruesome thriller with quirky cops and a killer of Lecterian complexity, and even when the movie is perfect nonsense, it's so voluptuous that you're grateful to be watching it anyway.

It’s almost as if Ritchie wants to make sure we know he directed this, because it doesn’t seem like “a Guy Ritchie film.” Duly noted, and kudos to the veteran filmmaker for delivering a skillfully made and gripping tale about the hell of modern war and the universal nature of sacrifice, commitment and heroism.

A peculiar and intriguing film.

The story, written by Benton from the novel by Richard Russo, unfolds according to its own logic. It has the patience to listen to silences. Above all, it benefits from the confidence of Newman's performance. He is not hammering the points home, not marching from one big scene to another, but simply living on the screen.

After all these years, the land of Zamunda is still the world capital of comedy.

This is a well-crafted movie by a man who knows how to hook the audience with his story; it's Frankenheimer's best work in years.

From the direction to the script to the production elements to the performances, Triple Frontier is a first-class ride.

It’s a hard-R live action cartoon, and it is superb, wall-to-wall action entertainment, and I’m already looking forward to “John Wick: Chapter Four: This Time He Adopts a Cat.”

The ensemble is uniformly excellent, but this is Tim Blake Nelson’s showcase from the moment he appears onscreen, and he delivers world-weary greatness every step of the way.

The animation is elegant, the story is much more involving than in the original, and there's boundless energy.

At times the deception and the intrigue and the twists and turns make it nearly impossible follow every detail of the plot, but even when things get muddled, we know Ethan’s our hero.

The latest in a flowering of good films from Iran, and gives voice to the moderates there. It shows people existing and growing in the cracks of their society's inflexible walls.

Most impressive of all are the performances by Sebastian Stan as the raw and ambitious younger Trump, and Jeremy Strong (the “eldest boy” from “Succession”) as the unconscionable Cohn. This is “The Art of the Deal” told as a Frankenstein dark fable.

Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.

this is a very good movie. Woody Allen is ... Woody, sublimely. Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film.

A smart and funny movie, and the characters are in on the joke.

The most significant fact of the film is that the prosecutor Gunson, a straight-laced Mormon, agrees with the defender Dalton that justice was not served.

Petzold is a master at creating the kind of tension that can be felt on a subterranean level, a sort of acute uneasiness that can't be easily diagnosed, fixed, or even acknowledged by the characters. This is well-trod ground for Petzold, but never has it been so fully realized, so palpable, as in Barbara.

Thanks to director Jon Favreau’s visionary guidance and some of the most impressive blends of live-action and CGI we’ve yet seen, The Jungle Book is a beautifully rendered, visually arresting take on Rudyard Kipling’s oft-filmed tales.

A compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader.

Has the sort of headlong confidence the genre requires. Russell finds the strong central line all screwball begins with, the seemingly serious mission or quest, and then throws darts at a map of the United States as he creates his characters.

The film is terrifically entertaining, an ambitious big-budget epic, directed with great visuals and sound by Takeshi Miike.