Philip Seymour Hoffman's precise, uncanny performance as Capote doesn't imitate the author so much as channel him, as a man whose peculiarities mask great intelligence and deep wounds.

From start to finish, director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (creator of HBO’s brilliant “Veep”) delivers an audacious and insightful and ridiculous and hilarious send-up that reminded me of the classic Monty Python films of the 1970s and 1980s.

Strangers on a Train is not a psychological study, however, but a first-rate thriller with odd little kinks now and then. It proceeds, as Hitchcock's films so often do, with a sense of private scores being settled just out of sight.

I swear to you that if you live in a place where this film is playing, it is the best film in town.

Following the path of “Three Billboards” is a little like driving down an unfamiliar road in beautiful but forbidding country late at night, and alternately marveling at the scenery and gripping the steering wheel tightly when yet another steep drop or sudden change of direction presents itself.

The film was written and directed by Louis Malle, who based it on a childhood memory. Judging by the tears I saw streaming down his face on the night the film was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, the memory has caused him pain for many years.

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, Overlord is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. (Reviewed in 2004)

It’s quintessential Anderson... but also an unabashed entertainment. And that’s something to see.

One of the many wonderful surprises in A Star is Born is how director/co-writer/leading man Cooper strikes the perfect balance between a showbiz fable with emotional histrionics and performance numbers and a finely honed, intimate story with universal truths and experiences hardly unique to the entertainment world.

This thoughtful film is designed with taste. Music is minimal. Cuing a little Nine Inch Nails at the end, Poitras enables “citizenfour” to commit an act of reverse surveillance on the NSA.

I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.

Anyone who could read Munro’s original story and think they could make a film of it, and then make a great film, deserves a certain awe.

The filmed version of the Broadway sensation makes for immersive, exhilarating, magnificent cinema, almost sure to thrill first-time viewers as well as diehard fanatics who have seen the stage production once or twice or a dozen times.

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 splendid cast embodies the characters so fully that the events actually seem to be happening to them, instead of unfolding from a screenplay.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Inside Job involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves.

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

The director's cut adds footage that enriches and extends the material but doesn't alter its tone. It adds footnotes that count down to a deadline, but without explaining the nature of the deadline or the usefulness of the countdown.

What we have here is a superior historical drama and a powerful personal one.

Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.

Somehow, the great Almodóvar has managed to weave together these tales of recent birth and long-ago deaths in a way that is unnerving and yet authentic, strange yet relatable.

With electrifying, graceful direction by David Mackenzie...a rich, darkly humorous and deeply insightful screenplay by Taylor Sheridan...and no fewer than four performances as good as anything I’ve seen onscreen this year, Hell or High Water is an instant classic modern-day Western, traveling down familiar roads but always, always with a fresh and original spin.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation.

There’s always room for wholly original and unique stories, as evidenced by the one-two summer punch of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” In that latter category, we can now add Yorgos Lanthimos’ beautifully garish, wonderfully twisted, unabashedly raunchy and at times grotesquely striking Poor Things, and while it might sound clichéd to say you’ve never seen anything like it, trust me: You’ve never seen anything like it.

The first shot tells us 45365 is the zip code of the town." In this achingly beautiful film, that zip code belongs to Sidney, Ohio, a handsome town of about 20,000 residents.

This movie gets you coming and going.

To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal.

The movie, in fact, resembles Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" more than other, conventional time-travel movies.