Serkis is brilliant and memorable and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking as Caesar. The supporting players excel, with each getting a moment or two in the sun.

An astonishing film.

Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.

It’s one of the best movies of the year and one of the truest portrayals I’ve ever seen about troubled teens and the people who dedicate their lives to trying to help them.

Ron Howard's Parenthood is a delicate balancing act between comedy and truth, a movie that contains a lot of laughter and yet is more concerned with character than punch lines.

Mr. Henson left behind a body of work that continues to endure today, but a great deal of his legacy remains on Sesame Street, and this film tells us exactly how he and everyone else got there.

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

The best of three Star Wars films, and the most thought-provoking. After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.

Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.

All that beauty, Hitchcock's panache and a certain amount of cleverly suggestive, double entendre-filled banter between Grant and Kelly may be enough to keep To Catch a Thief entertaining for modern viewers, but it clearly falls short of the director's best work.

For about an hour, The Lobster is pure absurdist greatness, brimming with pitch-black shock humor and big, wild ideas. The second half of the film isn’t nearly as imaginative and startling, but I walked out of the screening with the surefire knowledge I wouldn’t soon shake off its most inspired sequences.

What a magical movie.

The director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.

What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.

Not many movies like this get made, because not many filmmakers are so bold, angry and defiant.

Jacques Perrin's Oscar-nominated Winged Migration does for birds what the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos" did for insects: It looks at them intimately, very close up, in shots that seem impossible to explain.

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid. Whales inspire major novels.

If quirky, independent, grown-up outsider filmmakers set out to make a family movie, this is the kind of movie they would make. And they did.

The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.

A Quiet Place doesn’t have the pin-you-to-your-seat originality of “Get Out,” or the psychological depth and pure scare impact of “Lights Out” or the wall-to-wall intensity of “Don’t Breathe,” but it is one of the smarter and more involving horror films of the last few years.

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.

Filled with witty dialogue and natural performances, Frances Ha marks a return to form for Baumbach.

While the movie contains delights and inventions without pause and has undeniable charm, while it is always wonderful to watch, while it has the Miyazaki visual wonderment, it's a disappointment, compared to his recent work.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity.

What a courageous first feature this is, a film that sidesteps shopworn stereotypes and tells a quiet, firm, deeply humanist story about doing the right thing. It is a film that avoids any message or statement and simply shows us, with infinite sympathy, how the life of a completely original character can help us lead our own.

The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.

With Cillian Murphy’s quiet, almost small and yet grand performance carrying the story every step of the way, “Small Things Like These” is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.