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.