One of the pleasures of “The Eras Tour” is the way it destroys the facile notion of a pure individual self. With its labyrinthine arc, jumbled chronology and dazzling changes of tone, milieu and costume, it’s Swift’s ode to invention and self-reinvention, the many different lives she’s lived and faces she’s presented over the course of her career.

Peter Hujar’s Day captures something beautifully distilled about human experience and the comfort of others.

Fast-moving and slow-burning by turns, The Killing of Two Lovers suggests that real life — and real drama — so often unfold in the in-between moments, in the anticipation rather than the actual execution of the next move.

To say that not everything coheres in this swift, propulsive 93-minute film is to suggest that the filmmaker has done justice to the unruliness of his subject: In capturing and preserving a long-standing oral tradition, he has arrived at both a persuasive vision of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. Like all good storytellers, he leaves you wanting more.

Intoxicating and meditative by turns, helped by Fred Frith's minimalist score, this film opens a portal into a singular creative mind.

Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.

The Second Mother is a satisfying contradiction. It's a soap opera with a social conscience that casually mixes dramatic elements about serious class issues with a crowd-pleasing audience picture sensibility.

As captured through the ceaselessly unflinching lens of Sharif’s borrowed video camera, Nowhere to Hide offers an uneasy prognosis that is at once graphically gut-wrenching and doggedly life-affirming.

Refreshingly devoid of talking animals and anthropomorphic vehicles, Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses is a lovely surprise of a stirringly original animated feature.

Smith has crafted a visually and artistically compelling portrait about a distinctive figure in a pivotal and exciting time.

Finds Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien at his most intimate and romantic. The deceptive simplicity of these vignettes, written by Chu Tien-wen, throws into relief Hou's formidable storytelling strengths and visual acuity - his way with actors, his subtlety and expressiveness.

The result is also one of the year’s most memorable theatrical experiences, because it’s Wenders’ return to 3-D (after 2011’s “Pina”), proving again how versatile and intimate the format can be when skillfully applied outside the genre of blockbusters.

Hit Man makes for an undeniable good time. Sometimes all you really need is a couple of impossibly attractive people enjoying each other’s company, captured by a filmmaker who knows when to stay out of their way. And if that’s not a movie, well, then, I don’t know what is.

This is a beautifully life-affirming fable about the power of art to heal, but really, it’s the people making the art that do the work. Ghostlight is a stunning and incredibly moving tribute to that process.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

The last thing you see in Ajami should be the first thing on your mind about this compelling new film from Israel. That would be the closing credits, written in both Hebrew and Arabic, separate but equal, side by side, mirroring the creative process behind this potent work and the story it has to tell.

Just as sports mirror society, so do the best sports films not only take us inside games and those who play them but also provide insight into our world and how it works. “Wrestle,” a superb sports documentary, does exactly that.

In the end, 127 Hours is one man's incredible, unforgettable journey; it took the extraordinary alchemy of Boyle and Franco to also make it ours.

Author Coben, who says he is a fan of "stories that move you, that grab hold of your heart and do not let it go," has gotten a film that does exactly that.

There is something magical about The Illusionist's world, and that's as it should be.

By letting the archival material carry most of the weight, Pettengill creates an instructive kind of time-travel experience for viewers of all political persuasions, transporting them to a past hauntingly similar to our present.

Some not great things happen in Mars One. And there is agony. But there are also the good things done in response that keep families like these soldiering on.

Exceptionally well-made and completely fearless in its depiction of the widest range of romantic emotions, this is a film as fiercely committed to passion as its heroine, and that's saying a lot.

James Ponsoldt's magnificent The End of the Tour gives us two guys talking, and the effect is breathtaking.

It's a chilling, completely fascinating documentary.

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

It is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, rigorously controlled in ways that he doesn’t always evince: It’s a bone-deep sensory immersion that never feels merely sensationalist, anchored by two performances of astonishing commitment and emotional power.

When juxtaposed against a history of Iranian cinema that has often relied on child-centric allegory and non-specific narrative to make its societal critiques, There Is No Evil practically blisters with the intensity of specifically living in Iran as it exists now, as a state once believed to carry out the most executions of any country outside China.

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc’s immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness. Acasă, My Home is much more complicated, as any thorough portrait of our modern world is when progress is a balance between old and new ways and people like the Enaches find their notions of survival and independence challenged.

Superb -- Crammed with incident, and bristles with passion and energy. Tavernier treats his actors, every last one of them impressive, as an ensemble.

A heck of a story splendidly told, Maiden succeeds by combining the athleticism of “Free Solo” with the enriching, across-the-board emotional appeal of “RBG.”

It would be hard to overstate just how singular this picture feels in its seriousness of purpose and in its cumulative power to enthrall and astonish.

Enormously entertaining.

A film that grips us dramatically, intellectually and emotionally.

It is startling, and sometimes disturbing, but hits a place that is intensely human — bittersweet and bloody and beautiful at once, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

The characters’ dilemma may, ultimately, be meaningless set against the ebbs and flows of history, but Gomes, who won the directing prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, invests it with such elegance that it becomes nearly mythic: a touching fable of cowardice and devotion with tragic undertones. The scenes may be dreamlike, but they’re our shared dream of being swept away by the movies.

Short Term 12 is a small wonder, a film of exceptional naturalness and empathy that takes material about troubled teenagers and young adults that could have been generic and turns it into something moving and intimate.

Ron Howard reaches real maturity here, as he pulls together the script's tendency to skitter between sociology and sitcom, making it into one perceptive, delicious whole. [2 Aug 1989, p.1]

Two of Us is one of those artfully crafted movies that never plays as such, because its proud, beating heart is so front and center, and its faith in the power of love and desire so energizing.

Though as leisurely as a summer’s day, this kaleidoscopic memory film has an intensity of purpose that wants to knock you on your heels — or maybe harder — in its take on gentrification.

The most entrancingly feel-good movie of the year.

A ticking time bomb of a movie, a gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat.

It is expansive but more tightly time-framed in terms of plot. I wish it were a handful of minutes shorter, but this is my single caveat about another richly imaginative, engrossing and spectacular motion picture from the redoubtable George Lucas. [18 May 1980]

The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.

A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.

As good as it is because of the care and skill writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck bring to it, gifts that were visible in their first film, "Half Nelson," which earned a lead actor Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling.

Watching Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg's probing documentary on Hogancamp's undertaking, is an exhilarating, utterly unique experience.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.

This is a rom-com with heart, wit and style. But it also shows a clear-eyed understanding that one dreamy day — no matter how epic — is really just a good start.

The Serengeti Rules celebrates not only the diversity and beauty of the natural world but also recognizes the transformative power of curiosity and knowledge.

It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control.

It's most successful when it is being off-center, a state of grace it doesn't quite have the nerve to maintain. [6 July 1994, Calendar, p. F-1]

Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.

Wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film.

The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.

Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.

Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.

At its best, Winged Migration is a marvel, and if that seems like a gee-whiz word, that's because this film has a lot to be gee-whiz about.

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.

Takes a clever premise and Black's unflagging manic energy and comes up with a pleasing mainstream comedy that uses new people and attitudes to entertain in old-fashioned ways.

It’s a vital, singularly crafted film that simply tells it — or more specifically shows it — like it is through the eyes of a struggling African American single mother and the adolescent son she desperately wants to keep out of trouble against the mounting odds.

The film is a harrowing and eerie horror fairy tale from another time, even as it feels startlingly fresh and always unpredictable.

Though it has its over-caffeinated aspects and its missteps, this Star Trek has in general bridged the gap between the old and the new with alacrity and purpose.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.

It answers Riefenstahl’s carefully chosen narrative, a fable of disillusioned purity, with an equally forensic counternarrative exposing her childlike narcissism about the impact of her talent. More disquietingly, she reveals a selective ignorance regarding the circumstances that brought her power and recognition.

Carmine Street Guitars is a leisurely Sunday stroll of a documentary.

Ilker Çatak, a German writer-director of Turkish descent, has shrewdly crafted a taut and tight examination of the concept of justice folded into an absorbing character study.

Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.

Effortless and effervescent, Frances Ha is a small miracle of a movie, honest and funny with an aim that's true.

The writing by the director and co-scribe Thayná Mantesso is deft and pithy, and there’s a rawness of spirit in both the stellar central performance and the film’s social realist aesthetic.

If its rueful, midlife nostalgia doesn’t carry quite the same current of vibrant, urgent empathy as “20th Century Women” or “Beginners,” the small, polished pebbles of wisdom it unearths are still a pleasure to observe as they’re sent skimming across the surface of a delicate, compassionate film.

The first-time director's unflinching camera, deliberate pacing and maddeningly long takes just amplify the story's innate harshness and test audience endurance levels.

Parse it any way you like, Miyazaki's gifts as an animator place him in a category of his own. To see his latest film is to be somehow reminded of Italians who could hear Verdi's operas as soon as they were sung or English readers who could experience the novels of Dickens episode by episode.

It's been brought to the screen by director John Schlesinger and writer Malcolm Bradbury with such deftness, giving it a life of its own, that it's not necessary for audiences to be familiar with the literature it satirizes.

Deliberate and marked by uncommon grace, In The Family manages to feel politically and culturally acute without ever resorting to melodrama, or having to wave banners for issues or causes, except perhaps in its quiet way for a renewed humanism in movies and a return to stories about everyday lives.

Vividly captures a year in the life of eastside Detroit's Engine Company 50.

A Hijacking is as lean, focused and to the point as its title.

The result is a tough, harrowing work of self-portraiture in which it’s Ito’s own journalistic tenacity, as much as her personal determination and outrage, that leads her to go public with her story, despite enormous pressure to do the opposite.

Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."

An undeniably shattering story, if forgivably shaky in its impassioned, therapeutic unfolding.

You may never have expected to see the words heavy metal, endearing and warmhearted in the same sentence, but you just did.

Coogan and Brydon are either quite brilliant at this or just serving up slight variations of their very witty selves. Either way, their travels and squabbles are great fun to watch, the countryside is bucolic, the food mouthwatering. You just wouldn't want to go on a real road trip with them.

Marty is a must-see picture. [11 Jan 1956, p.6]

Azkaban breaks free of all these shackles in its final hour. Working with the persuasive Thewlis and Oldman, able to focus his gifts on what's distinctive, dramatic and surprising about the story, Cuarón creates on screen the heartfelt magic that has enthralled so many on the page.

The conflicts involved are intense and absorbing, proving that compelling moral dilemmas make for the most dramatic cinema.

A smart and suspenseful legal thriller that comes completely alive on-screen.

Well-directed with exceptional access by veteran documentarian Doug Pray, whose previous films include "Hype!," "Scratch" and "Art & Copy," Levitated Mass in essence intercuts three stories, each of which is more unexpected than one might imagine.

The reality it confronts is so gripping, we cannot turn away. This may not be the most sophisticated retelling of what happened while Berlin burned, but what a story it is.

This is, to be sure, a riotously funny movie — a priceless collection of puns, insults, one-liners and some of the best-timed barf gags this side of “Problem Child 2” — but it also treats the classical detective story with the seriousness and grandeur it deserves.

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as high school seniors Sutter and Aimee, bring such an authentic face of confidence and questioning, indifference and need, pain and denial, friendship and first love, that it will take you back to that time if you're no longer there, and light a path if you are.

Anyone who loves a classic 1930s-style screwball comedy should check out My Man Godfrey. [25 Feb 1999, p.F16]

In its best moments, Face/Off practically mainlines fury, leaving audiences no time to think or even breathe.

What is life like on the ground for ordinary people in another culture, another world? That’s been the bread and butter of observational documentaries for forever, but almost never is it done with the kind of beauty and grace filmmaker James Longley brings to his Afghanistan-set Angels Are Made of Light.

In this sinister but gorgeous and compelling film by director Tomas Alfredson, being human and acting human don't always go together.

Rams is so much its own film that figuring out where its unusual, unpredictable plot will end up is difficult if not impossible.