The Worst Person in the World acts as a forceful reminder that the entanglements between women and the love interests dancing in and out of their lives matter less than the lifelong relationship we must maintain with ourselves.

Spielberg has taken us back to basics -- back to art, back to amazement at the film medium itself.

Licorice Pizza — a movie as exasperating as it is delightful — could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.

This haunting movie transports you to another world — and redefines home.

Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it.

For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter's Bone is the year's most stirring film.

The Queen is the most reverent irreverent comedy imaginable. Or maybe it's the most irreverent reverent comedy. Either way, it's a small masterpiece.

The brilliance of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is that, without a shift in tone, the film begins to seem like a tragedy populated by clowns, its males clinging to ancient laws to compensate for feebleness of character.

It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.

There’s an admirable defiance to Haigh’s interest in characters who aren’t easy in their own sexual identities, who don’t feel in sync with queer culture, and who struggle with scars from the past and internalized shame that doesn’t go away just because it’s unreasonable.

The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."

The movie goes on for three hours without an emotional letup — it’s finally overwhelming.

It would be a mistake to regard American Splendor as an anthem for the common man. It is the UNCOMMON that is being celebrated here.

We’re not so much watching Woodcock the rarefied designer as Day-Lewis the rarefied actor, his immersion so uncanny that he can illuminate a soul at once titanic and stunted.

A love affair between performer and filmmaker. The director shows off his ardor by eliciting from his actors aspects of their gifts that they themselves may not have known they had.

There’s a sealed-off quality to The Souvenir Part II that the first installment doesn’t have, a sense of surrendering to the idea that it’s possible to authentically portray only oneself — which may be true and may be a creative dead end. But even that turns out to be by design, something both the film and its protagonist can acknowledge and then escape.

In totalitarian societies, artists have found all sorts of ways - some brilliantly imaginative - to disguise their political protest, but Panahi has no subterfuges left. This Is Not a Film ends with a whimper that is a bang. He must be freed.

Built around silences and the steady accumulation of human and natural detail, the story feels at times as if it’s being told by the tree itself: omniscient, unflinching, yet shot through with an almost alien tenderness. Its perspective is not so much Olympian as it is pointillist.

It has what the most heartfelt Disney animated features used to have: rapturous imagery matched with real wit.

It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.

The sleek beauty, crafty wit, family warmth, and impeccable slapstick suffusing The Incredibles immediately vaults it to a new, higher level of entertainment.

By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.

Rahim is an exciting, unpredictable presence, and Arestrup’s César has a stature that’s nearly Shakespearean.

Oppenheimer is a movie so sprawling it’s difficult to contend with. It’s rich, uncompromising, and borderline unwieldy, but more than anything, it’s a tragedy of operatic grandeur despite so many of its scenes consisting of men talking in rooms.

Paths of Glory is all about that greatest of all movie subjects: power.

Pawlikowski understands the mythic, destructive pull such narratives have on us — as audience members and those swept up ourselves.

It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating.

Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.

It’s the 48- and 13-year-old Jenny sitting side by side, spent, against the wall of a women’s restroom, together in their helplessness, with little to show for their pain except this extraordinary movie.

I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.

Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. What it reveals at least as much is the modern phenomenon of reality-TV self-exposure carried to such lengths that, by comparison, the Osbournes look like the Cleavers.

The movie is a slot machine that never stops spitting quarters.

Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a “future” cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science of any place or period.

Satrapi’s parents ship her off to a French school in Vienna, but she’s rudderless, ungrounded. She’s drawn back to a devastated Tehran, where she can’t design a life, either. This great film, by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is that life, designed. It freed her mind; it frees ours.

For most of Eternal Sunshine, I found myself fighting off Gondry's hyperactive intrusions in order to get at the melancholia at its core. Fortunately, the idea behind this movie is so richly suggestive that it carries you past Gondry's image clutter.

As a go-for-it music movie, Whiplash is just about peerless. The fear is contagious, but so is the jazz vibe: When Andrew snatches up his sticks and the band launches into a standard—say, Hank Levy’s “Whiplash”—it’s hard not to smile, judder, and sway.

Ulrich Mühe gives a marvelously self-contained performance. There isn't an ounce of fat on his body, or in his acting: He has pared himself down to a pair of eyes that prowl the faces of his character's countrymen for signs of arrogance--i.e., of independent thinking.

The skateboarding and camaraderie are contrapuntal notes, liberating flurries of motion in a powerful saga of kids who were — and in some cases still are — miserably stuck in place.

For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

The most miraculous thing about Man on Wire is not the physical feat itself, 1,350 feet above the ground, but that as you watch it, the era gone, the World Trade Center gone, the movie feels as if it's in the present tense. That nutty existentialist acrobat pulled it off. For an instant, he froze time.

The funniest and most emotionally charged erotic road movie since Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

For Sama doesn’t feel like raw footage — it has been carefully shaped, with a bit of movie-­ish suspense during the final hours, when the last of the families in East Aleppo were told they could surrender to the regime but were fired on anyway. The ending is a little fancy for my taste — a montage of the good times and an overhead shot of Waad and her baby walking through the rubble.

Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.

Chung is a patient filmmaker who works in small sequences that accrue imperceptibly into something grander.

The little dramas and themes that emerge during the reunion of the film’s far-flung brood become, like a family, more than the sum of its individual parts, and an incredibly satisfying meal of a film.

Despite Chalamet’s blazing brilliance, we don’t particularly root for Marty, or feel for him, or even hate him; he feels like a plot device in his own story. And yet there’s something there. Maybe the fact that this tale of constant forward motion has little room for humanity or reflection or reason says something about Marty and his times — which of course are ultimately our own.

Magical and melancholy, The Tale of Princess Kaguya comes from the other mad genius of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, who co-founded the beloved Japanese animation company alongside the great Hayao Miyazaki back in 1985.

A meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how not to win friends (or wars) and influence people (or potential terrorists).

A haunting, morbidly romantic melodrama with obvious links to "Vertigo," but from a reverse angle.

Like his protagonist, Bahrani never gives up on William; his camera never stops probing. He loves West's face, and he honors its mystery.

Viktor Kossakovsky’s mesmerizing documentary Gunda still serves as a bracing corrective to the way animals are usually portrayed on film. Its earthy radiance reminds us of what we’ve been missing in our need to see ourselves in these creatures, instead of seeing them as themselves.

Campion preserves the simplicity of Savage’s prose with the understated ease of her own storytelling, and she even finds a compelling way to navigate the novel’s somewhat outdated dime-store Freudian conceits.

Witness as the African-American protagonist (who has kept the panicked survivors alive) meets a fate that has more to do with prejudice than carnivorous appetites. Sometimes reality can be as brutal as any nightmare alternative in celluloid.

For my money, Flags (however clunky) cuts more deeply, but Letters is more difficult to shake off. Together, they leave you with the feeling that even a just and necessary war is an abomination.

Once the surprise of seeing something so miserable depicted with such wit and poetry wears off, you’re left with a nagging ugh, as well as the feeling that this emotional/psychological syndrome isn’t nearly as universal as Kaufman thinks it is.

Under Coppola's direction it succeeds on a variety of levels; as sheer thriller, as psychological study, as social analysis, and as political comment. [08 Apr 1974, p.78]

It truly is a movie about politics, and it’s among the more mesmerizing ones you’ll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself.

Crime + Punishment makes you angry and scared in equal measure. What it doesn’t do is illuminate the sources of this evil. What about the majority of cops who know the 12 are right but shun them anyway? Would you trust them if they stopped you on the street?

The film gets progressively funnier and more delightful as it goes on; King layers plenty of good-natured comedy on top of each daring escape and chase scene, stretching probability and sometimes patience near the end, but each new hitch and escape feels like an act of invention.

A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.

Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.

As in the most unnerving satires, the glibness adds to the horror. Even the most absurd deaths have a sting.

We walk away from the film with a dark empathy for these people, and for ourselves.

Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.

I confess that I had a hard time reconciling McDonagh’s madcap incongruities with the horror of the original crime and the grief of a mother struggling to cope with so primal an injury. Are the people who love the movie less rigid in their tastes? Or has McDonagh succeeded in so thoroughly psyching them out that they’re afraid to call foul?

It becomes a meditation on the dual nature of film, on a "reality" at once true and false, essential and tainted.

Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

I have zero doubts about the first half of A Star Is Born — it couldn’t be more charming.

The hotel scenes go on a tad long, but what holds us is that we’re right in the room as history is being made — with the guy, the actual guy, soon to be notorious all over the world.

A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.

Away From Her is a twilight-of-life love story, one that harshly demolishes our romantic notions of love and loyalty, then replaces them with something deeper and, finally, more consoling.

That's the beauty of Mafioso: that what begins as a comedy of disconnection becomes a tragicomedy of connection -- of roots that go deep and branches that span continents.

Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.

As he proved in his Iraq-centered "No End in Sight," policy wonk turned documentarian Charles Ferguson has no peer when it comes to tracking the course of a preventable catastrophe.

The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.

It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.

This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.

Shirkers is a joy, but it also feels haunted, as if Tan had the unique opportunity to unearth a perfectly preserved clone of her younger, more idealistic self.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.

Pictures of Ghosts is so lovely and alive that, if anything, it only reassures you that movies aren’t going anywhere.

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

The Human Voice is all about the muddied lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and about how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that might be undergirding it.

Brooklyn doesn’t quite capture Brooklyn, but its ambivalence about being Irish is gloriously epic.

Jackson has a genuine epic gift: Few filmmakers have ever given gross-outs such resplendence.

The Dardennes' most accessible film. Their handheld camera catches tiny flickers of emotion that few filmmakers come near; you feel as if you're watching the movements of a soul.

It comes together neatly, perhaps too neatly to be … poetry. But it's not prosaic, either. It has a lucid grace.

It confronts, but it doesn’t exploit. It’s about one of the most horrifying events of recent years, and yet it’s defined by its austerity, its sense of quiet. It is as much about the complex, dull horror of memory as it is about the brute, sharp horror of that day.

Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.

Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting—the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh.

What is on paper a small-time heist film in the vein of the Coen Brothers or "Breaking Bad" is ultimately a cover for a more observant and relatable portrait of loneliness.

Kids will be enchanted, adults will be enraptured. It’s somehow light as air yet overwhelming, both ineffable and unforgettable.

Of Men and War’s compassion is matched only by its relentlessness.

If you can have another movie myth shattered in high style, with love as well as wit, The Long Goodbye is for you. [29 Oct 1973, p.80]