Mike Mills's marvelously inventive romantic comedy Beginners is pickled in sadness, loss, and the belief that humans (especially when they mate) are stunted by their parents' buried secrets, their own genetic makeup, and our sometimes-sociopathic social norms.

The film is phenomenally well directed by Kevin Macdonald and edited by Justine Wright to bring out every bit of scary volatility in the most casual interactions.

In the end, the point of this ridiculous, arduous, oft-interrupted odyssey turns out to be elusive — and is all the richer for it.

It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.

Loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn't much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb.

Avatar may be derivative, but it’s not insincere. Cameron clearly feels every beat of the story along with his viewer. He lets us discover Pandora through Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) eyes, first as a fearsome, terrifying place, then as a land of unimaginable awe and delight. [2022 re-release]

Demme is in such perfect sync with Young's music that even the painted prairie backdrop (and the painted farmhouse interior screen, complete with hearth, that slides in front of it) only makes you roll your eyes in retrospect.

A perfectly engineered and performed piece of comic cringe.

Time is an extraordinary documentary from director and artist Garrett Bradley, who didn’t make a film about Rich and her family so much as make one with them.

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

Shot in black and white and filled with images of collapse, Below the Clouds is nevertheless a strangely hopeful work.

Sometimes you forget how great an actor is, then he or she is reborn in an Altman movie.

A mesmerizing documentary.

Getting sucked into these people’s lives means experiencing the story in all its immediacy, sans judgment. Holler is too entertaining and well-made to be overly dour, too full of suspense and throwaway bits of cinematic elegance. It marks the arrival of a major new directorial talent.

The movie has momentously disturbing ideas but a fine grain, its images suitable for framing — or hiding away in the attic.

The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock, military-grade suspense the director does so well.

The Pinochet Case is a searing album of remembrance from those who, having survived, suffered most.

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.

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.

Neptune Frost is a mission statement by way of a musical, and its defining image is a middle finger taking up the whole lens.

There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, Krisha, that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different — more ominous — level of reality.

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.

Beautifully directed by Phillip Noyce, the film -- is a full experience, a love story and a murder mystery that expands into a meditation on the deep deceptions of innocence.

The Lighthouse is such an effective exercise in projecting claustrophobia, in both a physical and psychological sense, that it’d be unbearable to watch if it weren’t so funny. Thankfully, it’s a scream.

Writer-director Richard Kwietniowski has never made a feature before, but this debut effort is a triumph, a buoyant and elegant achievement -- romantic and ruminative yet always precise, a comedy of longing propelled by a strong current of satirical observation.

Blessed is the go-for-it movie that can make room for dissonances and weirdness.

Utterly demented and magnificent.

If the rest of the film takes a somber, poetic perspective on the symbolic and literal nature of this partial restoration of a lost heritage, its youth represents a bold, discordant, and exciting counterpoint — vital and engaged, looking toward a future they demand be better than the past.

What makes The Card Counter so delicious, aside from the Mad Libs quality of the way it connects card playing and government-sanctioned torture, is that the movie undermines the Spartan swagger of William’s half-existence as often as it basks in it.

The film finds a raw beauty in the wonders and heartbreaks of everyday life. It’s a humble portrait of a family’s deepening connections supported by a number of cinematic pleasures — expert sound design and cinematography; touching performances by Norman and Hoffman; and a tremendous showing from Joaquin Phoenix, operating at a register he’s rarely found before. It’s a career best for him — lovely, empathetic, humane.

Much of Her Smell, especially these backstage scenes, border on unintelligible, with numerous exchanges getting lost in the chaos. I found this to be incredibly, teeth-grindingly effective — this is a thoroughly subjective depiction of mental illness and substance abuse, and the accurate relay of information often takes a backseat in the throes of such a state.

Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.

Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond.

In its glimpse into the lives of partnered-up fictional directors, Bergman Island invites its viewer to guess how much it’s a reflection of Hansen-Løve’s actual relationship, while also acknowledging the gap between the art someone makes and the person they are.

Burnham made his name as a stand-up comedian, and if you can manage to look at Eighth Grade objectively — which isn’t easy, given the wallop it packs — you’ll see that it’s pretty slick.... But the slickness is dispelled whenever Elsie Fisher is onscreen, which is practically always.

The German comedy Toni Erdmann makes the best case imaginable for the importance of tone.

It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)

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.

The movie’s hectic (albeit very precise) swirl of dialogue creates a background against which the idea of slowing down and directing all your attention towards one thing feels like a genuine rebuke of the world. It’s a simple and obvious enough conceit, but Anderson and his cast have such fun with it that they render it fresh and original.

This small, grim documentary about Indonesia is actually a bigger and grimmer movie about all of us — our capacity for both breathtaking evil and, occasionally, profound bravery.

I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.

Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story.

It’s worth shaking off the incongruities and getting on the movie’s wavelength. Once Transit’s bitterly ironic vision takes hold, it eats into the mind.

Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.

The movie is a triumph of an especially satisfying kind. It arrives at a kind of gnarled grace that’s true to this sorry old man and the family he let down in so many ways.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is an exquisitely crafted tale of woe with heartfelt early-sixties folk music — and an overarching snottiness.

Hustle works, and it works beautifully, thanks to Sandler’s commitment.

The franchise has always centered Blanc as the champion of the underserved, but in leaning away from his shenanigans and slapstick and making space for someone like Father Jud to illustrate the film’s worldview, Wake Up Dead Man shows how much it has on its mind.

Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders — truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage — but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation.

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

The cumulative result of all this inventive intercutting is a nostalgic reminder of everything that makes Evangelion not just psychologically complex, but balls-to-the-wall fun. It recognizes that Evangelion is both a cerebral meta-narrative and a mecha action anime.

The people who maintain the status quo are those with power, and those with power are often unwilling to share: with those who are weaker, with those who are younger, with those who are other. The propulsive energy of the film is driven both by that injustice and by the scars it leaves on places and on people, and so the horror, the horror, of Saloum is both timeless and timely.

Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

If anything, I wanted Bottoms to be even more anarchic. . . As is, it’s still a great — and audacious — time.

Stunning, explosively moving.

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.

It’s an homage to radio dramas, maybe, but also works as a reminder that while film is a visual medium, sometimes sound can be enough to sustain you. It’s a sound, after all, that opens up the cloistered world that Everett and Fay are living in, exposing them to something terrible and awe-inspiring and new.

Michel Bouquet's performance makes Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father required viewing.

Please don’t bore me by complaining that the characters are “unlikable.” The defense admits that the movie is indefensible. Just breathe in the aroma of decay and howl like a banshee.

Most of the time we are with Cruise and Foxx, and their interplay is never less than galvanizing.

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.

There is a sparseness to Hit the Road that reveals the intuitiveness of Panahi’s filmmaking, his grasp of these characters and how they tug and poke at each other, and his understanding of the ways fear, paranoia, and loss turn us into people we might not like, let alone recognize.

It’s a near masterpiece.

If your mind has opened even a little by the time American Utopia is over, that is a testament to what publicly presented art can do and why its absence is so deeply felt right now.

It was splendid! No, it’s not a larky kid-pic. We're firmly in the realm of English horror.

It showcases two astonishing performances: one from the always reliable Taron Egerton as the hardened, haunted ex-con Nate McClusky and another from newcomer Ana Sophia Heger as his young daughter, Polly, in whose queasy glances the drama finds its sorrow and its depth.

In Mysteries of Lisbon, the prolific Chilean-born director and egghead Raúl Ruiz has achieved something remarkable, at once avant-garde and middlebrow: the apotheosis of the soap opera.

What lingers after the film’s bittersweet conclusion are the melancholy details of people leading lonely lives of compulsion and loss, looking for sympathetic companions in order to feel less sick.

The Matrix Resurrections might lack the ground-shaking originality of its 1999 predecessor, but it manages to chart a stunning, divergent path, philosophically and cinematically.

Observe and Report is the rare "action-comedy" (almost always a muddled hybrid) that earns its cathartic climax. The blood is real because the psychosis is real. But somehow--the magic of comedy--it's also uproarious.

Thanks to a beautifully lush, moody score by Michael Nyman and great sound editing, even a fan who has pored over these archives obsessively will see them in a new light. What McQueen reminds those obsessives and laypeople alike is that fashion is an incredibly emotional art form, and McQueen’s work was some of the most moving there was or ever will be.

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first.

No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.

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

The movie is impressive.

Linklater, whose previous movies include "Slacker," "Before Sunrise," and "Waking Life," may be the most versatile director of his generation. School of Rock is his most unabashedly mainstream movie by far, and yet it’s commercial in the best way.

It’s a magical little movie about a most unmagical subject.

The first time I saw Peterloo, it sent me out of the screening room onto Park Avenue with my blood boiling. Despite the oratory and the funny hats, Leigh’s ability to incite felt utterly contemporary and urgent.

Wit and charm matter, and The DUFF has a good deal of both. The cast will be stars, the gags will be immortal, and you’ll still be watching this movie years from now.

A comedy in the best sense--it draws its life from the pitch-perfect authenticity of its characters.

Thanks partially to actual protest footage filmed by Woman, Life, Freedom participants, there’s a thoroughness to the way the film presents the perspectives of the young women living in the country.

Raoul Peck’s driving, free-form documentary I Am Not Your Negro is not a direct response to Donald Trump’s delighted recognition of the lone nonwhite face he saw at one of his rallies: “Look at my African-American over here!” But the movie feels, if anything, even timelier, which is to say, timeless.

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.

Live Flesh, the best movie from Almodóvar since that Iberian screwball classic "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown."

The film remains grounded in the elemental, the practical, and the real. That’s not to say it isn't beautiful.

All I can is that I didn’t draw too many breaths during the last half hour.

Yes! becomes an anguished film, though that eventuality isn’t as nauseatingly propulsive as its first chapter, which is such a caustic depiction of cognitive dissonance that it stings to watch.

Well-researched and highly detailed in how it lays bare the empty promises of the gig economy and the ruthless techno-feudalism of e-commerce, Sorry We Missed You is a movie that will infuriate you. But what makes it one of Loach’s best isn’t just its rage (which is plentiful) but its compassion (which is overwhelming).

The film is lyrical, expansive, unbearably beautiful.

A flashy, nasty triumph

For Scorsese, the slowing-down in The Irishman is radical, and it pays off in the long series of final scenes in which the characters are too old to move as they once did. They can’t hide inside motion, and so Scorsese doesn’t — and the upshot is one of his most satisfying films in decades.

The neo-Western inflected work is a lean, engrossing, action-packed shot of adrenaline that is striking in its aesthetic decisions and boasts some exceedingly fun turns from its actors. Most important, it proves once more why Jolie is a star.

The opening of Diane is simple but packed, like the movie: The more mundane the details, the more redolent it is of time going by too fast. Someone I know called it the most depressing film she’d ever seen. I found it one of the most exhilarating, but I admit that the exhilaration is hard-won and slightly perverse.

A truly strange, wondrous beast. It has the playful humor and charm of a children’s movie, but its design is dark and unsettling.

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

Reinsve, with that phenomenally open, oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield.