It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.

HPATDH 2 works like a charm. A funereal charm, to be sure, but then, there's no time left for larks.

Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.

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

Polanski’s strongest and most personally felt movie.

Belzberg doesn't intervene during the moments of violence, believing that the film can force social change only by showing the worst. If she is correct, then this film should move mountains.

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.

Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.

Whether this new picture is a masterpiece, or a masterful reimagining of a troublesome original, will have to remain in the eye of the beholder.

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.

Alternately thrilling and devastating, throwing you back and forth until the devastation takes over and you spend the last hour watching the most supernaturally gifted vocalist of her generation chase and find oblivion.

The Edge of Heaven is powerfully unsettled--it comes together by not coming together.

The Savages is a delightful movie--the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year’s other superb convalescent-dementia picture, "Away From Her."

The movie is a knockout.

For all its original touches, though, An Education follows a conventional trajectory.

By the end, the transformation of China is more compelling than Qiao’s love for Bin, but watching both unfold over time is continually thought-provoking, given the ephemerality of whole cities, much less love affairs.

Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui’s The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema.

In telling the story of a disappearing slice of America, Zhao has created a portrait of resilience, and the bonds that last even after the rodeo’s over.

Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal.

The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating.

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.

Narrated by Rhys Ifans with the dryness of a dessicated toad, Exit Through the Gift Shop is both an exhilarating testament to serendipity and an appalling testament to art-world inanity.

As the political rhetoric between Washington and Tehran becomes dangerously overheated, Offside offers an intimate antidote: an affectionate glimpse into the cultural schisms that young Tehranis face every day. Western audiences will cheer the rebellious girls on.

The fact that his fumbling journey toward fatherhood is not just tolerable but genuinely touching is a testament to the disarming earnestness with which Firstman approaches the clichéd set-up.

Knocked Up feels very NOW. The banter is bruisingly funny, the characters BRILLIANTLY childish, the portrait of our culture's narrowing gap between children and their elders hysterical--in all senses.

The movie works smashingly, especially if you haven't seen its Hong Kong counterpart and haven't a clue what's coming. But for all its snap, crackle, and pop, it's nowhere near as galvanic emotionally.

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.

Kim exalts nature--life’s passage--without stooping to sentimentality. He sees the tooth and claw, and he sees the transcendence. Whether this is a Buddhist attribute, I cannot say, but the impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.

I've heard it said that Le Carré's work lost its savor with the end of the Cold War, which is as dumb as discounting "Coriolanus" because Romans and ­Volscians are no longer killing each other. Le Carré's subject was the national character and what happened to it under threat and in the absence of public scrutiny. It could hardly be, mutatis mutandis, more contemporary.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

Downbeat as it is, Half Nelson is a genuinely inspirational film--a terrifically compelling character study and a tricky exploration of the links (and busted links) between the personal and the political.

The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.

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

Harrowingly straightforward.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast

Perhaps most importantly, The Taste of Things offers a perfect match between Hung’s artistic impulses and his subject matter.

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.

Mudbound could have easily turned out as a kind of dusty, respectable period drama that looks important while advancing nothing, but it exceeds expectations with every new layer.

My Life As a Zucchini is a deft work of empathy, and unlike a few of its fellow animation Oscar contenders, it works on a more intimate scale, without a big message or master thesis to carry it to its conclusion.

Holy Motors is typically confounding but on every level that matters a work of unfettered - and liberating - imagination.

The novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.

If you’ve seen Linklater’s other films, you know that time for him isn’t just a factor, it’s a character, a player.

What distinguishes Two Prosecutors is not its overall narrative trajectory (which reads more like a bitter cosmic joke than anything else) but rather how Loznitsa subtly colors in Kornyev’s journey through the halls of power.

It’s absorbing for a long while, at least half its two-hour running time — an evocatively photographed soap opera with actors who are impossibly gorgeous and yet human-looking — but it goes on and on, piling on twists, adding devices so clunky they’d have embarrassed most nineteenth-century problem-dramatists, refusing to jell despite the actors’ prodigious suffering.

A film that is, chain collars and ass-eating aside, surprisingly mild at its core — or, at least, it ends up positioning dominance and submission in counterpoint to emotional intimacy in a way that echoes E.L. James more than you might expect.

Black Bag is a tremendous example that a film need not be making an explicit political point or obsessed with the political dimensions of its narrative to be worthwhile cinema. A work can rise to this present moment by offering us rapture. This, too, is what movies are meant to accomplish.

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

One of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made.

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.

Atonement works reasonably well as a tragic romance, but that sting is dulled. As a book, it was a blow to the head; as a movie, it’s an adaptation of a book.

After warming up with "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," Malick has succeeded in fully creating his own film syntax, his own temporal reality, and lo, it is … kind of goofy. But riveting.

The accrual of human detail pays off masterfully when we get to the dance itself — especially when the girls see their fathers for the first time.

The most interesting parts of this baggy, inevitably indulgent, and often spectacular work find him grappling with the idea of putting himself onscreen versus adapting part of his life into the stuff of a movie.

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.

The Host packs a lot into its two tumultuous hours: lyrically disgusting special effects, hair-raising chases, outlandish political satire, and best of all, a dysfunctional-family psychodrama--an odyssey that's like a grisly reworking of "Little Miss Sunshine."

The film is a nearly unrelenting nightmare. Even interviews shot with the survivors after the fact have a current of dread.

A wonderful breather from reality, from which you come back more conscious of — and dismayed by — the hate that more than ever runs the world.

The cutting is hyperkinetic, yet Lee is always in synch with the cast’s phenomenal energy. He’s in their thrall--and so are we.

For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.

Fruitvale Station will rock your world — and, if the life of Oscar Grant means anything, compel you to work to change it.

I've never seen a movie with this mixture of fullness and desolation. Rachel Getting Married is a masterpiece.

In The Circle, which is banned in Iran, the enforced society of women is, in effect, a community of adults treated as children.

I still don’t know how a gore-meister like Park Chan-wook could have made the year’s most irresistible romance. Maybe it’s that he hates oppression — chauvinist, colonialist, Sadean — so deeply that in hoisting his old boys on their own petards, he has discovered the wellsprings of love.

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 whole thing is irresistibly preposterous.

It’s an inclusive experience and a gorgeous tale of metaphysical Afrofuturism. For what it is, it’s great. The question once more is: How does she top this?

Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece? Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.

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.

I came out giddy, feeling lighter--by about five-sixths--than I did when I went in.

No other concert film has ever expressed so fervently the erotic root of rock. Seeing it is the opposite of taking a trip down memory lane; it's more like a plunge into the belly of the beast.

If the grown-ups in this coming-of-age story keep drawing all the focus, it’s no shade on Margaret — they just have so much more going on.

Any good documentary teaches you how to pay attention to something, which is why this one feels like such an overwhelming experience: It teaches you to pay attention to the world, all of it all at once.

Children of Men is a bouillabaisse of up-to-the-minute terrors. It's a wow, though.

On its own terms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a farrago of genius.

It left me bemused instead of moved, but true Andersonites will likely float away in a state of nirvana.

The way the film swims through the contradictions, considerations, and cultural reverie of the rural South is genuinely enlivening. Sinners, festooned with intriguing ideas and even more beguiling characters, grabs the hem of greatness even if it never takes hold, hobbled as it is by a desire to hold more than it can properly contain in its over-two-hour run time, leading to a story that feels misshapen after the setup.

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.

What makes Booksmart land so delightfully is Wilde’s handle on exactly how seriously to take her neurotic heroines. ... Booksmart manages to be inclusive and progressive, without being precious about anything or sacrificing an ounce of humor. It feels at once like a huge moment for the teen movie genre, and also effortless, effortless enough to make one wonder what took so long.

Reality is filled with the sickening tension of a thriller, but it really plays like a tragedy, given that we already know what happened to its subject next.

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

Profoundly different from the others. On the cusp of their half-century mark, Apted's British subjects have accommodated themselves to what they were, what they are, and what they will be.

To a Land Unknown presents the cousins’ ordeal as something no person should have to go through, something unnatural and surreal and Kafkaesque. But there’s also a creeping devastation in how the film convinces us of their pain and of all the opportunities and chances that were stolen from them through statelessness.

BPM is vital for the history it depicts, but it’s also important in the here and now, as a testament to public action — even messy, not-always-effective public action.

For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.

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.

If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching "Gone With the Wind" without ever having seen a Hollywood movie.

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

Anderson says that as a child she dreamed of making something that had never been made before, and, with the help of some gifted artists and editors and camera-people, she has done it again — with bells on. The only thing that would make it more pleasurable would be Anderson narrating it in person.

Like much of Romanian cinema, Aferim!’s narrative and stylistic gambit doesn’t quite click until the final scenes.

The film never quite lets us know what to feel. It’s an unnerving little movie, one that at any given moment might deliver a burst of feeling, or a big laugh, or a jump scare. It whipsaws you this way and that, and this sense of disorientation is new for a company whose work usually feels so carefully calibrated, so perfectly put-together.

My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.

In concert, they paint an intricate portrait of women forced to navigate the whims of men in a patriarchal culture that refuses to listen, let alone believe the voices of survivors — most pointedly, of black survivors, the documentary reminds us. In that vein, despite its faults, On the Record is a necessary social document.

Chill to the core, Haneke presents human cruelty not to make us empathize with the victims or understand the oppressors but to rub our noses in the crimes of our species. He thinks he’s held on to the subversive ideals of punk, but all I smell is skunk.

Crosses the blood-brain barrier like … like … whatever the drug is, I haven't tried it, thank God. The movie eats into your mind - ­slowly.

Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.

To my taste, the movie finally feels rather one-dimensional, basic. But there’s no disputing its awful power.

If high-toned futuristic time-travel pictures with a splash of romance float your boat the way they do mine, you'll have yourself a time.