Beyond the many jump scares involving aliens and the terrifically terrified-out-of-their-wits performances, what makes A Quiet Place Part II special is the sheer joy we get from feeling like we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker.

What keeps Sicario from cynicism is the nature and depth of Villeneuve’s gaze, not childishly wide-eyed but capable still of feeling pain. He’s a terrific director. You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground.

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.

Troell’s entrancingly beautiful Everlasting Moments uses surfaces--light, texture, faces--to hint at another world, a shadow realm.

There are many films that attempt to illuminate the world through pain, but Step is most instructive in its moments of joy.

The movie is not demanding anyone feel that way nor straining to jerk tears out of its audience. It is matter-of-fact, even when those facts aren’t necessarily flattering to its subject.

The director, Tim Wardle, has shaped the film as a detective story in which the more pieces of the puzzle are filled in, the more disgusted and infuriated we become.

The story of the "accidental" death of a peacenik politician (Yves Montand) and the investigator (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who unravels a right-wing conspiracy remains as fresh as a head wound.

If you think LaBeouf is a joke, you need to see him here. There’s wildness there, but acting centers him. He’s magnetizing.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

This is Kent’s first feature — an astonishing debut. Not perfect, though.

Starred Up is an edgy, teeming thriller, brilliantly disorienting, making strange a world we thought we knew, at least from other movies.

Arnold's first feature, "Red Road" (2006), centers on another outsider, a woman who monitors security cameras. The film is formally brilliant, but it doesn't have the breathtaking openness of Fish Tank.

This is one of the most galvanizing documentaries I've ever seen.

When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.

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.

Endlessly enchanting.

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.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

Far beyond the courage of its convictions, The Armor of Light also has the intelligence and grace to embrace its contradictions. It’s a beautiful, conflicted piece of work.

With this cast, and such a vivid sense of play, Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom-com. It’s enchanting.

As is often the case with Hosoda, it’s the extracurricular details that make his work so moving, the textures of the everyday lives of his characters that become something larger and more profound when placed in contrast to the genre elements at the center of his story.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the story, but Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen finds a way to make an old tale feel new.

The power of Little Men is in how the characters resist the melodramatic flow (which is, come to think of it, how Chekhov works, too).

In restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision.

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

I've never seen another movie that so clearly expresses the sensual sustenance that great folk culture provides its practitioners.

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.

Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.

The Great Beauty is a subtly daring cinematic high-wire act — an entire film built around one character’s unrealized, unspecified yearning. And it might just be the most unforgettable film of the year.

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.

While making his new film, he (McElwee) imagines that his boy is looking back at his screen image from some distant point in the future, when McElwee himself is gone. No child of a moviemaker could ask for a more beautiful bequest.

There’s a lot about how we complicate and obfuscate what should be obvious goods, such as saving the lives of children. But the film’s approach isn’t ham-fisted, and it makes room for gleefully fun stuff, too.

Sex can be a rigid rubric of performance for some and a fluid experiment in expression for others. The friction between those two perspectives fascinates Femme, a volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

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.

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.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro, Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle), but it is more subdued.

Tina is sweeping, fascinating, and, because of Turner’s participation, deeply personal.

Glass Onion is bigger and more precisely designed than Knives Out, but what makes it a more satisfying movie is that it sits with its characters more rather than immediately showing off their decay.

Murray's performance is at once enormously generous and fiercely, concisely witty.

For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together.

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.

What's remarkable is how often the photographer's subjects allow themselves to be caught on film; it's as if they understood implicitly that Nachtwey was there not only to agitate for reform but to memorialize their agony. He does both.

You could never call Solondz a humanist, but he achieves something I've never seen elsewhere: compassionate revulsion.

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.

As a piece of inspirationalism about human stamina, Touching the Void is peerless, but what it doesn't--perhaps can't--explain is why people place themselves in such peril.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

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

Diana, with her glamorous gowns and her taste for fast food, may be forever too much and not enough, but Spencer is just right.

Árpád Halász is the credited “animal trainer for 280 dogs,” Teresa Ann Miller the handler of Bodie and Luke — better actors than half this year’s Academy Award nominees. This is the new gold standard for nature-bites-back movies.

Howard is the summation of the Safdies’ culture, in which the drive for life collides head-on with the drive for death, and the upshot is cinema.

Crawl is a great example of a simple story exceedingly well-told. It’s a bloody adventure full of teeth-gnawing turns of fortune, mordant wit, vicious gator kills, and surprising tenderness — that clocks in at a blessedly fleet 87 minutes. It’s a perfect horror film for the summer, as much an ode to the cataclysmic, humbling aspects of Mother Nature as it is a love letter to father-daughter relationships.

The movie’s singular acting triumph is Nathan Fillion’s Constable Dogberry, one of Shakespeare’s simpler buffoons made poetic by understatement. Fillion speaks softly, with ­uninflected sincerity, a brilliant departure from the standard gregarious-­hambone Dogberry. It’s his insularity — his imperviousness to the interjections of more observant people — that makes him such a touchingly credible clown.

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.

Downey found a way to channel his working-class audience’s anger against liberal shibboleths and not incidentally take down both his dad and his surrogate dad — Teddy ­Kennedy. It’s a ­riveting Oedipal tragedy.

The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story.

It’s all supremely touching and evocative without ever feeling too on-the-nose or heavy-handed.

Kusijanović conveys all this through the way her actors move against and look at one another. That’s filmmaking of the highest order — intimate and gripping.

McKay does no editorializing in En el Séptimo Día. He’s a simple, graceful storyteller — so graceful that we don’t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through José’s eyes.

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

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.

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

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

The coup de grâce is especially graceless because everything we know is already visible in Marinca’s eyes. The actress is extraordinary.

Aware of the raw, incendiary power of her subject matter, Ben Hania doesn’t sensationalize this story, keeping the action fixed entirely in the call center itself, with actors portraying the dispatchers on the line.

Rye Lane asks you to fall in love with Dom and Yas, but failing that, it will have you hopelessly smitten with its South London setting and with that feeling of having the day open and nothing to do but wander and see what may happen. With the city spread before you, you never know who you might meet.

A family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie.

Playground is bleak, bleak stuff. It’s also electrifying.

In his late seventies, Robert Redford has never held the camera as magnificently as he does in the survival-at-sea thriller All Is Lost.

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

Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.

The ensemble is stupendous--howlingly great--and the music goes deep.

Very entertaining (and doesn’t overstay its welcome) but it’s a little depressing to contemplate.

Truly, this is manna from hell.

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.

Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential.

Sean Penn is so frighteningly good in this movie that he outdoes even the best of his earlier work.

The new Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is shockingly good.

It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.

It takes some time to realize we're in a maelstrom--going down down down into a saga of obsession, sadism, masochism, and codependency that was and remains one of the great, sick tabloid stories of all time.

The delight of the exuberantly bittersweet closing sequence comes from the way it fulfills a promise the audience doesn’t realize, until that point, has been made.

Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture.

The Gambler is a perceptive and remarkably paced drama, with director Karel Reisz in full command of his medium. [07 Oct 1974, p.93]

Gloriously filthy, ramshackle, endearing documentary.

Whatever else you say about Jurassic World, its amazing special effects — not just hurtling dinosaurs but flying killer pterodactyls — make it one of the most rousing people-running-away-from-stuff movies ever made. At its best, it’s good enough to take your mind off its worst, which is saying a lot.

Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe.

It's a crackerjack ride, shot and edited for maximum discombobulation.

It’s the closest I’ve seen a film come to an act of genuine hypnosis.

Connery and Zeta-Jones not only look great together, they work well together.

It is filmed with simplicity, a purity of intent, and I wanted to watch the faces of these men in their last seconds of life--not for the sake of history, but because of Wajda's imperative to put his father's death onscreen. He needed to do this. And somehow, sanity is restored.

The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action and suspense to add some urgency, not the other way around.

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.

Think "In the Mood for Love" with hookahs instead of chopsticks.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.

Showcases some of the world’s finest and funniest actors having a high old time. It’s best enjoyed as a kind of traveling music-hall revue.

The Naked Kiss is a gut punch with the rhythm of a dream.

As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.