Blue Valentine leaves you with the shattering vision of its truest victim-the one who'll someday look for safety in places it might not be. And the psychodrama will go on and on …

Amid all these narrative threads Fogel occasionally loses sight of what should be the beating heart of this film: Khashoggi himself, who often comes through as an ill-defined figure with relatively ill-defined politics and views.

The director of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" has muffled the rage and darkness of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. Master and Commander is a too-comfy classic.

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.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

One of the films best visual treats are its alebrijes, the colorful fantastical creatures from Mexican folk art, rendered here as electrically colored lizards and gryphons that seem to pop off the screen even without the aid of 3-D.

It’s Rylance who keeps Bridge of Spies standing. He gives a teeny, witty, fabulously non-emotive performance, every line musical and slightly ironic — the irony being his forthright refusal to deceive in a world founded on lies.

Shaun the Sheep might look like an exciting, no-nonsense tale for little kids — and it totally is, on one level — but beneath its pitch-perfect simplicity lies great wisdom and beauty.

A bit too satisfied with its own sweet sensitivities.

The movie’s take at times is fascinating. But it’s basically one long, sick joke played at half speed. It’s a ponderous, sick joke.

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.

Young Edie Martin, with her chaotic swarm of red ringlets and deadpan dutifulness (she has few lines, but they’re goodies), is the movie’s sign of eternal spring--the butterfly atop the just-opened blossom.

Guilt and alienation from Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel, so arty, enervated, and allegorical it might have been made by a European in the early sixties.

Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality.

I hate to damage so fragile a work with overpraise, but, gay or straight, if you don't see yourself in this movie, you need to get a life.

A brilliant, disturbing, but unstable and half-crazy piece of work.

Raw is certainly nasty, but its gore is strategic and sparse. It is, however, a very stressful film to watch from beginning to end, even before the real feasting gets underway.

Like Pynchon’s novel, it’s a little insular, too cool for school. It’s drugged camp. Some of the plot points get lost in that ether — it’s actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It’s not shallow, though.

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.

Revenge inverts the gutbucket revenge genre without transcending it. That said, why should men have all the fun? The movie is like Ladies’ Night at a sleaze-o bar.

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

The literary world jabs are sharp and funny, but it’s the rueful family dynamics that make the film so rewarding, as well as the performances.

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.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

Hot Fuzz is fun, and it's nice to see all the English character actors who aren't busy in Harry Potter films, but it lacks its predecessor's freshness.

Django Unchained doesn't merely hit its marks; it blows them to bloody chunks. It's manna for mayhem mavens.

It’s wonderfully inventive filmmaking: Amirpour’s striking compositions borrow from the iconography of both the Western and the horror film — wide, evocative vistas are intercut with dark, tense city streets where shadowy figures follow one another.

As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele’s attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he’s more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

The best film of the year? Possibly …

Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

I just wish Vega and Lelio let us in a little more to see her as an individual, aside from the hostility she encounters.

Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

This engaging, sturdily guided film from director Alison Ellwood (American Jihad, Laurel Canyon) argues forcefully that there is more depth and value to a group that fought and celebrated, broke up and reconciled, burned out and rocked hard for four decades.

I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.

The how of Tillman, Mabry, and Wells’s telling distinguishes their story. The Hate U Give should be an epic, and it is: Yes, it’s a teen melodrama, but it’s also an elegantly constructed piece of world-building, a love story, a family history, a sociological spiderweb of cause and effect of the hate referenced in the Tupac-coined titled. If this is what the next wave of YA adaptation will feel like, we are in a good place.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

I realize that Fosse's dark sizzle might seem a bit dated today, but surely something halfway snazzy could have been devised for this movie. It's toothless.

Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.

It’s a gloriously hand-animated existential fable that manages to be both genuinely sweet and thoroughly twisted.

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.

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

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

As the encounters stack up, though, the impact of what Hosoda is starting to do starts to cohere, and it’s pretty effective stuff. The extradimensional travel is an obvious but heart-tuggingly direct way to get at the truth that everyone was a kid once, a fact that is mind-boggling when you’re a kid, and bittersweet when you’re an adult.

Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.

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.

To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

She Dies Tomorrow is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

This is by light-years the most entertaining movie of the year. How many apocalyptic sci-fi action extravaganzas leave you feeling as if the world is just beginning?

Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Giannoli knows exactly which buttons to push and for how long. He takes what could have been a fussy adaptation of a dusty tome and turns it into something hugely entertaining.

When Kurzel does penetrate the unkempt veil of Jones’s hair and closes in on his face, it’s to capture how the actor sprints from one emotion to another, alluding to the impetuousness and spontaneity at play within Nitram.

Woman at War takes its tone not from von Trier but deadpan pranksters like the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, whose absurdities have an undercurrent of tragedy. Erlingsson has a magnetic heroine in Geirharðsdóttir, who’s lithe and athletic without being a show off, and underplays as a good soldier would.

Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, The Nest doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.

The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

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.

Purposefully aggravating yet still beautiful, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is both a takedown and a celebration of our dissonant, tech-obsessed world. It gets us.

It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games" but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.

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

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is one of those showbiz docs that’s not exactly pleasurable but offers a penetrating glimpse — sometimes too penetrating — into what it means to eat, drink, and be contrary in the public sphere.

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

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

The beauty of DaCosta’s film is that these particular ideas are worked in subtly, even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle. In fact, it’s downright looney tunes.

Midway through, an eerier theme creeps in, all the more powerful for Herzog's lack of insistence. By the "end of the world" he means the end of the world.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks.

The adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other.

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.

Ultimately, the director leaves us with more questions than answers. Which is probably what art should always strive to do.

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

The movie isn't as world-shattering as those bouts: It's a regretful-old-warrior weeper.

If all three of the women’s lives had come across with equal weight and artistry, the film, which glides back and forth among them, might have approached the symphonic. But only the Streep section truly inspires the kind of awe and terror that the film as a whole strives for.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is the most unassuming and delicate of movies, but don’t be shocked if it leaves you in ruins.

It’s a cop movie that’s largely uninterested in cops, crimes, or criminals. And yet, despite all that, the film is at times an effective, evocative mood piece. The funereal pall of sorrow that hangs over everything these characters do has a strange, surprising pull.

For all its throttling thrills, Good Time is a film about a destructive love — and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them. Ignore the deceptively convivial title: This is the kind of thrill that sticks.

The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing--it touches on every aspect of modern life. It's the documentary equivalent of "The Matrix": It shows us how we're living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything.

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

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

Your cousin could have written this movie. But maybe only Wenders could have directed it. He has the sensitivity to shoot the seesawing depths of Yakusho’s face. He has the eye to capture the elegant and diverse architecture of Tokyo’s public bathrooms.

In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.

Tomas is the film’s most captivating element as well as its limiting factor because it’s only possible to bear so much time in his company. It’s a testament to Rogowski’s performance that Tomas’s appeal remains apparent despite his behavior, that his gravitational pull is understandable even as you long for the others to escape it.

For Greenfield, the Siegels are a brilliant metaphor for everything farkakte about the U.S. economy and the culture that shaped it.

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

The movie doesn't quite jell, but you'll feel its sting for hours.

If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.

Nothing in Trophy shakes out neatly, because everyone onscreen has his or her own set of values and every value is in conflict. The movie is richer in every way for its tangled sympathies. It will leave you angry, sick, and confused — but not smug. Never smug.

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.

This Bond is haunted, not yet housebroken, still figuring out the persona. In Casino Royale, the reset button has been pressed in the manner of "Batman Begins."

Much Ado About Nothing is one of the few movies of recent years that could leave its audiences weeping with joy. [May 10, 1993, p.62]

James Gray’s space opera Ad Astra is so eerily, transfixingly beautiful that I want to purge from my mind its resolution.

Director Bill Pohlad (working with frequent Wes Anderson cinematographer Robert Yeoman) is extraordinarily sensitive to the amorphous nature of Wilson’s life and art, and Atticus Ross’s score creates a floating, evocative soundscape, which is Brian Wilson–esque without a trace of plagiarism.

Akl and Clara Roqet’s script provides depth to these characters and immerses us in each of their perspectives and relationships — which shift along lines of blood and love.

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

It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.