You can’t stop art, motherfuckers, and whether it’s in Grand Theft Auto Online or during a global pandemic, the show must go on.

Sherlock Holmes is totally cool again, which warms my dorky heart.

As the spiritual subtext took over, I couldn’t help but feel that something essential had been lost. The state overwhelms the individual; so, too, by the end, does this beautiful, strange movie.

McBaine and Moss are the team behind 2014’s The Overnighters, a wrenching film about the North Dakota oil boom, and they’re interested in something beyond the contrast of adolescent faces and grown-up topics — or, for that matter, serving up simple optimism about Gen Z when taking in these young men at the cusps of their political lives.

This is not just a musicologist's dream; it's our dream, too.

A senseless blast.

The film starts out as a freewheeling farce and turns into a pitch-black burlesque with surprising depths of feeling.

Director Dennis Dugan knows his way around shin-whacking slapstick, and Sandler is mesmerizing.

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

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

It’s our sense of adventure that matters in the end. We must cultivate confusion and dare to be disoriented.

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

Its observations about the disconnect between its elderly protagonist and the society around her are surprisingly relatable.

Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.

That's Entertainment! is just that--and let the purists attribute to this amusement the pretentiousness it so charmingly lacks. [27 May 1974, p.90]

Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.

The ending dispels a lot of the magic, but the silent-movie palette is gorgeous, and the film is worth seeing for the inspired hamming of Paul Giamatti as Vienna's chief inspector, whose plummy tones made me sure I could hear the ghost of James Mason cackling.

Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.

The law of commerce worked this time around: One terrific thrill ride has begotten another.

The movie has so much texture that once it gets you, you're good and got.

Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino’s twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it’s all of a piece.

A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.

If Possessor ultimately feels more like a testament to its director’s excellent taste in influences than a film that entirely gels in itself, it’s still a thoroughly troubling watch.

Sing Street is far more boisterous and certainly funnier than Once, but it remains in a minor key; “finding happiness in sadness,” is how one character puts it.

It’s not hard to see why Triet’s picture resonates. It has both suspense and intellectual ambition; plot revelations don’t just send the story in new directions, they expand the film’s cultural scope.

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.

McKinley establishes just the right amount of physical and emotional stakes, and a cast led by Ethan Hawke infuses the drama with believable camaraderie, conflict, and tension. It’s the kind of atmospheric, exciting period drama we don’t really get much anymore.

I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured. Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."

It overflows with intriguing ideas, even if they aren’t all fully explored.

What makes Late Night — otherwise a largely predictable story in a familiar mold — really pop is Kaling’s script, which is at the blunter and frankly more exciting spectrum of what Kaling has proven herself to be capable of in her writing career thus far.

Once everything finally collides in The Whale, something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.

Part of the movie’s fun — and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms — is how it forces you to share Lazarro’s go-along-to-get-along ebullience.

It’s romantic, tragic, and inexorably strange.

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]

Haneke is an exploitation filmmaker of the highest gifts. His movies are not to be entered into lightly.

The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.

It’s a shame that Vandross, who died in 2005 of complications from a stroke, didn’t get to participate in the clear-eyed, holistic reappraisal he’s gotten with Luther

A deliciously absorbing documentary.

Yacht Rock is most intriguing as a chronicle of the cat-and-mouse relationship between artists’ creativity and the language fans and brands use to describe and promote it.

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.

It’s quite a mix: Far From the Tree throws so much at you that you’ll want to pick up the book and read (or reread) it. You might be surprised that one of Solomon’s subjects is the accomplished composer Nico Muhly, who’s on the spectrum. Muhly (along with Yo La Tengo) composed the movie’s music, which, like the film and book, doesn’t settle for easy harmonies.

Even with its complicated moral vision, Wouk’s ending reoriented the story’s emotional focus; some might argue it clarified it. Friedkin’s ending leaves you unsure of what to think or feel. It sends you out questioning your beliefs — about war, about service, about madness, even about right and wrong. In that sense, despite the lack of ornament and the reduced scale, this Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is pure Friedkin.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games.

A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.

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.

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

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, in a very real sense, is about the privilege, the sexiness, of being a movie star. Certainly it isn't about the heist; never was.

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’s a potentially grisly setup, but the actual movie makes death look downright fun.

Gooses you even in its barren patches and gets fresher and funnier as it goes along. It builds to a shriekingly funny (and scary) revelation and a dénouement so brilliant it's almost demonic.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act.

Val is not a gloomy movie at all. Quite the opposite. It’s vibrant, quick, and alive, and Val Kilmer today makes for an entertaining guide, with his hammy facial gestures now doing double duty since he can’t talk.

It’s smoothly written and smartly paced, and Michael Douglas is riveting.

As the father-in-law, Langella has one of those thankless antagonist roles — the rigid, killjoy patriarch — that older actors take for the paycheck and almost never pull off. As usual these days, he’s remarkable.

When it comes time for some of the girls to flee, the result is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all prison breaks.

The Two Popes may be a fantasy about a closed institution flinging its doors open, but it’s also a compelling actor’s showcase. The combination is surprisingly potent.

The movie is phenomenally well made and the three actors who fall apart on our watch suffer magnificently.

The film is, first and foremost, a visual and sonic experience. We can lose ourselves in it. I think we’re meant to.

It’s a romp, full of touches that go by almost too quickly to pick up on — I was partial to the strongman who plays a small but key role — but the lingering mood is unmistakably sad.

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.

It’s occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a dull combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that’s the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.

The Dry is a beautiful thriller that leaves us not with explanations, but with overwhelming sadness.

Swan Song is a tremendously tender love letter to someone who survived so many of the slings and arrows that accompanied being an openly gay man in a small, conservative area.

Before Midnight counts on our previous investment to keep us riveted. We are. And we want them back in spirit on that train to Vienna as much as they do. What’s next — After Sunrise?

Vacation is lazy, idiotic, and gross — and I laughed my ass off at it.

Terence Davies's The House of Mirth is a rigorously elegant adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and unlike in some other Davies movies, the rigor here doesn't turn into rigor mortis.... This is dourness of a degree you won't find in Wharton, but in its own shadowed terms the film is a triumph.

Beyond its brash confidence as a piece of filmmaking and its homages to the Western (including the use of a wider frame than was used on the show), El Camino is fan service executed at a very high level — an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, “And then what happened?” after the words “The End” have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch.

Garbus brings off something extraordinary in a film that sets out to leave us sad, enraged, and profoundly unsatisfied. Lost Girls makes us want to rethink our need for a certain kind of closure in a world that has so little of it.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

The documentary could hardly be more timely or essential.

The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

For all the artfulness, the feel of the film is rough-hewn, almost primitive. It’s a fabulous tree house of a movie.

It’s great not just because we’re eavesdropping on two rock survivors, but also because we’re seeing, in these living legends, the handiwork of the two unsung men to whom this film pays tribute.

That title would suit a melodrama with an emphasis on doomed love, which is not what Loach has crafted. There is a (chaste) love story and plenty of bloodletting. But what engages him and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, is the growing tension between brother Irish rebels.

This is no antique show: Faced with an audience, they are still amazingly vital and sometimes amazingly lewd.

Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.

Tim’s Vermeer starts off in a playful fashion, but as he soldiers on, our intrepid, mild-mannered technologist finds himself getting emotional. In the presence of art, something happens. By the time it’s over, don’t be surprised if you’re more in awe of the work of an artist than ever before. Maybe this is Penn and Teller’s final, subtle rug-pulling moment: An attempt to demystify the artistic process ends up posing even greater mysteries.

Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.

Red Lights is the most ambiguously compelling romance around.

The unexpected element is a series of letters (some never before heard) Joplin wrote to her family back home in Port Arthur, Texas, read by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) in a voice that captures the cadences of Joplin’s speech without being an imitation. The letters are heartbreaking in their own way.

It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.

Stillwater is the new movie from director Tom McCarthy, and it feels like one he’s spent his career preparing for — an enthralling, exasperating, and, above all else, ambitious affair that doesn’t soften or demand sympathy for its difficult main character but does insist on according him his full humanity.

James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.

Even given the spate of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films that rule the multiplexes, this is the bleakest “franchise” in human history, and I’m curious if there will be any balm whatsoever in the next close encounter of the furred kind.

What makes the movie such an unexpectedly potent little number is that Adventureland comes to stand for Stagnationland; the real roller coaster (i.e., life) is just outside the park.

The film’s driving ideas, which transform over the course of the picture, are replete with ironic potential, but Flanagan ably navigates the tonal minefield, never presenting the whole thing as a wink-wink joke on his characters. They feel real, both in their conception and in how they deviate from our preconceptions, which is quite an accomplishment given that most of them aren’t even onscreen for that long within the movie’s frescolike structure.

By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.

By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya’s fragile, unguarded soul through Harley’s eyes, and the film’s discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Ted runs out of invention in its last act (the bear is coveted by a chillingly deadpan sociopath, played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the villain's fat son), but I can't think of a better movie to see if you're male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence.

A startling achievement, but its lack of psychological dimension prevents it from making much human contact with us. It ends where it begins: in a state of shock.

Lafleur’s film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.

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.

One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.

By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. Despite the tumult of her life and her singularity as both a person and an artist, this Frida seems downright familiar.