It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.

I suspect that, if nothing else, this astoundingly beautiful picture will stand the test of time.

It’s a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. It’s sui generis. It’s the damnedest thing.

His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.

It’s funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing. It’s steeped in existential dread. I don’t know how Birbiglia pulled it off, but he gets the minutiae of an improv-comedy show thrillingly right while using the form to build a kind of allegory of the corrosive effects of capitalism.

Kids will be enchanted, adults will be enraptured. It’s somehow light as air yet overwhelming, both ineffable and unforgettable.

You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.

The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."

Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.

Ferrari is elegant and restless, with a sense throughout that something horrific might be lurking around each corner. And when the director straps his cameras on those cars and sends them on their way, the picture transforms into something more visceral and chaotic, a fever dream (or maybe a nightmare) of speed and smoke.

For all its portentousness, this is the best Harry Potter picture yet. In some ways, it improves on J.K. Rowling’s novel, which is punishingly protracted and builds to a climactic wand-off better seen than read.

I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.

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?

The Avengers is both campy and ­reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.

You've seen the rest; now see the best.

For grown-ups, the film will touch something deeper: the heartfelt wish that childhood memories will never fade.

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.

That drifting, elegiac quality (which at times may recall his once-neglected, now-classic Jackie Brown) is the film’s great strength. There are several major set-pieces — some hilarious, some creepy, one absurdly violent — that will get people talking, but perhaps the most powerful is a lengthy, seemingly aimless one that comes smack dab in the middle.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.

It’s a work of masterful and almost unbearable melancholy.

Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living.

Every scene adds another onion-skinlike layer, adding density and mass so slowly that you hardly notice the emotional weight of it all until it is suddenly overwhelming.

Assayas’s pace is easy, his structure linear: no tricky flashbacks, no jagged cuts. There’s so little in the way of histrionics that it’s hard to put one’s finger on why the film is so terrifically intense — except that each actress is, in her own peculiar way, preternaturally high-strung, able to convey momentous emotional stakes without raising her voice above the pitch of conversation.

It’s extremely moving and thrilling and it will both make and ruin your day.

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny--another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.

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

Pantheism, Cameronism: In Avatar, what's the diff? Now he's king of a world he made from scratch.

Across the Spider-Verse looks incredible, even better than the groundbreaking first installment, but what’s truly impressive about it is how willing it is to entrust its storytelling to its animation.

This teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.

Of the many things that make Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of World exhilarating, from its egalitarian mix of high and low references to its delightful profanity, what stands out is its willingness to acknowledge the general horror of modern existence, and then to suggest the only reasonable response is to laugh.

What’s extraordinary about Tangerine is that it’s everything an entertaining, old-fashioned, mainstream Hollywood comedy should be but no longer is. That nowadays you have to get this kind of stuff via Sundance from directors using iPhones is a drag — the wrong kind.

It confronts, but it doesn’t exploit. It’s about one of the most horrifying events of recent years, and yet it’s defined by its austerity, its sense of quiet. It is as much about the complex, dull horror of memory as it is about the brute, sharp horror of that day.

We walk away from the film with a dark empathy for these people, and for ourselves.

Living with Mason and his parents over time you feel an intimacy, an empathy, a shared stake. I’m not saying Boyhood is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but I’m thinking there’s my life before I saw it and my life now, and it’s different; I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.

Osder has made a documentary that’s astonishingly in the present tense.

The movie is as cornball as all get-out and — once you discern the narrative arc — as predictable. But then there’s the part that’s — as we serious cinephiles like to say — infuckingcredible.

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?

As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it's phenomenally gripping - an unholy masterwork.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.

Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles—on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable movie.

One to One: John & Yoko becomes not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one.

Built around silences and the steady accumulation of human and natural detail, the story feels at times as if it’s being told by the tree itself: omniscient, unflinching, yet shot through with an almost alien tenderness. Its perspective is not so much Olympian as it is pointillist.

I recommend seeing it more than once; luckily, it’s so gorgeous and spellbinding that it invites repeat viewings.

The film is not just a means of trying to understand if there was some better possible outcome but also a fantasy of opening up the past and slipping back inside it to see what you missed when you were there.

Showing Up is more than worth surrendering to. It’s one of Reichardt’s best — warm as one of the sunny Portland, Oregon, afternoons Lizzy’s perpetually fretting her way through and an affectionate rumination on the relationship between art and all the day-to-day stuff of life that can get in the way of making it.

Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.

An astounding, one-of-a-kind movie.

Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

[Dano] gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.

Perhaps the most awesome thing in Mr. Turner is how Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope hint at Turner’s paintings in their landscapes — not to make the film look painterly but to suggest what Turner saw before transmuting reality into art.

Hats off to Olivier Assayas's plain yet hauntingly beautiful Summer Hours, a true--albeit nonsecular--meditation on art and eternal life.

The sleek beauty, crafty wit, family warmth, and impeccable slapstick suffusing The Incredibles immediately vaults it to a new, higher level of entertainment.

It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream.

Room is astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime situation into a fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival.

Among the greatest, most ravishing of films.

It’s breezy, then suspenseful, and gradually, crushingly sad. On its own terms, it’s a perfect film.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds and builds and builds, as we keep waiting for an explosion, a big emotional climax. And, not unlike with another great recent import, Pedro Almodóvar’s "Pain and Glory," it arrives with the very last shot — which I won’t reveal other than to say it’s one of the finest pieces of acting and one of the most moving images I’ve seen in eons.

It Was Just an Accident plays like an ideal melding of the filmmaker Panahi was and the filmmaker he’s been forced to become. It’s an endlessly fascinating and extraordinarily powerful work.

It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character.

The most joyously cinematic movie I've seen this year. Chomet's astonishing imagination conjures images you could swear you've seen in your dreams.

Jackson is rare among the makers of epic movies in that he knows how to do the small stuff, too. The Return of the King has “heart”--how else could it pump out all that blood?

The end of The Cove is as rousing as anything from Hollywood. Manipulative? Sure--but isn't that fitting? Capitalism has driven an entire village to massacre dolphins and keep its work hidden.

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.

Magical and melancholy, The Tale of Princess Kaguya comes from the other mad genius of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, who co-founded the beloved Japanese animation company alongside the great Hayao Miyazaki back in 1985.

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]

A love affair between performer and filmmaker. The director shows off his ardor by eliciting from his actors aspects of their gifts that they themselves may not have known they had.

The best film of the year? Possibly …

Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.

Pain and Glory is at once the gentlest and most emotionally naked movie Pedro Almodóvar has ever made.

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.

I found its thundering journey through several decades of recent Russian and world history revealing and (perhaps more importantly) enormously entertaining. And by utilizing Law’s charisma to approximate Putin’s anti-charisma, it gives us a villain who is chilling and believable. I can’t wait to see it again.

Schamus is the former head of Focus Features, and seeing how he directs (this is his debut, though he has been Ang Lee’s collaborator for decades), I suspect he chose the company’s name. His vision is 20/20 plus.

Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.

This haunting movie transports you to another world — and redefines home.

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

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.

Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon is the greatest, most searching documentary of an actor ever put on film, and it’s no coincidence that it’s about film’s greatest and most searching actor.

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

Welcome to Leith is a sober, terrifying look at the very real monsters roaming the quiet countryside.

By letting the picture embody his failures — by turning Armageddon Time into a self-aware look at his own limitations — the director makes that necessary connection between then and now, between the characters onscreen and us watching. In other words, he denies us the one thing these types of movies almost always provide: reassurance.

The film is a masterpiece in which “locked-in” syndrome becomes the human condition.

Its subject is timely but its presentation is timeless — it’s a war movie, a family drama, a Greek tragedy.

James White looks like a simple film on its surface.... But despite the vérité-influenced stylization, writer-director Mond (whose own struggle with loss likely inspired some of this story) doesn’t seem too interested in realism or grit.

It has what the most heartfelt Disney animated features used to have: rapturous imagery matched with real wit.

A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.

Freddie is a live wire given form, flesh, sinew. She’s a woman defined by what she refuses to be, and Chou appropriately refuses to offer any heartwarming, simple resolutions to the dilemmas marking her life.

Of Men and War’s compassion is matched only by its relentlessness.

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

Pi has designed his own terrarium to keep from staring directly into the abyss. It's not denial. It's faith in something else: the transformative power of storytelling. The film is transcendent.

[A] truly monumental work of art ... The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace.

Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made.

The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest.

The Deep Blue Sea is not a showy or pronounced movie. Open yourself up to it, however, and it might destroy you.

Once the action starts - and it starts very quickly - The Raid is relentless, breathtaking in its sheer propulsive majesty. But it's also shot through with moments of bleak poetry amid the carnage.

First Man might be the most grounded space movie ever made — grounded in the tension between technology that’s almost laughably fragile (the astronauts really do seem as if they’re going up in tin cans) and the sheer evolutionary imperative of family.

The movie is a knockout.