The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

Park’s ability to manipulate his imagery is something else entirely. His dissolves and overlays and intercutting are formal and sensual expressions of his great subject: that all of us are trapped in the same socio-economic and psychological nightmare.

This isn’t his smoothest film, but it’s his fullest and most original. It’s also his most urgent, which is really saying something. It’s one of the most urgent films ever made.

In the best moments of Howl's Moving Castle and in his extraordinary body of work, Miyazaki teaches his viewers more valuable lessons.

The film manages to be both intelligent and visceral.

Moodysson captures exactly the preening narcissism and gumption of these frazzled would-be revolutionaries trying to wriggle out of their bourgeois straitjackets.

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

The Banshees of Inisherin is like watching two cars slowly set out on a collision course ending in a crash that would be easily averted if one would just give way. But it’s also a caustic masterstroke of anti-romanticism, a counter to every starry-eyed screen portrait (often made by an American) of rural Ireland as a verdant sanctuary of close traditions, quirky characters, and a more authentic way of life.

It’s a lively, occasionally powerful history lesson, and an essential reclamation project.

The jamboree is beautifully shot and directed, by Chris Menges and David Leland respectively, and there is a haunting touch: the presence of George’s son, Dhani, on guitar, looking near-identical to his dad in his twenties.

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.

No filmmaker I know has gotten as close to a professional athlete as James Toback gets to Mike Tyson in his new documentary.

It builds a deeply moving emotional journey out of the simplest, most mundane elements. By the end, almost nothing has happened, and yet you’re a wreck.

Hot-dog Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To has never achieved the cult status of John Woo in this country, but his explosively entertaining — and startlingly splattery — Drug War should win him new fans.

One of the very best American independent films you’ll see this year, John Magary’s The Mend, takes what could have easily been a mundane tale of brotherly dysfunction and turns it into something abstract and electrifying.

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

In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.

The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.

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 film is too rich and too human for any kind of categorization. But for all its beauty, it’s also quite an unsettling watch — a delicate, authentic look at the complicated ways in which abuse works.

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.