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

They’re great stories, and it’s through them that Jodorowsky’s Dune shows us how the greatest movie never made, in its own crazy little way, somehow still came to be.

Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep Beasts of No Nation only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level.

The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.

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.

Girls Will Be Girls is a modest work, but like some of the greatest films, it comes to vivid life before our eyes.

By cutting things up and showing us the perils of fractured perspectives, the director, one of cinema’s great humanists, demonstrates that compassion is more than just a natural state of being; it’s a process that requires constant expansion of one’s field of vision.

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

Loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn't much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb.

This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.

If it feels somewhat hazy and unsatisfying as a story, that is perhaps by design. Its fragmented, elliptical style has the quality of a dark, fragile memory.

Do I detect a note of self-satire in Jarmusch’s undead? I’d like to think he’s poking fun at his own stylized, white-boy cool. But underneath, of course, he’s deadly serious. A ruined metropolis, a snatch of dialogue about coming water wars, a poisoned blood supply: The garden of Adam and Eve is despoiled beyond remedy. This is a charming dirge, though.

It’s sensational in the open air and subtle in smaller, enclosed spaces. It has sweep and intimacy. And, yes, we need this movie now.

Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool.

What makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it.

Farmageddon made me laugh quite a few times, and kids will probably love it. But it can’t quite measure up to the glories of the first Shaun the Sheep film.

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 she (Ullmann) does achieve is a couple of scenes of lacerating power.

Although Junge had consulted with a few historians and moviemakers over the years, she had never really unburdened herself, and this 90-minute documentary is a devastating act of personal confession.

But days later, I keep coming back to Jennifer Lopez’s performance. With a wave of her hand or a dip in her hips, light seems to change and move with her. Lopez has always been charming — even great — in films like "Out of Sight" (1998). But here she’s doing the best work of her career, weaponizing an undeniable charisma and turning it into something hard, pointed, righteous, even angry.

Cream-puff light, but is deceptively rigorous, and about so much more than one woman’s quest to find the One.

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.

The poetic Swedish vampire picture (with arterial spray) "Let the Right One In" has been hauntingly well transplanted to the high desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and renamed Let Me In.

It’s not cinematic enough to make you forget you’re watching something conceived for another, more spatially constricted medium, but it’s too cinematic to capture the intensity, the concentration, of a great theatrical event.

Kimi threads its increasingly tense interactions with a modern melancholy.

Berger’s film is adapted, quite faithfully, from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, and it combines the pulp velocity of a great airport read with the gravitas of high drama.

Sachs hits notes we've rarely heard in gay cinema, in which the hedonist bleeds into the humanist, the ephemeral into the enduring.

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.