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

Has a mixture of bloodletting and exultation that would make Sam Peckinpah sit up in his grave and howl with pleasure.

Wonder has an overflowing humanism that extends to less-sympathetic characters.

Palm Springs would have been a scream and likely a word-of-mouth hit in theaters, but maybe there’s something fitting about its going straight to streaming in the middle of a pandemic. What is quarantine, anyway, if not waking up and going through the same routine over and over without end?

Grandma marks a new era in gay cinema — one’s that confident and mature enough to acknowledge regret.

This is a rock documentary that doesn’t just recount a band’s rise, breakup, and successful reunion, though it does do that. It invites its audience to see the band’s success from a deeper, more contextualized point of view.

Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.

Infused with honesty and authenticity, Michael Showalter’s crowd-pleaser is an instantly winning heart-stealer and a superbly well-timed story of culture clash that resolves into a lovely tale of mutual understanding and acceptance.

It’s unlikely to make new converts, but it’s filled with vibrant, graceful ass-kickery, and sometimes that’s all one wants, and needs.

Another year, another Mike Leigh gem.

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe’s empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture — woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

Holy Motors is typically confounding but on every level that matters a work of unfettered - and liberating - imagination.

Payne is too acerbic - maybe too much of an asshole - to settle for easy humanism. But he's too smart a dramatist to settle for easy derision. Mockery and empathy seesaw, the balance precarious - and thrillingly so. It's the noblest kind of satire: cruel and yet, in the end, lacking the killing blow.

Molly’s Game isn’t the deepest movie you’ll see, but it’s both finely tuned and big-hearted. It’s a rouser.

His palette here is deep-toned, with bottomless blacks and supersaturated oranges and blues--as if the Walt Disney of "Pinocchio" had collaborated with Goya.

Baumbach’s main characters are written and acted straight as befits their personal integrity, but the rest of Marriage Story is done in a satirist’s broad strokes — a penetrating, often inspired satirist.

The Human Voice is all about the muddied lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and about how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that might be undergirding it.

A culture clash defined by an incredibly strong first-time performance, it’s continually more emotionally surprising than its dry packaging lets on.

Jodorowsky’s fondness for the surreal and grotesque is in full evidence here. What makes his films so captivating, however, isn’t their strangeness, but their refusal to divide the world into good and bad, even when it’s easy to do so.

By the end of the movie, the characters are numbed, while the audience is sensitized to the mayhem to an almost unbearable degree.

Actress and director build a symphony out of Grandma Wong’s grimaces and her glares. There are emotions in there, but she’s not about to let us get to them, and to her, that easily. And so, we are transfixed.

Calculated to enrage and pulling it off like gangbusters, Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal pits the legacy of the late Albert C. Barnes’s Barnes Foundation (which boasts arguably the world’s finest collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art) against the social-climbing, philistine, downright Nixonian machinations of Philadelphia’s wealthiest--who gamed the system and pried the collection loose in defiance of Barnes’s legal will.

Belle does have a clear moral compass, but it refuses easy answers and withholds easy judgments. As such, it feels profoundly human.

In addition to being a film about soulless jet-setters as a new form of walking dead, grounded in and caring about nothing, Infinity Pool is a phantasmagoric ode to the sensation of staying too long at the party.

A quietly delightful new entry in the Fletch series.

The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.

A cool summer thriller whose laughs don't slow down the suspense.

It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.