Under the astute direction of Danny DeVito, who does a sly turn as Oliver's attorney, this acid-dipped epic of revenge is killingly funny and dramatically daring.

The chaotic, jumbled The Other Side of the Wind isn’t for everyone — just folks who care about the history of film and the master builder who helped make it great.

Kicking off with a barrage of kitschy imagery and an abundance of irony and ecstasy, Devo lets you know that it’s the definitive portrait of an art project by mimicking its subject’s Dada-meets-deadpan-humor aesthetic.

Director Ron Howard has turned Peter Morgan's stage success into a grabber of a movie laced with tension, stinging wit and potent human drama.

In a beautifully nuanced directing debut, actor Paul Dano mines the smallest details in Richard Ford’s acclaimed 1990 novel — he and his partner Zoe Kazan wrote the emotionally-attuned script — to create a portrait of a woman who can’t quite catch up with the frustration and feminist stirrings she feels inside.

Watching Haneke's film is, aptly enough, a challenge and a punishment. But watching Huppert, a great actress tearing into a landmark role, is riveting.

It's the Pixar animators who keep grown-ups as riveted as the kids with visual marvels that dazzle and delight.

Exorcist junkies should look elsewhere. Instead of spinning heads and projectile puke, Mungiu offers nuance and provocation. The result is quietly devastating.

Just see it. This movie will take a piece out of you.

Among Fincher die-hards, the result will probably bemuse some, bore many, and thrill a relative but hearty minority. Count me in the minority.

Michael Moore might want to look into this before more animal docs steal his thunder.

Writer-director Raymond De Felitta creates something wonderfully funny and touching.

Garland need make no apologies for Annihilation. It's a bracing brainteaser with the courage of its own ambiguity. You work out the answers in your own head, in your own time, in your own dreams, where the best sc-fi puzzles leave things. Get ready to be rocked.

The gifted Rees makes finding out a stirring and heartfelt journey. And Oduye is unforgettable. A star is born.

Pride naively thinks it can change the world with a single movie. Talk about fighting spirit. I couldn't have liked it more.

George has been criticized for simplifying a complex story into an African "Schindler's List." But despite flaws in execution, this is a film of rare courage and imperishable heart.

It’s not just that Kidman shows you this woman’s sexual fulfillment — it’s the way she gives you everything happening around it, in the most intimate and telling of ways. And that’s why this feels like the most naked performance this A-list star has ever given, with the physical exposure being the least vulnerable aspect of it all.

Whether it's the "best" documentary of 2017 is a matter of opinion. But it is assuredly the most vital.

The antique charms of the story can still seduce us when done well, and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who freely adapted the play with Jean-Claude Carrière, knows how to fashion a sumptuously beautiful, hugely entertaining spectacle that also stays alert to the cadences of the heart.

There's not a timid, sympathy-begging minute in it. Even better, you leave Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work with the exhilarating feeling that the lady is just hitting her stride.

All the pieces hang together. You can't say that about many movies.

Think "The Hurt Locker," which shares a cinematographer in Barry Ackroyd with no damage to the Bard's bruising poetry. Neat trick.

In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

Evocatively shot by "Selma" wizard Bradford Young, A Most Violent Year reflects a world where nothing is held sacred. You watch with nerves clenched, holding on tight.

David Fincher's shockingly good film version of Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another.

Scrappy, funny, hot-to-trot biopic.

Fierce, funny and vividly moving.

Kingsley creates an unforgettable monster. Acting rarely gets this hypnotically explosive.

Dear White People marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Justin Simien, an African-American who laces his satire with delicious mirth and malice.

Broken Flowers may be too low-key for laugh junkies, but Jarmusch fills his sharply observed comedy with wonderful mischief. The mix of humor and heartbreak brings out the best in Murray.

The film sneaks up on you, quiet-like, until its implications accumulate. And then it crushes you.

No one with a genuine belief in the possibilities and mysteries of cinema would think of missing Silence. It's essential filmmaking from the church of Scorsese, a modern master who lives and breathes in the images he puts on screen.

It's both gravely serious and a demonically funny, a blend meant to catch audiences off balance. Mission accomplished.

From "The 39 Steps" and "The Lodger" to "Rear Window," "Psycho" and all stops in between, this film gets us drunk on Hitchcock's movies again. My only problem with Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it's too short at 80 minutes. More please, and soon.

Appearances by Adam Ant, the Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with U.S. trans icon Jayne County, ground it in the moment, but Jarman's suggestion that even the most vocal nihilists would sell out their ideals — if given enough encouragement, naturally — provided a glimpse of the future.

A film of awesome power and blistering provocation.

The result is a film of surprise and wonder, lyrically attuned to the ticking intensity of romance.

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

This bonbon spiked with malice is a triumph for Jaoui, who takes witty and wounding measure of the small betrayals that leave bruises on us all.

The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself.

The performances are uncommonly fine...Lone Star isn't built to ride trends. It's built to last.

A brilliant piece of nasty business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity. Damn, it's good. You can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing.

The Fighter, its heart full to bursting, is an emotional powerhouse that comes close to spilling over.

Keep "Survivor" and "Fear Factor," and give me this spellbinding mind teaser, the ultimate game for movie buffs.

It's the remarkable Attah, whose young face reflects a hellish journey, that makes this fierce movie a blazing, indelible achievement.

Apollo 10 1/2 starts off as a fantasy, a family comedy and a loosey-goosey flashback. It exits as a tribute to imagination, which — like so many of Linklater’s best movies — uses something personal as a jumping-off point for something poignant, funny, expansive, and ultimately moving.

Saddle up for a rowdy, rip-snorting, hilarity-and-hellfire western full of riding, fighting, hanging, shooting, gold prospecting and bloody massacres — plus silly songs, a limbless poet, cowboy love rituals and philosophical musings about the inevitability of dying. Yes, it’s all in one movie. Who does things like that? Try Joel and Ethan Coen.

A heartfelt human drama that sneaks up and floors you.

Green Room is way more than crass exploitation. It's a B movie with an art-house core.

All praise to acting dynamo Robert Downey Jr., who brings so much creative juice to the party that Iron Man achieves instant liftoff.

That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy.

Jarmusch, as ever, has the power to sneak up on you. He's a spellbinder. The same goes for his movie.

In fact, Bell the writer, director, producer and actress knows how to set a savvy trap. While we're laughing, she pulls the rug out, making us see Carol's world as a microcosm for the world every working woman lives in. That she does it with subtlety, humor and touching gravity marks Bell as a filmmaker to watch.

The sad fact is that racial injustice is timelier than ever. Righteous fury is in the air. And that fervor to stand up and be counted is all over Selma.

Furiosa runs on a high-octane philosophical perspective that finds hope in a hopeless place. Also, a lot of cars go fast and sh*t blows up. It’s a win-win.

It’s a matter of opinion whether Thunder Road is one of the best films of 2018, a distinction best left for listmakers and marketers. (Cue “It, Me” copping to the former.) But I can say it’s one of my favorites, the sort of experience where you walk out of a theater 90 minutes later and feel like something inside you has shifted two klicks to the left.

If their contribution to the man-vs-nature genre isn't exactly top-tier, Walking Out still hits its marks in terms of father-son melodrama with an uncanny precision.

Green’s slow-burn style might not spell box-office windfall in a cinema era of short attention spans, but her artistry is indisputable.

Dawn is dynamite entertainment, especially in the rousing first hour.

A mesmerizing deconstruction of the brute nature of love.

Just one talking head, that's all. But the head in this mesmerizing documentary belongs to Traudl Junge.

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying.

Lee uses 3D with the delicacy and lyricism of a poet. You don't just watch this movie, you live it.

Reeves plugs in a live wire to play Abby, the girl vampire who's been 12 for, well, a very long time. That would be Chloë Grace Moretz, an acting dynamo (see Kick-Ass) whose mesmerizing performance goes deep.

The movie of Fences doesn't need Hollywood bells and whistles. This writer, this director and these actors are all the magnificence required to grab your attention and hold it.

Naranjo, a graduate of the American Film Institute, has a gift for staging action that defines character. The film is a harrowing experience. It cuts deep.

Do not come to Conclave in search of some divine messages about power, corruption and lies percolating within a sacred space. Just embrace it for being the type of gobsmacking, pope-up-the-jams entertainment that will have you genuflecting with gratitude over its over-the-top ridiculousness.

A fresh and unexpected documentary that plays like a nail-biting mystery and a ticket to ride the whirlwind where art and commerce do battle.

Sing Street is the most romantic movie you'll find anywhere these days, brimming over with music, fun and the thrill of first love.

Keane means to shakes us, and does.

If many male stars of a certain age are destined to become late-act action heroes, we hope this is Vaughn's "Taken," and his particular set of skills will continue to involve dishing out such graceless, effective hurt.

Abounds in pleasures.

The movie would hit every bullseye it needed to even without her near-surgical deconstruction of the narcissistic monsters who scream “action” and “cut.” With Cruz’s take on artistic “genius,” however, this satire officially becomes a work of actual genius.

Unique and unmissable.

People may fault Coppola for dipping her toe in familiar terrain, but it’s hard to argue with the result: a transportive, heartbreaking journey into the dark heart of celebrity, and her finest film since Lost in Translation.

This may be one of the few rockumentaries since Stop Making Sense to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental.

Portman's portrait of an artist under siege is unmissable and unforgettable. So is the movie. You won't know what hit you.

You can be successfully creative or you can end taking a much more crooked path. As The Painter and the Thief so ably demonstrates, your life is worthy or compassion and consideration regardless.

Somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.

A portrait of a sycophant as a pure, unbridled sociopath, Lurker understands the relationship between fame and fandom all too well.

Indignation is one of the few adaptations of Roth's work to make it to the screen with its claws intact — Schamus reveals his gifts as a filmmaker who respect the words and the space between them in equal measure.

It sounds like rom-com hell. And it would be if Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus weren't such an appealing pair of misfits. It's a pleasure just to watch them spar.

Guggenheim and his subject also want to show what it’s like to be Michael J. Fox right now, and that’s really where this documentary, which premiered at Sundance today, turns into something else entirely — something beyond praise or tragedy.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

Hold on for a hell of a ride.

An actor with a handful of shorts under his belt — including a Cesar-nominated 2017 one that served as the basis for this feature — Ladj Ly juggles a variety of perspectives, subcultures and intersecting storylines like a pro.

It's taut, tense and terrific.

Kajillionaire feels in some ways like a relic, harkening back to the recent past of indie quirk but dressing it up in the pain of overgrown kidulthood. The difference between July’s work and those other movies is that the quirks aren’t a mere matter of personality or window dressing, but evidence of a way of being in the world that, to the majority, isn’t quite right.

It's Corbijn, shooting with a poet's eye in a harshly stunning black-and-white, who cuts to the soul of Ian's life and music. You don't watch this movie, you live it.

The House of Mirth is not one of those teacup and doily movies; it's harsh and disturbing. Davies does superlatively right by Wharton. There's blood on the walls.

It’s a fresh-faced gloss on the original, in other words, powered, like the original, by a star who’ll simply never stop being a star. The big mission makes for the most exciting moment; the build-up is worthwhile. When Maverick goes its own way, it tends to lose itself.

There’s something so compelling about what [Howerton's] doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story.

Langella delivers a master class in acting. He's playing Leonard Schiller, an aging author aching from the loss of his wife, a weak heart and literary neglect.

What gives birth/rebirth its dark, subtle, painful sense of humor, as well as its horror and its thoughtful gravity, is the sense that even the most profound problems of life and death can be approached like problems of science — that the act of trying to give someone you love more life can result in basic trial and error and scientific problem-solving.

The only agenda in Warfare, in other words, is to give you a sense of not just what happened but how everything felt while it was happening. A tall order, to be sure, but one that Garland, Mendoza, their cast and the crew pull off shockingly well.

Though the film has an evocative look reminiscent of Matthew Brady’s period photographs, Zwick has stuffed the actors’ mouths with numbing bombast. Glory is a shame.

Springs surprises that entertain and provoke.