It’s a harrowing documentary, to be sure, but also healing in a way that doesn’t go for easy emotional button-pushing, or play down the white-knuckle struggle they endure while processing all of it.

Blue Is the Warmest Color sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

Not your typical biopic. But it is one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year.

Taking full measure of Phantom Thread may require more than one viewing – a challenge any genuine movie lover will be eager to accept. Our advice for now: just sit back and behold.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality.

The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.

There’s something stealthy in its awareness, in the ways it accrues crumbs of insight and observation and dispenses them throughout the narrative without us even noticing. You emerge from the movie with an enriched, nearly felt sense of the Mangrove as a place, not just as a symbol.

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

Bird has crafted a film -- one of the year's best -- that doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true.

All Holland asks here is that viewers contemplate this headline-generating tragedy happening “over there” from the point of view of those within it. After you’ve sat through this devastating film, it’s impossible not to.

A new crime classic.

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

It's a magical, beguiling wonder.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

Adam Driver gives one of the loveliest and least likely to be rewarded performances of the year in Paterson. Why least likely, you ask? Because Driver's indelibly moving portrayal is so lived-in and lyrical you hardly recognize it as acting.

The Fits is more than a transporting film experience. It's cinema poetry in motion.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

It's a modern horror story that gets you where you live.

For some, the silver linings in Russell’s movies represent a failure to embrace darkness. I see them as a humanist’s act of resistance. That’s why American Hustle ranks with the year’s best movies. It gets under your skin.

The script, co-written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, focuses on a TV journalist (a superb Jack Nicholson).

Day-Lewis is smashing as the man caught between his emotions and the social ethic. Not since Olivier in "Wuthering Heights" has an actor matched piercing intelligence with such imposing good looks and physical grace.

Chases so many ideas that it threatens to spin out of control. But with our multiplexes stuffed with toxic Hollywood formula, it's a gift to find a ballsy movie that thinks it can do anything, and damn near does.

The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.

Beat the drums for a Simmons Oscar, and add a cymbal crash for Whiplash. It's electrifying.