Even though there were moments in The Magic Flute when I wondered if Branagh hadn't truly gone off his rocker, I found its audacity exhilarating. [11 Sep 2006]

Destroyer may position itself as a kind of redemption tale, but Kusama’s film is decidedly not feel-good. The music by Theodore Shapiro is deliberately set to jangle one’s nerves — it is definitely trying too hard — but like most of the film’s elements, it is just effective enough to create an impression.

Bale’s performance is absolutely letter perfect, and he disappears into the role.

This film really is Moore’s tour de force — a forceful, moving, and compelling call to action. A number of Michael Moore’s films have made history. This time he’s asking his audience to be the ones to do it.

Stronger is an actor’s movie. Gordon Green’s touch is subtle.

Cretton did fictionalize parts of the story, adding dramatic embellishments and narrative tissue. But his greatest feat may have been telling the story in such a way that viewer doesn’t leave the theater going, “Oh, some of these stories are so extreme, they might be slight fictionalization.” They’re too consumed by the ride.

The film itself is an admirable and empathetic work that does not romanticize anorexia or the young woman being ground into nothingness by the disease, as some have feared.

Despite the hit-and-miss nature of this highfalutin concept-art, Manifesto comes across as successfully, outrageously funny. As authentically enthusiastic as Rosefeldt seems to be about manifestos, he seems equally aware of the pretentious ridiculousness lurking within them.

Though it’s not a film that will enter the canon of cinematic classics, it is nearly perfect, with ample heart, humor and tragedy-tinged humanity.

With Landline, Robespierre once again proves herself to be one of the funnier filmmakers working. Just as important, she proves herself to be one of the more empathetic directors out there.

Emily’s sickness is ultimately what elevates The Big Sick above the echelon of enjoyable-but-generic rom-coms.

In Okja, Joon Ho takes animal cruelty and corporate capitalism to slaughter. And yet, he doesn’t preach or pander.

The discomfort that Arteta elicits serves a purpose and is buoyed by a few very funny moments.

Like every Swanberg picture I’ve seen, Win It All is a small character drama that, through improvisation, renders relationships impeccably; it’s at once specific and universal.

It’s an enormously resonant work of cultural history that should do much to renew attention to the lonely, prophetic voice of James Baldwin.

Jarmusch has a tendency (which is intentional) to turn away from what is obviously beautiful and popular, and to instead beautifully render what is rarely noticed and perhaps slightly ugly. He credits the cinematographer Robby Müller with teaching him, “Don’t look for the obvious, always keep your eyes open, keep thinking on your feet.”

Gandhi’s direction brings out superior performances in the film’s cast, particularly in Terrell, whose imitation of Obama’s singular ways of speaking and mannerisms is nearly flawless.

Jackie transcends mimicry to achieve something greater — bringing the first lady’s grief and resolve in the face of unspeakable loss to vivid life.

Elle, like all of Verhoeven’s films, refuses easy categorization. It combines elements of a rape revenge thriller, an extremely dark class comedy and Cronenbergian body horror to create something totally unique — a singular experience that transcends genre.

Assaf’s pop-culture transcendence was a coming-of-age moment for Palestinians, a sign that they could triumph in the most delicious, delightful and unlikely of contexts, despite a broken society built on institutional hopelessness. Abu-Assad’s films make the same point, in a darker register.

How close did a simple maintenance mishap come to rendering at least one American state uninhabitable and killing an unknown number of people? And what does that tell us about the security and safety of the deadliest weapons ever built in human history? We don’t know the answer to the first question, and the second one raises extremely troubling issues. I don’t want to spoil the gripping and improbable details of Kenner’s film, but how the Damascus accident started is no big secret.

In Order of Disappearance possesses both a striking soulfulness and a sense of beauty. (Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Philip Øgaard, whose images are memorable but never showy.)

I would simultaneously argue that Sheil and Greene go off the rails several times during Kate Plays Christine, most notably in their overly artful and self-conscious attempt to re-enact the shooting but also that they get viewers closer to the real Christine Chubbuck than I would have thought possible.

Not only is War Dogs a surprisingly well-told tale in the classic American rags-to-riches-to-rags mode. It’s also a mordant morality fable with a genuine heart of darkness. (Plus, it has one hell of a soundtrack, matching its moods to an array of classic rock and hip-hop tunes in the Martin Scorsese vein.)

The film may not go boldly, but it’s a welcome homecoming for the beloved series.

Feig’s Ghostbusters is a goofy, free-floating romp with an anarchic spirit of its own, a fresh set of scares and laffs and a moderate dose of girl power that is unlikely to seem confrontational to anyone beyond the most confirmed basement-dwelling Gamergate troll.

There’s a terrible wonder in this rare glimpse inside a country that has tried to empty itself of all thought, all commerce and all civil society — of pretty much everything except an especially lame version of hero worship and despotism.

Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.

It seems like it’s more about what happens after the tickling stops, which is also when Tickled stops being hilarious.

If you want a movie that eviscerates “The Hunger” and eats its bloody insides while daring you to look away, here it is.

The truly remarkable thing about this modest little movie is the revelation of how much change is possible within a relatively short time.

Forget the inflated Trumpian moral dilemmas of "Superman" and "Captain America." The summer’s most powerful and most disturbing thriller has arrived, in the form of an intensely atmospheric Korean movie called The Wailing.

Mesmerizing documentary.

To sum it all up, The Nice Guys is basically “Chinatown” remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time.

This High-Rise is a scathing, intoxicating visual and auditory experience, the most truthful and most powerful Ballard adaptation we’ve ever seen, or are likely to.

It’s gruesome and funny and dark and incredibly tense.

To give a performance this layered and complex and unstinting while also directing the film around it, which is risky and imaginative and full of life, testifies to impressive powers of concentration.

I suspect this movie will sharply divide Nichols' existing fan base for reasons I can only allude to vaguely in a review; I loved it, or almost all of it, but I can understand the uncertainty.

The conscientious precision and painstaking identification in Eye in the Sky is presented as morally murky; Mirren’s character leans hard on a subordinate to give her an acceptable estimate of collateral damage, so the politicians will say yes. Even so it may be an overly reassuring picture.

There’s a freshness and an unjaded quality to almost every scene that makes you want to keep watching.

Like any truly successful horror film, The Witch operates on various levels at once and is open to interpretation.

It’s no ordinary movie: Rabin, the Last Day is a disorienting mixture of drama, documentary and meticulous re-creation, and very little of it takes place on the last day of Rabin’s life.

Underneath the laff-riot and the Hollywood satire, Hail, Caesar! is a curiously delicate film built on profound affection for American movies and the illusions they build, and loaded with in-jokes the mainstream audience will grasp incompletely or not at all.

Lazer Team is a pastiche based on a beloved pattern; it understands its own limitations but seeks to maximize its potential. All the characters are presented with immense affection and offered the chance to grow and develop, by which I mean to be gifted with inexplicable superpowers, to be repeatedly struck in the groin area by projectiles and to be mocked by others for their moments of vulnerability.

It’s a lot easier to convey the broad-brush satirical flourishes of While We’re Young than to explain the subtler and sometimes darker threads of meaning that run through it.

For a loose-limbed spoof with no real plot, “What We Do in the Shadows” is startlingly effective at creating characters we care about, which testifies to the fact that Clement and Waititi have created a world with clear governing laws (albeit ridiculous ones) and never violate those parameters.

This is a tragicomic fable about an all-too-real social predicament rather a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the tragic result may be that hardly anyone notices how good it is, or the sickest, weirdest, most triumphant performance of Wiig’s career.

My personal view is that Quentin Tarantino is now permanently high on his own supply, but you could just as well say that he has succeeded in reinventing the art film. Is it worth it to put yourself through the brutal and incoherent three-hour ordeal of The Hateful Eight for its moments of brilliance and its ultimate catharsis? Jesus, don’t look at me.

Son of Saul is a work of superlative filmmaking craft and moral intensity.

With its cartoonish pace, larger-than-life characters and detours into farce and agitprop, this movie captures the accelerated pace of life in the financial markets and the vast scale of their mendacity far more vividly than a naturalistic drama could.

Nick Cannon’s complicated and masterful performance as Chi-Raq, a young man who embodies the contradictions of his community, who is both a perpetrator and a victim of the heartless violence that has surrounded him all his life, accomplishes that.

Carol is one of the greatest American screen romances of any era, period – and perhaps that serves as the ultimate vindication of Haynes’ outspoken commitment to “queer cinema.”

A clean and agreeable biopic that restores some vitality to a fascinating episode in 20th-century cultural and political history.

Even with its abundant flaws and its willingness to embarrass itself this strange and extraordinary film never lost me and never let me go; it wrapped me in a dreamlike rapture and then in a sense of profound and nearly universal personal tragedy.

Here’s the thing about Crimson Peak, which is lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

Bridge of Spies is itself a form of historical whitewashing, albeit one less noxious and harmful than the customary American variety. I liked the movie a lot – it’s one of Spielberg’s most measured and most adult films in years.

This terrifying, seductive and adrenaline-fueled movie has found a new form of freedom for cinema.

It’s a moving and magnificently crafted story about a person named Steve Jobs who was brought low by pride and arrogance and then redeemed by love. It might be a story that mirrors our dreams and desires, which is what the real Steve Jobs did too, and in that sense maybe it’s indirectly about him. It’s definitely not about a guy who built and sold computers.

You can argue that the plot of The Martian doesn’t offer many surprises, but this is a movie of innumerable delightful moments and small discoveries, and even more of infectious enthusiasm.

The bittersweet conclusion of Finders Keepers suggests that the important question is not whether we can retrieve what is lost or fulfill impossible dreams, but how we respond to those failures.

Pawn Sacrifice sticks admirably close to the facts of that peculiar historical moment, and features a showboat performance from Tobey Maguire as the increasingly disturbed Fischer, along with a more composed one from Liev Schreiber as the taciturn Spassky.

Sicario is a queasy-making thrill ride through Dick Cheney’s Theme Park on the Dark Side, with an enjoyable cast headed by Blunt, Josh Brolin as a bro-tastic but oddly sinister secret agent in flip-flops and Benicio Del Toro as a person of uncertain provenance (is he Mexican? Is he Colombian? Is he CIA?) who is approximately the scariest guy ever.

Sleeping With Other People is one of the best and funniest recent attempts to update the rom-com – but the container feels too antiquated for the world it captures, which is so furiously alive.

It certainly is possible that Gere’s memorable performance as George – one that is far more physical than verbal, and that pushes the star’s legendary charm in unexpected directions – will put him in line for his first Oscar nod. George is never a cliché of homelessness, and neither the actor nor the film ever makes the expected or automatic choices.

The way those things come together in this strange tale of a small-town newcomer and his crazy dream — it’s like “The Music Man,” except really, really depressing — illustrate a different problem that is not easy to pin down.

What we see in Stanley Nelson’s urgent and necessary documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the story of an organization that meant many different things to many different people, and that changed so dramatically during five years or so in the national spotlight that it could almost be described as reshaping itself month by month and putting forward a distinctive face at almost every moment.

What emerges in the end actually is surprisingly consistent and coherent, if you pay close attention to the most important passages of Kirk’s self-serving narrative and steer through all the denials and reversals and irrelevant tangents.

A sprawling, overstuffed, formulaic but highly entertaining story of pop stardom.

Vidal vs. Buckley was pretty much a clown show. It was also total TV gold. Those two guys went viral when that adjective only referred to actual disease; they invented the YouTube clip decades before the Internet was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

It’s a diverting ride, played out against spectacular locations, that repackages a whole bunch of familiar elements and attitudes: A little latter-day Bond, a little Jason Bourne, a little John le Carré, a little 1950s Hitchcock.

Riveting jigsaw-puzzle documentary.

Southpaw is a tremendous accomplishment of mainstream cinematic craft, a near-perfect match of director, material and star.

This is a gorgeous, timely and possibly profound human comedy, and if there’s no disentangling the medium from the message that’s because both are powerful and ambiguous.

In its own strange way, the tiny, mysterious and occasionally terrifying indie film Felt captures the confusion of this moment in gender relations, and especially the confusion around the term “rape culture.”

Let’s give Allen full credit, by the way, for casting Posey as this wounded, sexy and emotionally rich middle-aged woman, a character enormously more interesting than Jill.

It’s a gorgeous sound-and-vision journey through a mystical or mythical space that has echoes of the 1960s Paris of Godard and Truffaut and the 1980s New York of Jim Jarmusch.

If the ambiguity of these stories may frustrate some viewers – we long to be clearly told which of these people are good, if any, and which bad – that is the ambiguity of the world, the ambiguity addressed by Heineman’s Michoacán friend with the bandana and the AK-47.

Kapadia is a London-born filmmaker who approached Winehouse’s life, as he did that of Brazilian racing legend Ayrton Senna in his thrilling 2011 “Senna,” as a dramatic story with numerous twists and turns and a magnificent and tragic figure at its center.

This isn’t a perfect movie, but it might be the perfect summer movie for 2015.

It’s entirely ludicrous but highly enjoyable.

In its better, non-jizz-related moments, Ted 2 is a loosey-goosey stoner road trip with an irrelevant, appealing blend of innocence and sweetness: John and Sam doing a “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance number in the law library, for no particular reason, or the “Law & Order” theme-song lyrics, a bit of brilliant standup material stuck in the middle of a movie.

It takes discipline in this age of bloat to bring your movie in under 80 minutes, closing credits included, and still make the audience feel we’ve been taken on a genuine journey with these people, a few big laughs and jagged left turns included.

It’s a lovely film that requires a little patience and a friendly disposition, and may be too low-impact to thrive amid a summer of grotesquely overengineered sequels.

The great strength and great weakness of the Yes Men, not to put too fine a point on it, is that they’re a couple of dorks. Their props, costumes and supporting materials are invariably crude – but they are sincere and unafraid, or at least unafraid enough to brazen it out.

McCarthy has much more to discover about herself as an actor and an avatar and a cultural signifier, and I hope she doesn’t get trapped by one role, one genre or one franchise. But her campaign of conquest is going well.

In telling the story of one damaged suburban genius and his unlikely rebirth, Love & Mercy captures the vanished possibilities of 1960s pop music, the fecklessness of the California dream and its decay into tragedy and madness, and other things less easy to describe or define.

Maybe if Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier tried to write a sitcom together, the result would be something like A Pigeon Sat on a Branch, which essentially consists of a series of comic sketches whose gags are often revealed in their final seconds.

After its own unexpected and light-hearted fashion, Results is as subversive as Bujalski’s other films. Yes, I called it a rom-com, and that’s accurate enough, but it’s a love story full of twists and turns, one that tempts us toward incorrect conclusions and deliberately avoids revealing its true heart.

There’s an honesty and ferocity to Heaven Knows What, a refusal to flinch from depicting the marginalized and despised underbelly of a caste-divided city.

The wonder of Tomorrowland – and with all its flaws and its hidebound Disney formula, it really is wonderful – is that Bird’s tale of nostalgia for the lost future manages to recapture some of that original, optimistic meaning without losing sight of the newer and darker one.

He (Vinterberg) has accomplished something that is both extremely simple and extremely difficult: This is a gorgeous literary adaptation true to its period and its source material in almost every respect, largely shot in the “Hardy country” along the south coast of England. It’s also a film that feels charged with life and hunger and romantic-erotic energy.

I enjoyed Age of Ultron more than its predecessor, despite the fact that it’s almost exactly the same thing. This was probably a result of adjusting my expectations: I wasn’t sitting there waiting for Whedon to revolutionize the genre, or to turn an overdetermined comic-book movie into a Noel Coward comedy. He delivers a clean and capable entertainment, with a handful of distinctive flourishes stuck to the margins.

A masterful and often deeply moving portrait of a volatile American genius, a portrait that goes far beyond one man, one family and one rain-sodden small town. It depicts the society that nurtured and fed that genius, and that made his unlikely creative explosion possible, as being the same environment that poisoned him — and suggests that the rise and fall were inextricably connected.

Once you get past an awkward and artificial beginning and roll with the movie’s crazy rhythm, The Dead Lands is also a blast, and one that delivers an unexpected emotional wallop along with gore, thrills and spectacular scenery.

Kristen Stewart doesn’t screw it up. She’s in on the joke, but she never plays Valentine as a joke. She’s alive and alert and present in every second of screen time, alongside one of the greatest living European actresses, working not for herself but for the benefit of a strange, imperfect and sometimes brilliant film. There’s nothing more you can ask.

As with the Antonioni film that Farhadi has so ingeniously turned to his purposes, you shouldn’t go see About Elly hoping for a Hitchcock-style thriller that will answer all your narrative questions. But if “L’Avventura” is a deliberately frustrating portrait of European postwar anomie and a study in abstract, black-and-white composition, About Elly is more dynamic and more realistic.

A memorable, haunting and highly original American movie.

Lurid but compelling.