Hilarious.

Devlin tells his story without bias but with shards of gallows humor.

Taps into the same emotional current that sustains the entire "buddy picture" genre, but does so with feeling and unmistakable insight.

It's a one-of-a-kind experience -- dark, bleak, twisted carnival noir.

Musician Charlie Sexton brings charisma and a haunted quality to Townes Van Zandt, the legendary Texas musician who was a Foley pal, drinking buddy and fellow teller of tall tales.

This is smart, inspired, no-fuss entertainment.

Boy A will rivet you while raising issues about forgiveness and just who deserves it.

The Order, directed by Justin Kurzel, has less interest in sermonizing about the evergreen cycles of racism in this country than in tracking a series of explosive events as a well-crafted thriller.

Anyone with any doubt as to the importance, in a functioning democracy, of American newspapers - with working newsrooms full of professional, paid journalists - needs to see this movie.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

It's a strange film, very original and very good. Just by virtue of the subject matter, it can't help but be erotic, and yet eroticism is not the movie's purpose.

Although we know the outcome, Silicon Cowboys feels like a suspense thriller.

Sex is a persistent theme in the movie, and it’s handled forthrightly.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

By the end, we’ve experienced one of the best films about street hustling ever made.

Fundamentally, though, “My Dead Friend Zoe” is a tricky story told exceedingly well. It earns our attention — and a few salutes.

It's a witty, intelligent scramble, and it's beautifully mounted.

The bottom line on Joan Baez I Am a Noise is that if you absolutely love Baez and her work, you will find nothing here to challenge your preconceptions and will probably learn some things you didn’t know. But if you’re merely Baez-curious, this documentary will not satisfy and might even make you less curious.

The result is a gutsy little picture and a nice slice of life.

Evokes grand emotions -- anxiety, sadness, joy -- sometimes within moments of one another. Broken Wings has heart and a poetic soul.

The film is a touching, detailed portrait of an important and often overlooked band. Filmmaker David C. Thomas has done a wonderful job of stitching his filmed interviews together with the extensive vintage footage he scrounged.

Turns out to be the most unnerving film of the year. Easy.

A nice gift for science fiction fans.

There’s already a small library of films about the Who and its music, but this is the first I know of that examines the men who almost accidentally wound up managing one of the most incendiary of ’60s rock groups.

A gentle movie. It’s valedictory, with a sense of the ephemeral nature of life, the inevitability of regret, and the bittersweetness of looking back on past happiness.

The obvious thing to expect here is that writer-director Christian Petzold is using the Undine”myth as a metaphor. But no, he’s doing the actual myth.

It may surprise you to hear that in the end there is a sliver of hope offered in Under the Tree, so thin that it’s almost not there. A less interesting movie might simply have served up a headlong plunge into the abyss — but Sigurdsson gives us a tiny flicker of light.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

It is the best and most enjoyable American film to be released this year.

The filmmakers investigate, but can't answer every tough question. There are so many people who could be potentially taking advantage of these players, it's hard to sort out the wrongdoers.

A complex story.

In “My Name is Alfred Hitchcock,” Cousins gives us a new way of looking at Hitchcock, as a filmmaker with an evocative visual world, and a case could be made that it would be easier for viewers to appreciate that aspect of Hitchcock on a second or third viewing.

Who can resist a good horse story? Simply and directly made, Dark Horse is a rousing documentary.

An unusual look at love and how it can unexpectedly develop. Those for whom the concept of an arranged marriage is foreign will get a little history lesson on the immigrant experience watching this sweetly engrossing film.

The Two Popes is movie nirvana, but anyone watching could appreciate the clash between these opposing dispositions and world views.

The hits just keep on coming in Muscle Shoals, a hugely entertaining, perhaps overlong, documentary about the renowned recording studios in the small Alabama town of the film's title. It's mandatory viewing for fans of the classic rock, soul and rhythm and blues of the 1960s and '70s.

Rosi endlessly proves that he can turn the region’s agony into the finest art and proves that he hasn’t lost sight of the human factor in the process.

In a way, Misery is a ghoul comedy. But it's more than that, because it's genuinely, consistently scary. With his enthusiastic direction -- the cutting, the odd angles, the unexpected timing -- Rob Reiner takes what might have been a static set-up, a couple of people talking in a room, and makes it harrowing. [30 Nov 1990, p.E1]

The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

An unflinching look at the ravages of substance abuse, and it's also a sobering redemptive tale.

For some viewers, it will be more than they want to know, but for Lynch’s many partisans, it’s required watching.

Alas, the main thing that comes through in Heaven Knows What is that a junkie’s life is really, really monotonous.

There is a maddening sense of dislocation through much of the movie -- a feeling that genuinely fascinating questions have been squeezed out by woo-woo philosophizing and material (like Glennie's brief return to the family farm) of only minor import.

The look of the film is first class, with muted colors but deep textures, the opposite of historical kitsch.

Has that Dickensian spirit wherein simple acts of kindness can bring an audience close to tears.

Bound by mother-daughter ties that are complex, touching, ultimately so powerful they yield the kind of tearful joy rarely experienced at the movies.

A very smart noir about gambling, smartly directed by Mike Hodges -- until almost the very end. It craps out in the decisive London casino heist scene.

Paradis, an actress and pop singer, is sensational.

Director Nicholas Hytner doesn't soften or cosmeticize Miller's tale -- it's often uncomfortable to watch -- and he draws an emotional pitch from his actors that helps us understand the mob fury and irrational fear that make a situation like the one in Salem possible.

Goodbye to Language seems like an appropriate title if it’s meant to suggest that logic and sanity have completely disappeared from this world.

The aerial cinematography is breathtaking: We can feel the fragility of the planet, but also its power to heal — if only we give it a chance.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

Captures one of the wildest, most heartbreaking episodes in Gilliam's career.

Dark, menacing and sexual, with satanic overtones, like a Black Sabbath song, with many moments of genuine fright and harsh eroticism. [19 September 1986, Daily Notebook, p.76]

Unfolds as a masterful chess match of wit and ingenuity, a cat-and-mouse chase of the highest order.

You should have the opportunity to experience the movie the way I did, in complete ignorance, enjoying its every weird turn.

His personal efforts are praiseworthy, but if glacial melting is in fact the "canary in the climate coal mine" (his words), the movie might have given us a bit less of Balog and a bit more of the startling sequences he produced.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

Benedetta continues Verhoeven’s strong run with as good a movie as he’s ever made.

Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and provocative, but rare is the documentary that makes you feel so engaged (and enraged) that it prompts you to action somehow. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion is that kind of film.

Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it.

Tully doesn’t expand as it goes along. It feels insulated and hermetically sealed, and it seems to get smaller.

Elizabeth works in a number of ways. It's a feminist film. It's also a kind of spy thriller and a superior historical drama.

Despite any weaknesses, the movie still does what Morris does best. It digs deep into the details of how some terrible idea was mismanaged in execution.

A triumph of simplicity, innocence and goofy jokes.

Every now and then, an interesting character pops up: Kyra Sedgwick, almost unrecognizable, is quite good as a homeless woman who collects aluminum cans. But these moments are as fleeting as George’s grip on reality.

Across the veil of years, we have seen tall Churchills, obese Churchills, sloppy Churchills, gross Churchills and scowling bull dog Churchills, and yet not one movie or TV Churchill has come close to giving us the man in full, both in look and spirit, until Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

Virtually everyone who sees this movie will be galvanized to do something about global warming -- and everyone should see this movie.

A good French film that was inspired by an American classic.

A grandiose cinematic invention, cleverly turning the present-day urban American world on its ear.

Amid scattershot pop culture references, flying cars and squads of armored knights with laser-guided crossbows, Nimona makes a cry for acceptance that has mythic resonance.

Unlike the previous two installments, Lady Vengeance generates on odd feeling: hope.

The love people have for this city just comes tumbling out of every part of this movie.

Adams does offer quite a turn: Portraying a version of Disney's Snow White, she owns the character, down to every warble and twirl.

A small gem.

The result is a film that's honest and tepid, intelligent and dull, worthy and forgettable.

Hyper-violent yet emotionally powerful.

A sequel was called for, and so a sequel has arrived -- but it's a slightly zombie-like version, with the size, look and shape of the original movie, but without its lightness or spirit, its soul.

Typically, films about '60s subculture recycle the same set of media cliches and teach us nothing. Harron approaches the milieu with curiosity, compassion and an anthropologist's eye.

A captivating mix of formality, ambiguity and offbeat humor. On the surface a simple fable, it's actually much more.

Pure escapist hokum, with action choreography by Sammo Hung, but I sure miss that old-school wire work.

Now after 43 years in feature films, Danner has gotten the opportunity to show what she can do, and in I’ll See You in My Dreams, she is simply jaw-dropping, just wonderful.

Based on “Umimachi Diary,” a best-selling graphic novel by Akimi Yoshida, Our Little Sister might be Kore-eda’s best film yet. It is certainly one of the best films of 2016.

Happiness might remain elusive in Nico’s last years, but after years of loneliness and fading fame, at least she can catch a glimpse from time to time.

Using footage mostly from the cameras of various passengers and crew, the documentary takes us inside the experience of being stuck inside a floating prison, unwanted by any port, as COVID cases and fears mount. It’s an experience you would not want to have directly, but it’s fascinating to watch.

Nobody is better than McCarthy at over-the-top comic hostility.

Here's a tiresome feature that could be made into a wonderful 20-minute film -- or, with a few adjustments, into two or three 10-minute shorts.

Those who love Nader will appreciate the respect and attention given his career. Yet others, even those for whom the mere sight of Nader's face is enough to cause a spike in blood pressure, will appreciate the film's evenhanded elucidation of Nader's faults.

The director's most painfully slow movie yet.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

No film could convey all the complexities of the case - what Crude does is air the plaintiffs' claims and show the lawyers at work.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

At its simplest, we have here a performance showcase for O’Brien’s artfully restrained sniveling and, especially, for McAdams’ miraculous shape-shifting abilities. Essentially “Send Help” is “Cast Away” if Wilson the volleyball were a misogynist tool.

Everyone has a story from childhood that remains vivid in memory, and that feels important enough to immortalize in art. But few people have the ability to get their story out from their minds and onto the page, the stage or the screen. Yet when that does happen, and when it’s done right, you can get something original and heartfelt, such as Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical Belfast, one of the glories of this year’s cinema.

A kind of film opera without music.

The multiply authored screenplay is based very loosely on Cressida Cowell's popular children's books, but it owes just as much to "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and the John Lennon songbook.

Beatty has fashioned a hilarious morality tale that delivers a surprisingly potent, angry message beneath the laughs.

This is a tense film that builds in impact as it goes along, and ultimately, it’s riveting.