War for the Planet of the Apes is a formidable achievement: not just the rare last chapter in a trilogy that maintains the high quality of the first two, but a visually lush, heart-pounding summer action movie that dares to ask hard questions about the struggle between good and evil—both on the larger social scale and within each individual—and the fate of life on Earth.

It's rich, but slow, and children younger than eight (like mine) might get restless. But this big kid was lost in admiration.

Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.

Over-the-top and shockingly vicious. But what strikes some critics as complexity feels to me like shame--the shame of Cronenberg, an uncompromising director whose bloodshed has always been genuinely horrifying.

The most remarkable thing Sugar does is give American viewers a sense of how our country must seem to a newly arrived immigrant, without caricaturing or condescending to either guest or host.

Right from the opening shot of Breaking the Waves...von Trier seems to be looking for the first time at life, not just the movies.

The hole in the film isn't a reflection on Linney's performance. It's as if Baumbach, his hands full of oily whale blubber, didn't want to deal with an exploding sac of squid ink. And who can blame him, really?

For all its slickness, School of Rock has a let's-put-on-a-show quality that touches you in the most direct way a movie can. It's as if the filmmakers had said, "I'd like to teach the world to kick butt--in perfect harmony."

Retains the original Star Trek's spirit of optimism, curiosity, and humor.

There are moments when the movie takes us firmly by the hand and escorts us down a darkened path, and they lead to one of the most profound of communal pleasures: the sound of a movie audience screaming as one.

It's so courteously deferential to its source that it never really comes alive as a movie...Even so, Nair has a gift for directing actors and a feeling for the immigrant milieu of the novel that make The Namesake a rich, if not completely satisfying, pleasure.

Frances Ha feels like a collaboration between two people in love, and not always in the best way. There are too many scenes in a row that make the same point.

Because of its convolutions, Howl's Moving Castle isn't quite as transporting as "Spirited Away." But it's a moving bridge between his lyrical fancies and his outrage. Miyazaki is like a soulful cartographer of the soul, mapping our inner landscape, leaving us bedazzled.

The director, Sacha Gervasi, is a fan first and a documentarian second. If Anvil! has a flaw, it's that it's too enthusiastic, a reverently uncritical valentine to the director's adolescent heroes.

A peripatetic comedy about two comedians on a jaunt around the north of England, alternately amuses, bores, and annoys, just like its two hilariously intolerable protagonists.

In Cuarón's hands, the world of Harry Potter doesn't feel like a synthetic movie theme park anymore. It's almost real, Hogwarts and all.

The great strength of Michael Clayton is that it's no "Erin Brockovich." Rather than a populist tale of class-action triumph, the movie is a grim vision of legal and ethical compromise at the top.

Knives Out is a sendup of twisty murder mysteries with all-star ensemble casts that also loves and respects that silly tradition.

This movie’s human scale, its unaffected compassion for every one of its far-from-perfect characters, is what kept me on its side throughout.

Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

Certified Copy isn't the masterpiece that "Close-Up" was, but it lures the viewer into a comparably labyrinthine thicket of fakeouts, doubles, and assumed identities. If you like movies that induce a pleasurable state of vertigo, this is one of the great discoveries of the year.

Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced.

Pig is a small film with a few big surprises executed very well, and well worth going into as blind as possible.

It's all too neatly staged to make for dynamic cinema, even if the dialogue does crackle with a delicious nastiness.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

It's true that the movie, arrested between documentary and drama, doesn't quite do justice to either medium: The actors playing Joe and Simon don't have anything like "lines" to simulate "drama," or even just "conversation," while the real guys often fall back on bland English understatement.

Demme's movie exuberantly crosses the border from documentary into hagiography and from hagiography into celebration.

For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie.

San Francisco may be waging war against its most vulnerable residents, but if you can enjoy its beauty, as Jimmie and Montgomery do for a magical few days, its unique picturesqueness makes it easy to love.

The performances are so passionate and the characters (even minor ones) so deftly sketched that it's impossible not to get swept up. You watch the battle scenes from behind your hands, just praying that these guys make it.

It’s hard to resist Isle of Dogs’ energy and wit, the filmmakers’ evident joy in exploring the miniature world they’ve imagined.

Her (Reichardt's) juxtaposition of imponderably vast landscapes and regular-scale individual lives is what gives Certain Women its mood at once of delicate restraint and of moral gravity.

Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George with such depth, tenderness, and history that their affection for one another’s bodies (there’s no sex, but loads of snuggling) seems like a natural extension of their pleasure in being together.

And then comes that transcendent last scene, in which the man whose side we’ve barely left during this incredible ordeal is suddenly revealed as the best kind of hero, not super at all but ordinary and vulnerable and human.

At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.

It's funny--bleakly, blackly so at times, but also tenderly funny with flashes of genuine compassion. The Maid is among the best films I've seen this year.

Rather than a birds’-eye procedural about a complex international mission, it’s a close-up of that mission from the point of view of the participant who understands it the least.

This new Blade Runner dazzles the audience with plenty of staggering sights but never quite matches the original’s mysterious ability to suggest something even more incredible lying just beyond our ken.

Almost to a one, the people Guest casts are virtuosos, and he lets them hit notes they can't hit anywhere else.

It’s a stunningly assured debut, a slyly subversive delight, and one of my favorite movies of the year so far.

Watching it, I was excited that such a strange piece of science fiction got made—and disappointed to realize that it is strange in just about all the ways that Interstellar is. But while even Nolan’s detractors couldn’t deny his skill at manufacturing awe, the primary emotion that Arrival evokes is puzzlement.

With a charismatic lead performance from Page and a plaintive score of indie-rock songs, many of them by Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, Juno seems poised to be the season's youth-culture hit.

Williams plays this tired, disillusioned, chronically angry woman without a trace of actorly vanity. It's a performance noteworthy not just for its intensity but for Williams' ability to communicate inner experience at a micro-level of detail.

Master and Commander hooks you from its nifty opening salvo to its nifty closing punch line.

Come for the skyline-destroying radioactive dino, stay for the delicately etched portrait of recovery and self-forgiveness. Or vice versa. Just don’t miss the chance to remind yourself why the world fell for Godzilla in the first place.

Top Five is not an op-ed. The movie probably makes its loudest statement about race simply by existing: an ambitious and personal film full of black stars, backed in part by black producers, written, directed by, and starring a hugely popular black artist.

The movie slips into a familiar rut and the scenery fades into the background.

Spielberg has an effortless-seeming knack for creating compositions that are not just lovely to look at but integral to the idea or emotion he’s trying to express.

Ends very abruptly, at a point where you're ready to hang out with it a while. I wanted it to go on and on, but that ending is right. It leaves you the way American movies almost never do: relaxed, receptive, and happy in the moment, not even caring if your train comes in.

As powerful as Foxcatcher can be scene to scene, there’s something maddeningly indistinct about it at times, as if the details that would make it all make sense remain somehow inaccessible to us.

The rare film about the life of an artist that is itself a work of art.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

An aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce that mingles condescension and compassion in a manner that's disarmingly--and often upsettingly--original.

The most delicious part of Raw is its rich metaphorical life. Rather than playing like a gross-out sideshow, the movie has viscera-streaked things to say about the terrors of young womanhood, sisterly initiation, French racism, the gruesome traditions of veterinary science, and the uneasy bond between women and gay men.

Inherent Vice’s spiraling, wordplay-happy script never quite resolves the difficulty of adapting this particularly confounding philosophical whodunit, but the film’s groovy sprawl is a fine place to hang out for 2½ hours, as long as, like Doc and his weed-toking cohort, you don’t mind spending a day in a pleasantly disoriented daze.

The film has an uncommon assuredness and eloquence, a keen sense of what makes its subject fascinating, and a grasp of shape and tone that, by Tina’s end, feels almost poetic. The sum result is a quietly revelatory work that achieves remarkable insight and intimacy while never feeling sensationalistic.

Fish Tank manages to be about exploitation without being exploitative. For my money--and without opening up the "Precious" debate again--it's by far the better movie.

It’s the rare political satire that can sound the depths of irony as No does and still end on a note of ambivalent hope.

As the dress floats above the couple while they sleep at night, fluttering in its indestructible refinement and invincible otherworldliness, one starts to wonder: Doesn’t the dress deserve to kill better people? Reg and Babs aren’t hateful, exactly, but their pathetic drabness make a case that the dress is getting the raw end of the deal.

Really, do we need another dumb action movie to remind us how dumb action movies are?...Yes. We absolutely do.

Django Unchained provoked a lot of contradictory feelings in me, including some that don't usually come in pairs: Hilarity and boredom. Aesthetic delight and physical nausea. Fist-pumping righteousness and vague moral unease.

The unsolved mysteries of Us are more exciting than maddening. It’s a movie you come out of on fire with questions, a movie you find yourself attempting to explain or have explained to you by total strangers before you’ve even left the theater.

It plays the whole absurd shell game for laughs, even as it acknowledges that the last and bitterest laugh is on the rest of us.

That a princess movie filled with brown faces and absent a love interest will be a slumber-party staple for decades may be its most important legacy.

Skyfall leaves you wondering whether this incarnation of the character has anywhere left to go. It's the portrait of a spy at the end of his rope by an actor who seems close to his.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Americans’ reproductive choice is again in jeopardy, making The Janes not only a crucial part of the historical record but a searingly contemporary film about the power of mutual aid and collective action.

Focusing the camera on Vega, an openly trans actress (apparently Chile’s first), allows A Fantastic Woman to tell a different, richer kind of story and allows us to process the subtleties of her performance without always having to evaluate the success of the underlying transformation.

And yet - and yet - there's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget.

Boorman pays a price for his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect. The magic is there but below the surface.

No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

The movie’s most profound performance isn’t Stenberg’s, although their emotional lucidity makes them a good proxy for its intended young adult audience, but Hornsby’s, as a father fighting to prepare his children for a world in which the people who are supposed to protect them can be a profound threat.

This movie-turned-stage-show-turned-movie-again is intermittently tasty, if a little too frantically eager to please.

This is an amazing movie.

Isn't just the most explosively entertaining movie musical in a couple of decades. It's going to be the most influential: the one that inspires the rebirth of the Hollywood musical.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

If there were an ensemble acting award at the Oscars, Glass Onion would be a lock for a nomination. The dialogue is fast-paced and verbally dense, and everyone in the cast volleys it back and forth with as much deftness as apparent pleasure.

A trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream.

Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller.

First-time director Richard Kwietniowski has fun with the collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work.

She Dies Tomorrow is a movie you could watch several times before you understand it. (After two viewings, I feel like I’ve barely cracked the surface.) But there’s something magnetic at its core that makes you want to return.

The World’s End not only makes a more than worthy conclusion to the Cornetto trilogy — it stands on its own as one of the sharpest, saddest and wisest comedies of the year.

As an allegory of racial conflict and mass immigration, District 9 never really goes anywhere: The appealing premise fades into the background before 20 minutes have elapsed.

The movie works on you cumulatively, wearing down the impulse to roll your eyes at its familiar parts and leaving you to appreciate how snugly they fit together, and the way the whole thing purrs.

And after Into the Spider-Verse and a handful of Lego Movies, it’s further proof that producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are an animation brand as reliable as Disney or Pixar, and a good deal more likely to provide something that’s not only sturdy but genuinely surprising.

It's a movie you're glad to inhabit for a full two hours, because it never stops surprising you - it's lopsided and spotty, but it's alive in a way that suddenly makes you remember to what degree most Hollywood movies aren't.

Nostalgia may buckle you into A Thousand and One, but the ride you take is one of emotional turmoil, beauty, love, and terror. Yes, terror.

It's a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month "austral summer" of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted--all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn't involve penguins.

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

Wake Up Dead Man marks not just a return to form but an expansion of the series’ potential.

The Ram is sometimes--often, even--a manipulative, self-pitying man, but Rourke and Aronofsky paint his portrait with a rigorous dignity.

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.

It's hugely entertaining, it's spectacularly acted, and it pricks you in all kinds of places. Maybe the best thing is to see it and let it bug you, too.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On struck me as an animated film like no other I can recall. It’s a story about the difficulty and necessity of making yourself vulnerable that is itself the product of an unusually intimate artistic collaboration, literally a couple’s shared in-joke that took on a life of its—or his—own.

An old-fashioned movie-movie, the kind that's substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.

Having already admired Pattinson’s post-vampire work in David Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis" and elsewhere, I wasn’t surprised to see him kill it in this role as a shambling antihero in the "Dog Day Afternoon" mode. With this movie, both Pattinson and the Safdie brothers have broken new ground in their careers.

It thaws the soul.

The action sequences in Incredibles 2, which was edited by Stephen Schaffer, are elegantly conceived and fluidly executed, as good as anything we’re likely to see on screen this year, in animation or live action, which only makes the rest of the movie seem that much clunkier by comparison.