A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

The main character of this movie expends enormous effort seeking affirmation that the words she spends her days trying to get down on paper matter. The movie’s writer-director, one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices currently working in film comedy, needn’t worry about a thing.

The first hour and half or so of True Grit is as good as anything the Coens have ever done-a sweeping Western that, like John Ford's best films, exposes the cracks in American myths of frontier justice and self-reliance.

It’s easy to make The Meyerowitz Stories sound tortured, and less so to convey the immense but not blinding affection with which Baumbach treats his characters.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

The movie becomes a nail-biter, the audience hanging on every letter. Who could have anticipated that a spelling competition would yield such a heartbreaking thriller?

Not everyone likes a movie that sneaks up on them, so be advised that Lean on Pete is the ugly-cry event of the spring.

The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small.

Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.

The fact that Jonah is so young means the writers’ hands are partially tied when it comes time to land that final gut-punch, and the effect is to leave the film feeling somewhat unfinished. But maybe that’s part of the point — to depict a young life in which, for better or for worse, it’s unclear what comes next.

Nearly all of the show's minor supporting characters--Moe Szyslak, Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, Hans Moleman--get to make at least an appearance, though it would have been nice to see larger speaking roles for favorites like Apu and Mr. Smithers.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is no biopic but a very narrowly cast reimagining of one specific relationship late in the life of a noted person.

An overpraised yet amusing satire.

It's a delicate parable, droll rather than funny, wise rather than smart. Eran Kolirin, debuting as a writer-director, has the deadpan sparseness of the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, but his vision is gentler, less bleak; at moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.

Never loses sight of its mission to be as silly, bawdy, and entertaining as possible.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

Something between a love story and a religious morality tale. The hauntingly ambiguous last scene, in which Lorna finds a place of temporary respite from the economic forces that have determined so much of her life, may be the saddest happy ending I've ever seen.

Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.

The recent film it most recalls is "You Can Count on Me" (2000), another small treasure about a fractured family that managed to be moving without troweling on the sap.

Though Sweetgrass has moments of great beauty, the film is never nostalgic or idealizing about its human or ovine subjects. It shows the relationship of human and domesticated animal—and the relationship of both to nature—as a productive and symbiotic yet often brutal struggle.

You walk out of this uneven but soulful movie with a smile on your face, maybe because that’s the default expression of Forrest Tucker, a man who practices grand theft with the stubborn passion of an aged master painter unwilling to put down his brush.

The movie is a collision between inspiration and tastelessness, between the defiantly quirky and the wholesomely homogenized. I hated it in principle--I hate most modern Disney cartoons--but adored a good deal of it in practice.

The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.

A delightful journey through the back catalog of one of the most playful and quick-witted bands in rock history. But its most important aspect is the way it restores the conceptual underpinnings of Devo’s music that half a century of radio play and contextless streaming has stripped away.

Morgan's compact, satisfying drama presents presidential interviewing as a gladiatorial event.

Wildlife is a confident and compassionate first film. But with its protagonist mostly relegated to waiting and observing, its main raison d’être is Mulligan’s masterful turn as a thirtysomething woman coldly testing her abilities to see what she’s capable of, while terrified that she won’t be able to provide a good life for her son.

Though the film immerses us in the details of Senna's life and the world of Formula One for 104 thrilling minutes, we leave still wondering both who Senna was and how Formula One racing works.

Doesn’t have the warmth of the Toy Story pictures, but it still boasts a very entertaining slapstick-farce structure and some neat hairy, oozy, tendrilly creatures.

Based on a horrifying real-life case that took place in the Moldavia region of Romania in 2005, Beyond the Hills can be seen as both a critique of patriarchal religious systems and an allegory about the tension between secularism and faith (as well as a precisely and painfully observed portrait of one particular friendship).

This frank, funny, tender film both asks and receives more from its sex scenes than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Remarkable.

Beat by beat, scene by scene, gorgeous...at times emotionally devastating.

A marvelously nasty revenge comedy.

Whatever the working balance is between mystery and revelation, Annihilation, the new sci-fi–horror drama from Ex Machina writer-director Alex Garland, never quite pulls it off.

It's sensationally well-made: skittery and kinetic, packed with mayhem, yet framed (and narrated) with witty detachment, so that the carnage never seems garish. The film is far from a work of art, but it marks the emergence of a great new action superchef.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex.

It's almost criminal the way the central relationship of High Fidelity has been left such a void.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

A most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City) and Coppola’s Godfather series.

If nothing else, it's an eye-boggling two hours at the movies and a must for Swinton completists fascinated by her recent turn toward operatic roles in odd, unmarketable films like this one and last year's Julia. She's becoming the Maria Callas of international cinema.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.

A stupendously moving film. Neeson nails Kinsey's rock-hard decency and fragile ego, and Linney abets him beautifully: There isn't an actress in movies right now who's more simply alive.

The movie is riotously entertaining, and with a big heart, too.

Unfortunately, Simien’s many smart, relevant thoughts on race are more often wrapped up in an impassioned, didactic bow that rarely feels fresh—or, more damagingly, funny.

The ending is madly unsatisfying--yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.

One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

It feels disrespectful to say it, but this kind of war movie, like war itself, is starting to feel sickeningly familiar.

The feature debut of young Norwegian director Joachim Trier, is as crisp and cool as a swig of Champagne.

Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.

At times, the movie simply feels overstuffed, mimicking the episodic structure of the book—if very few of its particulars—to the extent that it can feel like you’ve nodded off and woken up in the middle of a different story altogether. But its inventiveness is so vivid that no matter where you are at any given moment, you’re happy to be there

This is a bleak, unresolved film, with no release. What keeps it from being a mortal bummer is the music-exquisite sacred choral works, plus Mozart.

To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.

Though both highly stylized and highly stylish, Drive isn't hurting for substance. It has rich, complex characters and a storyline that's both emotionally engaging and almost sickeningly suspenseful.

Russell has always excelled at finding new ways to use familiar actors, and every performance in The Fighter is noteworthy if not outstanding.

Yes, Gandhi is a hagiography and not a nuanced, darkly shaded, or even very convincing portrait of an ambitious and deeply strange man. And as an account of the muddled, messy origins of Indian independence, the film is guilty of historical malpractice. But taken as a black-and-white morality play, Gandhi is unmatched. Simplifications and all, this is the movie my parents wanted me to see as a child—and it's the movie I'd want my own (purely theoretical) children to see as well.

A rollicking, comic-book Robin Hood plot and more furiously entertaining fight scenes than the ones in Ang Lee's solemn martial-arts art movie.

In its best scenes, this portmanteau of jauntily morbid fireside tales also offers a streak of something else, like the underground vein of gold that Tom Waits’ prospector patiently seeks: the small human moments of surprise, delight, and connection that lie somewhere between the first page of each life’s story and the last.

Gojira is no masterpiece, but it has the power of a masterpiece: It's the most emotionally authentic fake monster movie ever made.

Green Room proves to be an exquisitely crafted love letter to John Carpenter, and the rare horror ensemble that gives as much care to the villains as to the victims.

When it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

Rarely has Jarmusch’s style been so inherently suited to his content. Stillness and silence, the cardinal virtues of his method, have never been so pertinent as in the lives of the undead.

By focusing on the power of cannily staged collective action to turn the tide of public opinion, Selma achieves a contemporary relevance that few historical dramas can — especially those built around real-life figures as encrusted in layers of hagiography as MLK.

If it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action.

Faithless is almost entirely insight-free. Bergman gives no indication that he understands the link between his alter ego's "retroactive jealousy" and compulsive womanizing.

Not enough happens in it. And yet everything happens in it.

An affectless piece of moviemaking.

This seesaw of shame and self-justification might not speak for the most murderous segment of the German populace, but it's a peculiarly eloquent representation of the silent, obedient majority.

An immediate entrant into the pantheon of female friendship movies, Hustlers — a pretty much perfect film — makes plain the hollowness of so many other iterations of girl power in studio projects. You can feel its heart beat.

The movie's energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending's pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren't spiritual but gastronomic: What's on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn't me?

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

A Hitchcock-ian murder mystery that unfolds into a maternal melodrama worthy of Joan Crawford, shot through with bursts of black humor. Bong's ability to sustain three or four different tones in one movie without betraying the emotional truth of the story is nothing short of amazing: He can pat his head, rub his stomach, and break our hearts all at the same time.

This is lovely, momentous piffle.

To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.

Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.

As drama, Hilary and Jackie is merely sketchy and superficial. As a portrait of the artist, it's puritanical crap.

A wonderful movie, observant and hilarious and full of sad and beautiful truths.

The first hour of this lean, mean, 95-minute scream machine is so tasty that it redeems the predictable conclusion.

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.

Even if you don’t harbor fond feelings for the 1986 Top Gun, a movie that upon its release was seen by many as a glamorized recruitment commercial for the Reagan-era military buildup, it’s hard not to appreciate the care that went into this lovingly tooled sequel—a far better film on the sheer level of craft than the original.

It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away

Head-On doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but it keeps you on edge, laughing nervously, appalled and, against all odds, entertained.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

Swinton is good enough to take your mind off the not-too-compelling ambiguities.

In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.

Jasmine attains the paradoxical state of being fascinatingly tiresome. The same pair of words might be used to describe Blue Jasmine, which, whether you like it or not, surely counts as one of Allen’s more unexpected films of the past decade

Though its themes are so dark they seem to call for the invention of a new color, It Comes at Night does offer a few glimpses of levity and affection amid the unremitting bleakness.

Perlman's Red is hilarious, combining the gritty delivery of a film noir cop with the physiognomy of a horned behemoth. And the script, by del Toro and Mignola, alternates action smackdowns with sweet, goofy moments, like a scene in which Red and the lovelorn Abe drink beer and croon along with a Barry Manilow record.

Roadrunner is never less than fascinating to watch, but it is far from perfect.

In its portrayal of black athletes and their families navigating a system that both depends on them and abases them, High Flying Bird is a low-key act of subversion that just happens also to be a sleek, entertaining drama.

The movie has an intriguing wild card in Bess Armstrong as an ex-prostitute turned Zen masseuse. I'm not sure if she's meant to be brilliantly evolved or an idiot -- or if the actress is really good or really, really terrible. But her chemistry with Forster is terrific.

The whole movie is like that: gleaming, but with a whiff of the charnel house. Dirty Pretty Things doesn't quite cut to the bone, but it gets as far as a couple of vital organs.

I found it exquisite. In part I responded out of sheer amazement: I've never seen anything like the sequences in which Sandler, in his boxy, sea-blue suit, charges around his warehouse to the rhythm of Brion's harsh drums.