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.

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.

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.

There are a lot of stale -- and nefarious -- clichés in 8 Mile, but most of the time they're overwhelmed by the pulsing, grinding, hopped-up camerawork and the soulful star turn of Eminem.

Oddly enough, it's when the action of Ong Bak 2 stops that this funkadelic freakshow shines. The screen is stuffed with a gallery of grotesques, some of Thailand's best character actors, who spend their time bleeding, bellowing, and slurping up eyeballs.

While it digs deep into the eerie insularity of mediocre TV, Kelly’s movie is also informed by the understanding that some of the best children’s entertainment is driven by a powerful sense of the uncanny.

Young Adult doesn't fully work, but it's still one of the year's most memorable movies.

As for Bardem: How can I do him justice? He is normally the most robustly physical of actors, with a plummy voice and an insolent sensuality. To see him immobile, ashen, his hair gone, de-bodyized: It's agonizing.

Roberts has her most galvanic role, and she's sensationally appealing.

A charming, hyper-energetic, and wittily self-aware action comedy about gorgeous girls.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

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.

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

Intimacy doesn’t answer the question, which makes it all the more tantalizing: This is an emotional puzzle movie.

The Bill Cunningham captured here is a puckish, eightysomething man with electric energy and a wish to devour all of New York through his camera lens.

Has a soft windup, but along the way are some of the best-constructed slapstick sequences since "There's Something About Mary."

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

For all the familiar joys and comforts this holiday movie provides—maximally decorated homes, Christmas carols, a slapstick scene at a skating rink—its commentary on the agony of living in the closet, or loving someone who is, stakes out some entirely new territory.

Wonderstruck strikes a curious emotional tone, alternating between suspense and quiet wistfulness, with sudden surges of operatic intensity as the two timelines begin to connect. Still, all the moods hang together like the movements of a piece of classical music expressing different tempos: allegro, adagio, andante.

While the film is deliberately crude in some respects — Park once described his aesthetic as making sure that, no matter how carefully sculpted his clay figures were, he always left the thumbprints showing — it’s fastidiously detailed in others, dancing between broad humor and subtle, almost subliminal gags as it plays out the conflict between Neanderthals and their evolutionary successors.

Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.

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

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.

Wholly unnecessary but highly enjoyable.

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

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

hilarious, sometimes rueful, and strangely hip documentary.

What lingers in the mind after this version of The Tragedy of Macbeth is not specific line deliveries or bravura acting moments—although the cast all acquit themselves well—but images and sounds.

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

Fluid and lyrical and thoroughly transporting.

Above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.

It's the work of an old master summing up. It sure feels that way. The screenwriter, Anne Rapp, has provided Altman with a blueprint not only for an ensemble comedy but also for a comedy that honors the very idea of an ensemble. It's no wonder Altman fell on it.

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.

It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.

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.

Greene lets the contemporary resonances reveal themselves by implication rather than thrusting them upon us.

Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world.

The film isn't in the same key as Pekar's comic: The tempo is buoyant, puckish, and even more "meta" than the original.

As I watched American Movie, a lot of it struck me as untranscendent misery. But in hindsight it seems less hopeless.

The final minute of the movie is one of the most bleak, and moving, endings I've seen in years.

It’s a meditation on life and a touching ensemble picture, smuggled in by Streep’s star power and Soderbergh’s constant quest for innovation.

Salles brings an explorer's eye and breathless curiosity to this fetid milieu, and he gets the most brilliant performances imaginable for this sort of movie.

If Contagion is a "horror movie," as Soderbergh has described it, then you can think of it as the most believable zombie movie ever made.

A pandering, debased, generic little nothing of a movie. And I'm still trying to figure out why I loved it so inordinately.

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

Captain America isn't a masterpiece, but it's a solidly crafted, elegant adventure movie that held my attention from start to finish and sent me out into the street energized instead of enervated.

The wonderfully versatile Brewer, who’s in virtually every scene, pulls off essentially three “characters”: Alice, Alice as Lola, and Bizarro Lola. It’s a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot twists make narrative leap after narrative leap.

The characters are much less finely tuned and the climax is a botch, but the French-financed film is often a riot, and the sensibility is all there.

It keeps surprising us, mainly by being consistently smarter and sadder than inspirational-teacher movies usually let themselves be.

This is no tale told by an idiot — on the contrary, it’s a funny, fast-moving parable about fame and ambition, laid out for us with care and craft by a gifted filmmaker, a long-missed actor, and a world-class cinematographer. But I’m left with the suspicion the whole thing may signify — well, if not nothing, at least a good deal less than the filmmakers would have us believe.

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

It’s the (Russo) brothers’ touch with comedy (they collaborated on the wisecrack-rich script with their former Marvel co-writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) that sets this hyper-violent, stylishly shot thriller apart from your average espionage-themed bone-cruncher.

Julie & Julia makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph. The stakes may not be as high as the kill-or-be-killed suspense of a summer action movie, but the sauces are way tastier.

This is a grippingly original work, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt, and the first hour or more achieves something like greatness.

This elegantly hand-drawn caper doesn't have a lot to it - a little girl and her cat help break up a Parisian crime ring, un point c'est tout. But it moves to a different rhythm than the animated spectacles we're used to - it's sparer, less hectic, less cute - and the difference feels welcome and refreshing.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

Snyder’s Justice League is more, more, more in a way that most films wouldn’t dare, and, after a year of no theaters at all, a movie that makes me long to return to a multiplex—to see more movies that commit so completely to a vision that it’s impossible not to be swept away.

A scruffy delight, a movie with the happiest sort of family values.

Jones and Redmayne are both superb as a devoted but imperfect pair of headstrong people trying, and sometimes failing, to treat each other with care and respect.

The richly multilayered picture tends to have a gently immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most expensive diorama.

It is filmed, perhaps fittingly for the subject matter, like a TV show. But on the heels of a Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, whose women were essentially hippie-styled set dressing, it’s a pleasure to see him putting some of his signature quips in the mouths of female characters, especially one as spiky, complicated, and powerful as Lucille Ball.

The madcap, sexy, borderline-surrealist film is impossible to summarize, but calling it a fast-and-loose Hollywood fantasia on A Midsummer Night’s Dream would not be totally inaccurate.

Throughout this terse, entertaining parable (it won the grand prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival), the Belgian-born writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne ("La Promesse," 1996) immerse you in the sensations of Rosetta's life.

It’s devastating in its delineation of how brutally a determined and unrestrained state can strip citizens of their essential rights, and exhilarating in the way they draw strength from one another. In other words, it’s about as important and timely as it’s possible for a movie to be.

Sets you nearer than theater permits -- and further back than most movies dare. A magic vantage.

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.

The Italian is an aesthetic gem, but a moral muddle.

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

What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum — even more than Nemo, Finding Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases, bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion — this new movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity.

Linklater may not have set out to make a decade-spanning triptych of poetic meditations on youth, young adulthood, and middle age, but he, Hawke, and Delpy have accomplished exactly that. The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love.

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.

Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked.

Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.

I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.

The German reserve and Italian extroversion are in just the right balance. The movie exists on a tantalizing border -- and I don't mean Switzerland.

When the groom's enormous procession fights its way through the hard rain and muck to the bejeweled bride, Nair's chaos downright sparkles.

Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.

It's not a flawless adaptation, but it's a gutsy and deeply affecting one: The filmmakers manage to jazz up Smiley's tempo without losing her melancholy tone; and they find a way--without being untrue to the book--to make the stubbornly recessive protagonist seem a dynamo on the screen.

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

Lincoln does sometimes get a little sappy around the edges. Though his project here is clearly one of conscious self-restraint, Spielberg can't resist the occasional opportunity for patriotic tear-jerking, usually signaled by a swell of John Williams' symphonic score. But in between, there are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.

Lee Isaac Chung’s reboot is a worthy successor to the original, a rollicking popcorn thriller with an appealing screwball romance in the eye of its fast-moving storm.

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.

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.

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.

El Camino is a sumptuously shot, totally entertaining, somewhat needless, but sure-why-not elaboration of what has come before.

Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.

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.

A slow-burning suspense thriller about a trio of eco-terrorists conspiring to blow up a dam, it’s directed by Reichardt with the concision and elegance of a chess master.

There's something old-Hollywood about Slate's dizzy-dame charm, and at the same time, something very modern about her unapologetic ownership of her own sexuality.

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.

In its brief sojourn on the screen, A Ghost Story moves through centuries of geologic time and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

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.

Isn't as campy or as unhinged as the delightful Bailey and Barbato Tammy Faye Baker documentary, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"; it's more like your standard HBO documentary (and HBO co-produced). But it's extremely entertaining.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

If her films so far have ranged from very good to great, The Land of Steady Habits exists somewhere at the low end of that continuum. But that still makes it a very good movie, full of sharp dialogue and lacerating insight about the haute-suburban milieu that the script both skewers and struggles to understand.

It's not just Swinton's performances—first as a nobleman, then as a woman, then as a lover, then as a mother—that drive the film. Orlando is a movie deeply fascinated by performance, and so over and over again, we see characters putting on shows.