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.