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.