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.