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.