It’s almost impossible to conceive of a movie better suited to the present moment of reckoning with sexual abuse, and one better equipped to extend and complicate that extraordinarily necessary conversation. The time for The Tale is now.

United 93, as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful.

Riveting and so suggestive that you can't consume it passively: You have to brood on it.

A completely different kind of animated movie that, even more than "Ratatouille," reimagines what the medium can do.

This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, "Unforgettable!"

The Best of Youth doesn't have a boring millisecond. It isn't an art film, with longueurs; it's a mini-series with the sweep of a classic novel, with tons of plot.

Even if you couldn’t care less about jazz drumming, though, Whiplash is a thrill to watch. Underneath that taut, stylish surface, it’s really a movie about the perils of pedagogy, about the relationship between a passionate (perhaps too passionate) student and a demanding (perhaps too demanding) teacher. Which is to say, a movie about a uniquely powerful and potentially destructive form of love.

It's an intricate, ambiguous and deeply satisfying movie, a tautly plotted tale of state surveillance and personal betrayal that ultimately becomes an ode to the transformative power of art.

A movie that looks off into the distance and keeps its gaze there, Two-Lane Blacktop is a lean and melancholy beauty.

This is the most intoxicatingly beautiful martial arts picture I've ever seen.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.

Man on Wire brings back a time when the towers were still symbols of aspiration and possibility.

It's the way Cuarón demonstrates how a simple teen comedy can suddenly blossom into a study of sexual mores, a Mexican political allegory, a song of lamentation -- and still be breezy and funny and sexy as hell.

For people who enjoy coming out of movies unsettled, a little riled up, bursting with questions, and spoiling for a debate, see Elle.

Voices pile in asking for nothing more or less than to make themselves clear. When the Levees Broke is a monument of oral history. Without fanfare, Lee orchestrates a multivoiced blues for the common man.

Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing.

Thoughtfully directed, vividly written, and beautifully acted, it’s a hopeful film, universally appealing despite—or perhaps because of—just how very Korean American it is.

The subject matter is inevitably somber, but the picture is also mischievously funny. Wang pirouettes along some tonal hairpins — in one scene, I guffawed in the midst of wracking sobs.

A film of great intelligence and quiet assurance, Goodbye Solo exhilarates without ever trafficking in easy uplift.

The Power of the Dog is one of those films that, on first viewing, seems to have a story too thin to support the epic sweep of its setting. But watch it a second time through, and the tightly coiled thriller plot comes into focus, with no detail wasted as the movie hurtles toward a violent, psychically shattering, but narratively satisfying ending.

The scariest movie in history is actually a bit shy. The subtle, romantic score by Jerry Goldsmith is what keeps the tension at a simmer.

This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet.

The result is a movie that’s sad, but not at all unbearable — in fact, that’s oddly inspiring.

Whatever combination of practical effects and digital wizardry went into the technique that gave rise to Anomalisa’s otherworldly yet very human narrative universe, I hope it will be used to tell more stories, perhaps by this same storyteller.

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.

Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.

Just 97 minutes long, Hard Truths is a deceptively slight movie that can barely contain its titanic central performance.

Though Mildred makes many choices that are reprehensible or downright dangerous, McDormand never fails to convince us of the fundamental decency of this woman, a tragic heroine struggling to find even the tiniest scrap of meaning in a comically awful world.