A collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.

The heart of Life Itself, and the part of the film that’s most instructive even for those familiar with Ebert’s story, is the long middle section dealing with his stormy, never-resolved relationship with Gene Siskel.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

Greene lets the contemporary resonances reveal themselves by implication rather than thrusting them upon us.

Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.

It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.

As the couple’s widening rift exposes the gender and class assumptions that underlie their marriage... Force Majeure morphs into a biting critique of modern masculinity, of traditional parenting roles, and possibly of the institution of marriage itself.

Good One is a quiet movie, not because it has little to say but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what’s left unsaid as to its meticulously crafted dialogue, and to the way silence can be a power as well as a punishment.

A sneaky slice-of-life indie that comes on all casual and cinéma-verité in the early scenes, then slowly coalesces into a romantic comedy as intricately constructed as any door-slamming stage farce.

Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.

Life and death are two sides of the same coin; in embracing what it means to be mortal—and, by extension, human and imperfect—Beyoncé found a way, in this Renaissance era of hers, to celebrate life and liberation. She does it in a way that only a Beyoncé who has stepped down to earth from her pedestal after more than 20 years finally can.

The acting of this central trio is brilliant, in part because the crisscrossing of these and other stories and the gorgeous backdrops take some of the weight off: The characters are free to be flawed without losing our interest.

I’ve always admired this director’s commitment to both seriousness and laughter, to showing the beauty and significance of ordinary human life side by side with its petty, venal absurdity.

It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.

The Babadook creates tension not with jump scares or chase sequences but with judicious editing and slow-burn suspense—that is, until it descends into a final half-hour of harrowing emotional and physical intensity, an extended climax that made me gasp aloud, hide my eyes, and weep at least twice.

Anderson is young enough to be post-hip and post-ironic, if such terms are possible.

The movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs.

If you're interested in the history of the human race-if you're a member of the human race-you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

Like Ghibli’s classic films, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s, it lavishes as much attention on the natural world as the creatures who inhabit it. But though it has the shape of a fairy tale, The Red Turtle’s perspective is distinctly adult, and its vision of nature is harsher than Miyazaki’s.

The best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

Not one of your pass-the-popcorn date movies. It's a howl of rage.

This film’s honesty and urgency feel both providential and grimly prophetic.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Argo isn't quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage - smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like "Dog Day Afternoon." But Lumet lite still goes down pretty smooth.

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.

The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about.

Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down.