Milk is a rowdy anthem of triumph, brought to an abrupt halt by Milk's personal tragedies and the unfathomable moral chaos of Dan White.

The filmmakers haven't simply tamed the rogue elephant of Clancy's narrative; they've turned it into something that moves as gracefully and as powerfully as a gazelle.

Villeneuve has what I keep looking for in directors: a charged sense of the way the world actually works.

The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes Taxi Driver one of the few truly modern horror films.

It's a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.

By the time of the closing shot -- twists of fog rising like spectres from a leaden sea -- even the most stubborn viewer will be lying back in a state of happy hypnosis. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

The movie, at two and a half hours, retains much of the unhurried suspense -- the careful cultivating of our patience, of our narrative loyalty -- that is bred by the best TV.

So expert are the performers that you wind up rooting for Burry, Baum, and the others despite yourself, knowing full well that they are fuelled by cynicism -- by an ardent faith that the system will and must fail.

Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time.

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

A near masterpiece...The story is told in a flowing, lyrical German manner that is extraordinarily sensual, yet is perhaps too self-conscious, too fable-like for American audiences.

Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing.

Thanks to Whiplash, Simmons will lend comfort to those actors who believe that, if they wait long enough, the right role — their role — will come along. Fletcher is such a part.

Hal Ashby has the deftness to keep us conscious of the whirring pleasures of the carnal-farce structure and yet to give it free play. This was the most virtuoso example of sophisticated, kaleidoscopic face that American moviemakers had yet come up with; frivolous and funny, it carries a sense of heedless activity, of a craze of dissatisfaction.

What Maisie Knew sees things that most of us manage to hide. James might have been shocked by the movie's profane taunts, but he would have recognized the system of betrayals, large and small, that he dramatized so well. [27 May 2013, p.87]

Rust and Bone might as well be called "Water and Light"; it glitters and flares with the urge to renew those things - limbs, knuckles, lovemaking, and parental bonds - which are easily fractured and lost.

The picture turns into a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character, and it's terrifically effective.

The smallest details (a stammering child, the wrinkle in the turned page of a book) stick like burrs, and we are left to wonder if any director has delved with more modesty and honesty into the heartbreak of the past.

The films range widely in form—documentary, fiction, hybrid, and unclassifiable—as well as in tone, subject, style, and, for that matter, in originality and inspiration. Even the most ordinary of them is worth seeing, and the best of them, brevity notwithstanding, are among the most powerful films of the year.

A macabre comedy classic.

With a wide range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and drama, Lee sketches the circular connections between racist images, racist policies, and the lack of leadership to resist them.

It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

Barkin and DiCaprio are sensational. Every time De Niro threatens to take over the picture, they snatch our attention right back, and always with something casual: a look or a gesture that conveys how thoroughly this mother and son understand each other.

The movie exemplifies the power of the cinema—even the popular and commercial and invigoratingly swingy cinema—to reflect the inner life through imaginative methods that, at the same time, reveal the fractures and complexities of public life with probing and passionate insight.

This movie can hardly help being beautiful, in such a rarefied domain, but what matters is that it never looks merely beautiful. [28 Feb. 2011, p. 81]

A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.

Magellan isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning.

Nomadland is not primarily a protest. Rather, it maintains a fierce sadness, like the look in its heroine’s eyes, alive to all that’s dying in the West.