Voiceovers build on top of voiceovers, and we feel as if we’re simply getting to know these people a little better, even while Rees is gesturing toward things to come. The result is a deeply engrossing film — its two-plus hours whiz by — about stumbling one step forward and two steps back toward a more enlightened existence.

Hittman’s depictions of sexuality, emotional crisis, and parent-teen relationships are rendered here without sentimentality — and with the burning urgency of a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.

Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.

In his debut feature, Lee has crafted a mature love story centered on an immature man facing the fear of even admitting that he needs love at all. It’s a film to prize.

There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.

Working with Lyle Vincent as director of photography, Finley continually offers up striking, emotionally resonant compositions, including a wide variety of inventive two shots in which the leads talk at or simply regard each other. Either actress could command the frame; when they share it, the air between them trembles.

The film is a devastating success, moving in its beauty and wrenching when that beauty withers: Acres of coral waste away to chalky ash before our eyes.

Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.

Art itself should seek a restraining order against anyone who insists, “Here is the one thing that Mother! means!”

An excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust.

The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.

Campillo’s focus on these charismatic characters, who bicker constantly but pick one another up the second they fall (sometimes literally), makes their present so thrilling that we don’t focus on what bleak future may await them.

The intoxicating A River Below contains elements of immersive nature documentaries and shocking wildlife exposes (like Blackfish and The Cove), but director Mark Grieco’s profile of two driven conservationists tells a more slippery tale.

Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.

We like cows and crows and snow, but it’s Kiarostami’s phenomenological presence that somehow turns every image or camera posture into a question about living, seeing, empathy, and essence.

Casablanca was filmed in the safety of the Warner Bros. lot, but the cast of immigrants and exiles who had fled the Third Reich conveyed their visceral fear. While the future was uncertain, the resolute characters of this exquisite wartime drama found peace through love and resistance.

It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City’s fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward.

Psycho should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the sheer terror of the experience, and on this occasion I fully agree with Hitchcock that only a congenital spoilsport would reveal the plot; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the surface of the first American movie since “Touch of Evil” to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films. [This was Mr. Sarris's first appearance in the Voice.]

The film is gently thrilling, often revealing, alive with talk and scenic beauty and well-observed vignettes.

Brad’s Status remains grounded in reality — it’s gentle, human and unresolved. I loved it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch it again.

Mark Perez has written one of the tightest comedy scripts to make it to be the big screen in ages. Game Night, directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, wastes not a single second of dialogue, gives killer lines to every member of its all-star ensemble, delivers genuinely tense action sequences, and even goes for broke with style.

Machines proves both uncompromising and unforgettable.

You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a movie “stunning.” But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word.

The Death of Stalin would be a brilliant, harrowing film even without all that contemporary resonance.

For all its raw pain, Strong Island is also a scrupulously shaped work, one of striking compositions and juxtapositions, its faces and revelations presented with artful, thoughtful rigor.

A heartfelt coming-of-age story that perfectly captures the bittersweet transition from adolescence to dawning adulthood, Gerwig’s directorial debut is a joy from start to finish, a warm, generous snapshot of teenage vulnerability and exuberance.

The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.

Maoz is as good at youthful languor as he is at the process of grief. This middle section of the film abounds with insights and moments of surprising desert beauty.

Writer-director Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) dashes expectations in almost every scene. Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre.

There are no loose ends or wasted time; everything builds to a rising crescendo that makes you feel like your heart is going to burst. The immense strength of this remarkable woman is on such powerful display that, twenty minutes into the film, tears welled from my eyes and did not stop, even after I left the theater.

Over the course of its simple, unadorned 82 minutes, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré: A Chadian Tragedy wrecks you in ways you might not have known were possible.

Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch’s much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

This combination of intimacy and remove — the startling emotional jolt of seeing a family in mourning stare toward you in silence, an image of the felled patriarch hanging on the wall behind them — characterizes Davies’s enthralling thirty-year-old debut feature, an autobiographically informed but hardly event-reliant memory piece.

A Quiet Place is full of fabulous, virtuoso action set pieces, but mere hours after seeing it, what I’m already flashing on the most are the ways in which each member of this family, children and adults alike, tries to carry the weight of their central burden, which isn’t fear and dread, but guilt and grief, two monsters no third act plot twist can ever quite vanquish.

Granik films with subtlety and quiet grace, but Leave No Trace explodes in the mind.

Who’s telling this story? you might wonder, and therein lies the radical, breathtaking beauty of this film. Madeline’s Madeline is at once intoxicated by the world and deeply terrified of it.

In Aster’s story, as in life, the devil is in the details. As the film goes on, these details accumulate, coalesce, and then hang heavy over the characters.

The Tale is a powerful and clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse and the shifting sands of one’s own memories.

I will be very clear with you, dear readers, that this surrealist comic moral tale, about a poor man selling his soul to ascend in a golden elevator to the heights of a dubious corporation, is a balls-to-the-wall, tits-to-the-glass, spectacular orgy of fist-pumping, anti-capitalist, pro-labor ideas rolled into 105 minutes of gloriously unpredictable plot.

Fargeat is thoughtful about the elements of her genre, flagrant in her inversions of them but also ferocious in her commitment to them. She has an eye for landscape, a love of light — relish the infernal glare of the dust whenever a driver here hits the brakes at night — and an all-too-rare mastery of geography in an action scene.

A near-masterpiece. The fashions and music and attitudes on display might have been interpreted at the time as opportunistic stabs at au courant stylization, but the film is nevertheless overpowering and otherworldly rather than quaint or kitschy. It feels like a transmission from a different planet. To Live and Die in L.A. is so of its time that you can only be captivated by it.

Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.

Vranik’s film couldn’t be more timely in its moral inquiry, but it’s timeless in form and technique, a melodrama tempered with a painstaking realism.

Welles’s presence, so radiant, so enthralling, so unapologetically egotistical, is all the more wondrous when you consider that Harry Lime was nearly played by someone else.

Stephen Maing’s searing documentary Crime + Punishment offers a fuller look at the question of what can be accomplished from inside, revealing both the personal toll fighting the system can exact but also the urgent necessity of such battles.

By sticking to his impressionistic perspective, by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic — a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth.

At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s—a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.

Key to Giant‘s enduring appeal is the meshing of outsize stars with Ferber’s characters: Closeted sex symbol Hudson’s towering Bick fills the big boots of his ranching family while struggling with the demands of traditional masculine authority. The taboo-breaking Taylor is the seductive, whip-smart Leslie, an assured reformer who views the injustices visited upon the ranch’s Mexican workers with maternal concern...And then there’s Dean’s most mannered, complex performance: Jett is at once transparent and enigmatic, hardening with age while the other characters mature. The actor’s death — a year before release — adds a keen poignancy to the character’s lost potential.

The most influential horror film ever made, this stark and stylish work has a weird fairytale beauty. Boris Karloff gives one of the most indelible performances in American cinema as the monster, misjudged by the society that created him, at once terrifying and pathetic, a moving study of alienation and primitive anger.

California Split has never been heralded as one of the key Altmans. But the few things it does — friendship and disappointment and the drab and desperate thrill of the gambler’s life — it does superbly.

A vérité masterpiece of the bulls**t that America sells itself, Albert and David Maysles’ Salesman, from 1968, documents a way of life that was dying even then — the soiling grind of getting by as a door-to-door salesman, talking people who don’t want you there into buying junk they don’t need with money they’re almost certainly short on.

The movie’s bleak, but it’s funnier than most comedies, and it suggests that life’s toughness doesn’t preclude joyfulness.

A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.

Were it the only film Kurosawa ever made, his name would be rightfully engraved on film history.

You either get it or you don't. I get it. At least until I see some Ozus I've missed, Late Spring seems to me his greatest achievement, and, thus, one of the 10 best films of all time. [17 Aug 1972, p.57]

This is neither a hopeful nor a hopeless film, but one of feeling so colossal and resplendent, it can’t be constrained by prison or consumed by fire.

This is as exceptional as microbudget cinema gets.

Breathless is pure, it is moral, it is true. It doesn't impose anything on man and it doesn't distort man: it studies man, humbly without pretensions. [13 Jul 1961, p.13]

It's merely a well-done, adult American movie--that is to say, a rarity.

Paley's beguiling, consistently inventive visuals and sly yet melancholy tone are about as warm and winning as heartbreak-fueled empowerment gets.

District 9 whizzes by with a resourcefulness and mordant wit nearly worthy of its obvious influences: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Dawn of the Dead," and "Starship Troopers."

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.

Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.

Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play.

For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama.

Mann's exhilarating movie exists in a state of perpetual forward motion.

I've seen Mottola's movie twice, and both times, it has inspired feelings of joy, sadness, and a profound yearning for the unrecoverable past.

Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.

An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.

Bahrani possesses a disciplined sense of composition and form, a vision of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of his own navel, and the understanding that it is possible to make films about class and race in this country without pandering to the audience.

Expertly crafted documentary.

It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology.

The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do.

Ratatouille is as much a feast for the senses as it is food for thought.

Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell.

Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay (Transformers) has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise.

Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation--though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-'toon juggernauts--but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, "adult" comic story into moving pictures.

The special power of Eastwood's achievement is that, save for one indelible moment, the mutual recognition between sworn adversaries happens not on-screen, but later, as we piece the two films together in our minds.

As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.

Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.

Superbad is duly ribald and often achingly funny, brewed from the now-familiar Apatow house blend of go-for-broke slapstick and instantly quotable, potty-mouthed dialogue.

Generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick.

To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.

The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.

Comedy seems to have liberated Gilroy, who directs Duplicity with the high gloss and fleet-footed hustle of a golden-age Hollywood craftsman.

It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.

Craig, excellent in both art house endeavors (The Mother, Enduring Love) and blockbuster think pieces (Munich), has both a nasty streak and a soft side never before seen in the series; Fleming would recognize him as most like his literary creation: damaged goods in a tailored tux.

Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.

This extravagant family melodrama, one of the highlights of last year's New York Film Festival, runs two and a half hours and never lags, so moment-to-moment enthralling are Desplechin's narrative gambits, as well as his reckless eccentricity.

By the time the spellbinding and mysterious final shot rolls around, we’re left with this thought, the sad, mad truth of an authoritarian world: Nobody’s innocent, and everybody’s a victim.

It's precisely Malle's omnivorous appetite that makes his first feature, adapted from a policier, so delectable, one stuffed with many sumptuous sights and sounds.

With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)

Mood is everything, trumped up by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama, and symphonic mournfulness it's almost a movie on its own. 2046 may be a Chinese box of style geysers and earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren't bleeding humans at the center of it.

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.

Unlike American counterparts "Kids" or "Dangerous Minds," this highly intelligent comedy (which cleaned up at this year's Césars) doesn't seek to shock or inspire, but merely documents teen moodiness in all its tedious unpredictability.

Keane is a painfully specific figure but at the same time a totem, lean and frightening, for a morass of modern anxieties. That might be this phenomenal film's emergent achievement: Its raw hopelessness is its universality.