The malignity can be oppressive -- this is a far cry from Fellini finding poignant uplift in the slums -- but the dramatic structure is complex, the details are instructive, and the sense of tragedy is momentous.

Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.

It is, simply and stirringly, a kind of beau ideal of education, a vision of how the process can work at its best.

The Velvet Underground is a beautifully poetic meditation on the emotional and cultural power of rock and the allure of making a life in art.

It’s a fertile idea, beautifully executed.

Cinema’s power to transport is vividly on display in Nigerian writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s eerie but beautiful visit to a rich and unfamiliar setting.

Excites us with words not spoken, passions not played out. A mood story more than a love story, it's all about sustaining a state of exquisite melancholy in the face of desire.

Watching this surrealist silliness, I would have welcomed the sight of a geezer on a riding mower.

Profoundly moving documentary.

This episode is something special, because the dance is so smashingly gorgeous.

Mr. Herzog's perspective is an invaluable balance to Mr. Treadwell's as the animal advocate approaches what seems like madness.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the year’s best movie thus far, and a fitting tribute to Chadwick Boseman. His loss is still stunning, but oh, what a legacy to leave behind.

It’s a feel-good fable of companionship that is just a little too simple, in both its sadness and its sweetness.

Mr. Moodysson's film is little only in physical and financial scale. When measured by the pleasure it confers, We Are the Best! is a big deal that will be winning hearts — and even grownup minds — for a long time to come.

A film like About Endlessness invites comparisons not to other movies, but to other media. The Preludes of Chopin or Debussy, for instance, brilliant flashes that don’t need to go anywhere, but might. Or something like Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen,” an intriguing whole composed of incongruous poetic fragments.

Stirring, profound, poignantly funny and almost literally transporting.

The illusion is seamless and the pleasure is boundless.

Mr. Day-Lewis works famously, and phenomenally, from the inside out. The mystery at the core of his gorgeous performance, which is enhanced by Mr. Kushner's script, has to do with his masterly grasp of Lincoln's quicksilver spirit.

It's a meditation on mortality, with remarkable resemblances to "Gravity," not to mention echoes of "The Old Man and the Sea." It's admirably crafted, with a wealth of detail that illustrates the sailor's resourcefulness.

Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, The Banshees of Inisherin is a strangely profound little comedy. It’s one of the few true originals among movies this year.

A meta-mystery lurks here — how it is that this horror flick can be so shocking and dismaying, so genuinely upsetting in spasms and spurts, yet at the same time so madly entertaining.

Although movies about celebrities are often fatuous and superfluous, that’s anything but the case with Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon. This feature documentary about Marlon Brando needed to be made, and Mr. Riley made it extremely well.

Needlessly long, visually drab and not just a foreign-language film, with English subtitles, but a film that's ostensibly foreign to our experience. That said, there are compelling reasons to see it.

A remarkable -- and harrowing -- debut feature that makes you think there's hope after all for the future of independent films.

The film's power also lies in the honesty of its observation. Though Gyuri survives unfathomable horrors, he can't forget them and, in the end, doesn't want to. They're the only history he has.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

Haunting, troubling documentary.

“All Dirt Roads” is difficult to firmly grasp, sometimes frustratingly so, but its textures linger.

I can't pretend to understand the intricacies of the Buddhist belief system that informs the surreal story, or the fantasy system in which Boonmee, embodying Thailand, recalls his nation's history and shimmering myths. Yet no effort of understanding is needed to be moved by Boonmee's descent into a limestone cave shaped like a womb.

Brokeback Mountain aspires to an epic sweep and achieves it, though with singular intimacy and grace.

Working on a scale that's minuscule by studio standards, the Dardenne brothers have made yet another movie that does what Hollywood used to do - keep us rapt, and leave us grateful.

There’s never been anything like this animated exaltation of the Spider-Man canon. The animation is glorious, and more faithful to its comic-book roots than any big-screen graphics in the past. The story is deliciously witty and preposterously complex, but perfectly comprehensible, whether or not you have studied quantum physics. The scale feels vast, yet the spirit is joyous. It’s as if everyone had set out to make the best Spider-Man movie ever, which is exactly what they’ve done.

There are worlds within the startling world of Murderball.

Ms. Hawkins reminds us how intense silent films could be. She gives the best performance of the year with the most heart-piercing silence you’ve ever seen.

A harrowing but enthralling documentary.

Demanding, quietly breathtaking film.

Never before, though, have statistics added up to such electrifying entertainment. After the mostly minor-league productions of recent months, this movie, which was directed by Bennett Miller, renews your belief in the power of movies.

This isn’t only a wise and graceful film but, in its tossed-off way, a great one, with a debut performance — by a young actress named Lou Roy-Lecollinet — that will prove to be unforgettable.

Mr. Ostlund positions his troubled characters in an environment of polished ash and Scandinavian spotlessness, under which there are dark mutterings — the constant creak of tow cables and un-oiled metal.

It feels mostly believable but a bit too obvious, as the meaning of the movie seems to shrink in its final minutes to fit a theme. Still, as a debut, “Good One” is good enough, a sensitively performed drama of a journey into the wild.

Lacking space for a proper review, let me say first that Tampopo is right up there with “Ratatouille” and “Big Night” when it comes to peerless movies about food.

Diane navigates some challenging narrative disjunctures en route to a spiritual dimension, but it also has quiet moments that speak volumes. They’re all about Diane achieving a state of grace by awarding it to herself.

The film is clearly not for everyone; sometimes it wasn’t for me. But it’s steadfastly nonjudgmental and wonderfully tender toward two searchers for new versions of old-fashioned love.

Where the film shines is in its vivid and affecting portrait of Tillman himself. Instead of the square-jawed hero memorialized by the army and lionized by the news media, we get to know a man of many gifts for many seasons.

This drama is as big as all outdoors in scope; poetic and profound in its exploration of the senses; blessed with two transcendent performances, by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay; and as elegantly wrought as any film that has come our way in a very long while.

What you take away from Anatomy of a Fall is largely up to you, but it’s a thoroughly engrossing case study.

Fallen Leaves, though no radical departure for its maker nor a landmark of its medium, reminds us of a singular artistic personality, still vibrant after all these years. In a world of disasters large and small, surely that counts as consolation.

What's extraordinary is what happens at the intersection of Mr. Payne's impeccable direction and Mr. Nelson's brilliant script. The odyssey combines, quite effortlessly, prickly combat between father and son.

As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.

It is thoughtful, unfashionable, measured, mostly honest, sometimes clumsy or remote, often exciting, occasionally moving and eventually surprising. It's correct.

What you call Mr. Shults’s first film is spectacular.

As a director, working with actors, she may have drawn on her own experience acting in features and TV; whatever her method, she has come up with a matched pair of terrific performances.

I was riveted by the performance of Paulina García, the great Chilean actress who plays Tony’s beleaguered mother. To watch her is to see exactly how less can be more. Instead of acting, she allows her character to reveal her thoughts in words that are all the more powerful for being few, far between and softly spoken.

A thrillingly funny and casually profound film.

Go underground with magic glasses on your nose and you won't regret it.

The extraordinary cast includes John Travolta, Amy Irving, William Katt and Nancy Allen. Mario Tosi did the elegant cinematography.

This exquisite animated feature, directed by Michael Dudok de Wit, has no dialogue, only the sounds of water, wind and birds, the occasional strains of Laurent Perez del Mar’s graceful score; and images of a young castaway living out the stages of his life on a desert island after giant storm waves hurl him onto a beach.

What's so remarkable about their decadeslong campaign, though, is how desperation led to inspiration - to the inspired notion that they, as nonscientists, could still take their fate in their own hands.

The kind of movie they don't make any more -- a seriously beautiful, deliberately paced drama that meanders for a while at the pace of a summer romance, then explodes with phenomenal force.

Mr. Luhrmann successfully makes Presley’s concerts fresh again.

More than anything, Of Gods and Men is a drama of character, and warm humanity.

Museo is in part a caper film, a heist film, and while it leans on such classics as “Topkapi” and “Rififi” the robbery has its own signature and is done in a visual style that’s hypnotic.

This is not a drama of shadings, but of ever-increasing intensity.

There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.

Deliver Us From Evil has its flaws. Certain passages are diffuse, others are argumentative, and there's a discomfiting staginess to the climax... Yet the film's concern for the victims, and their families, is one of its strengths.

Any five audience members might have five different takeaways, which tells you there is a lot going on here. I was left with this thought: How well do we really know anyone, even ourselves?

[Crowe] knows how to shape a scene and he's never cheap with characterization; adults are permitted to be as complex as their children; a rare event in pictures. [18 May 1989, p.A14(E)]

It’s an emotional investment with rich returns. Pedro Costa’s hypnotic drama, shot superbly by Leonardo Simões, follows its heroine through a dark night of the soul into the light of a new life in a new land.

Ms. Gyllenhaal might have chosen conventionally entertaining material for her first time behind the camera, but she and Ms. Colman turn “The Lost Daughter” into something memorable. It’s a study of repression expressed with heartbreaking poignancy, a lost mother’s search for herself.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

The results are nothing less than sensational.

Mr. Frears is as good with the small touches as he is with the big ones – and that means they're great. [24 Jan 1991, p.A8(E)]

Beautiful (sometimes sublimely so), daring (sometimes outrageously so), seriously crazed and terrifically funny.

Much of Summer Hours, which was shot by the excellent Eric Gautier, feels like a Chekhov play and resonates like a Schubert quartet; it’s a work of singular loveliness.

Paul Thomas Anderson's remarkable sixth feature addresses, by extension, the all-too-human process of eager seekers falling under the spell of charismatic authority figures, be they gurus, dictators or cult leaders. Or, in the case of this masterly production, a couple of spellbinding actors.

Sentimental Value is an affecting look into a fractured family. Art and domestic life intertwine with each other, inform each other and perhaps support each other more than is at first apparent, leading to an ending that provides a satisfying union of the two realms.

Whether the truth sets anyone free is unknowable at this point, but the city that was being slaughtered silently has been heard, and its suffering has been seen.

The explosively combative young hero, Liam (a brilliant performance by Martin Compston), has only the illusion of a fighting chance. Yet Sweet Sixteen is powerful because of the searing honesty with which it strips Liam of his illusions.

This brilliant satire, styled as a murder mystery, is the best insider's view of Hollywood since "Sunset Boulevard." [15 Dec 1992, p.A16(E)]

If the plot of Ponyo is small as a minnow, its themes--the relationship between parent and child, between the young and the elderly, between friends, between man and nature--are large and fully realized.

This tale of forbidden friendship between a bear and a mouse is so winning that audiences will cherish it as the classic it's sure to become.

Grapples with eternal questions of faith, to be sure, but confronts just as powerfully, if not more so, the urgent matter of how to live a good, useful life in the turbulent here and the terrifying now. First Reformed has its steeple in the clouds and its foundation on solid ground.

Sensationally entertaining.

There's no trace of calculation, only artistic ambitions and hopes that have come to fruition in the year's finest film thus far.

The film, newly streaming on Netflix, pulls together disparate strands of an untold saga into something thrillingly new.

What's so mesmerizing about this film is the sight, in an endless rush of color and images, of so much of his work in one place, including pieces we don't often see.

What Mr. Hou has done is borrow power and some gentle intimations of a state of grace from one of the most enchanting images in movie history.

You’d be unwise to look to the movies for economic insight—this one amounts to an extended fatuous argument that an individual who behaved like a corporate restructuring would be a psychopath. But among contemporary socio-economic parables, Mr. Park’s latest is an amusingly cutting one.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

The Green Knight is many things—hypnotic, cryptic, dramatic, occasionally funny, certainly poetic and often magical in its way—but simple isn’t one of them.

Part 2 of The Deathly Hallows, is the best possible end for the series that began a decade ago.

A dazzling piece of filmmaking, and much of the dazzle - as well as the anguished darkness - comes from Adam Stone's cinematography, which expresses the swirling state of Curtis's mind with richly varied flavors of light.

His new film, in Persian with English subtitles, is of a piece with his best work — tightly focused, rather than broad-gauge brilliant, and another instance of this superb filmmaker turning elusive motivations and the mysteries of personality into gripping drama.

Astonishing visually and problematic dramatically.

As a witness to some small rectification and the still simmering problems that surround it, Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.

Get Out starts with a great title and a promising idea — a black man’s fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb. Then it delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance.

This is hardly a film to recommend as entertainment. As an act of remembrance, though, it is singular and, in its way, soaring.

Mr. Spielberg’s film is a revelation. He has seized the moment by rethinking and reworking the source material. The results aren’t perfect. The production suffers from a heart condition of sorts, a flaw in the love story that’s flagrant but not life-threatening. Altogether, though, this pulsing, exultant musical connects a classic of American entertainment to a contemporary audience as never before.