It’s a masterpiece — an overused word, but not the wrong one.

The result of the intricate interplay is a fairy tale for adults that is violent, sometimes shocking, yet utterly engrossing. And eerily instructive; it deepens our emotional understanding of fascism, and of rigid ideology's dire consequences.

Elegantly crafted, brilliantly acted film.

The story begins as a social satire of rich and poor, as witty and sophisticated in its fashion as vintage Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch. Remarkably, though, it gets funnier as it grows more serious, then savagely funny and finally…but we mustn’t get ahead of a movie that stays ahead of its audience every frame of the way.

There’s no other way to say it than to say it: Roma is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and one of the most moving. If Norma Desmond had been able to see it she wouldn’t have worried about the pictures getting small.

It is plainly, though not simply, a masterpiece from an acknowledged master of contemporary animation, and a wonderfully welcoming work of art that's as funny and entertaining as it is brilliant, beautiful and deep.

A delicately poetic, essentially plotless vision, unblinking but not unhopeful, of life in Watts, where little but the ghetto's name recognition had changed a decade after the riots.

However you look at it—as concert footage enriched by cultural history or cultural history raised up by glorious music—Summer of Soul is a thrilling documentary and a remarkable feature debut.

Movie audiences have never been presented with anything quite like the intertwined beauty and savagery of 12 Years a Slave.

See this film as soon as you can, preferably with someone you love. Kenneth Lonergan’s third feature as a writer-director is a drama of surpassing beauty, and Casey Affleck’s portrayal of the janitor, Lee Chandler, is stripped-back perfection — understated, unaffected, yet stunning in depth and resonance.

The characters are irresistible -- why would anyone want to resist a hero who so gallantly transcends his rattiness? -- the animation is astonishing and the film, a fantasy version of a foodie rhapsody, sustains a level of joyous invention that hasn't been seen in family entertainment since "The Incredibles."

Barbara Stanwyck is the sexiest con woman ever captured on film.

In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like Gravity. What's new in Alfonso Cuarón's 3-D space adventure is the nature of the motion. It's as if the movie medium had been set free to dance in a bedazzling zero-gravity dream sequence.

Rangy in tone, style and theme, it has so much going on that a single viewing hardly seems sufficient to absorb it all. Whether it’s a masterpiece or a hodgepodge will be a matter of some discussion; the reach is evident but the grasp is a little shaky.

They both had a lot to lose, in other words, and Mr. Coppola was quite sure that they would: “The film will not be good,” he states at one point. He was wrong, but in watching “Hearts of Darkness” we can see why he might have thought so, as the making of his mammoth movie, requiring its director to wrestle art from chaos, seems to unfold in its very own fog of war.

This account of Facebook's founder, and of the website's explosive growth, quickly lifts you to a state of exhilaration, and pretty much keeps you there for two hours.

The prime mover is sexual tension, which grows inexorably as the women learn the contours of each other’s lives. Portrait of a Lady on Fire — the fire is figurative, but also real — goes beyond painterly beauty. It sees into souls.

If it’s an extravagant demand of time it’s an even more extravagant pleasure, the rare film worth a trip out to the cinema for full immersion.

The film is unsparing as history and enthralling as biography.

Michael Haneke's French-language Amour, a perfect film about intertwined lives, proceeds at its own pace, and breathes so deeply that it takes your own breath away.

A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, it’s an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.

The most imaginative movie to come along in ages. [18 Oct 1994, p.A14(W)]

Judged solely as a film, a partially fictionalized account of the decade-long search for bin Laden, it's superbly crafted and relentlessly dramatic. More than that, though, Zero Dark Thirty is a shock to the system, one that's bound to incite discussion of profoundly troubling issues.

The members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest.

A movie that falls outside the ordinary, or even the extraordinary. There is enormous passion and artistic integrity throughout this film. [11 Jan 1994, p.A10(E)]

The first half hour of WALL-E is essentially wordless, and left me speechless. This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can.

Loneliness and longing are at the center of these two women’s lives, at least for a while, and they’re expressed by nuance and implication in a pair of superb performances, and by a lovely evocation of the period.

In Dunkirk, an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic.

Less is not only more in 45 Years, Andrew Haigh’s study of marriage and memory, it is eloquently and anguishingly more, and what’s unspoken is almost deafening.

There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.

When we peruse this movie, we see a superb evocation of Turner’s latter years, during the first half of the 19th century, and a performance that’s symphonic in the sweep of its eccentricities, vivid in the spectrum of its passions.

This new film, which seems shorter than its 209 minutes, feels genuinely new and deeply satisfying — for its subtlety, wit and resonance; for its serenely confident technique, meaning no truck with fancy tricks; for the sumptuous quality of the production; and for the epic scope of the story, an extraordinary tale of organized crime’s grip on American life as seen through the eyes of one outwardly ordinary man.

The level of invention is so high, and the density of detail is so great, that it’s impossible to absorb everything in a single viewing.

Sideways makes you glad about America, about movies, about life.

The buddies in Faces Places are perfectly matched, notwithstanding an age difference of 55 years, so the things that happen during their wanderings around rural France aren’t funny in a conventional sense. They are lovely, surprising and deeply moving.

The main attraction is Welles, of course, decked out with scruffy hair, a cantilevered beard, crusty eyes and a crafty smile, and deploying a tuba-register voice that shakes the timbers of the Boar’s Head Inn. He gives a performance that’s monumental in girth.

The invisible wizard Peter Jackson makes use of every scene to show us the meaning of magnificence. Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.

It’s a tale of totality, not during an eclipse but during a brief conjunction that changes at least one life surprisingly, and one of the greatest pleasures of the movie year.

One of the high points of last month's Telluride Film Festival was, as I wrote at the time, spending 5½ hours in a darkened theater-with one short break around the four-hour mark-to watch Olivier Assayas's shocking and edifying epic.

It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.

It’s a life-affirming, profoundly affecting classic.

Damien Chazelle’s musical, consistently daring and occasionally sublime, does what the movies have all but forgotten how to do — sweep us up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in an urgent present by the mythic power of Hollywood’s past.

What you see is exactly what you think you’re seeing from the moment of your first guess. What you feel is another story—one of calm, almost inexplicable enchantment.

Ms. Gerwig’s movie is very much a thanking situation. Once you’ve seen it — even while you’re watching it, with a grin stuck on your face — you want to give thanks for how wonderful it is, how wise and funny and full of grace.

What's fun about this movie is the sight of Mr. Irons's Claus stalking the mansion like a tall, skinny ghost smiling at the perverseness of it all. [18 Oct 1990, p.A14(E)]

What makes Ms. Kapadia so clearly an artist is her ability to let a scene breathe, to be patient but not ponderous, suffusing the film with atmosphere and unarticulated feeling.

Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values and bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems.

Brilliantly funny and moving comedy.

Can a movie that generates steady-state anxiety also function as entertainment? Yes it can, and Adam Sandler is here to prove it in Uncut Gems, a hard-edged and hard-charging phenomenon directed by Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie from a screenplay the brothers wrote with Ronald Bronstein. Mr. Sandler is flat-out sensational as Howard Ratner.

The film's centerpiece is Mr. Isaac's phenomenal performance. He's an actor, first and foremost, who is also a musician.

Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.

Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal is not just the performance of the year -- there will be injustice if he doesn't win an Oscar -- but a creation of awesome proportions.

Crumb pulls us in with rich detail, and with what it says, or suggests, about art, drugs, psychology and the subconscious.... Like last year's "Hoop Dreams," this documentary does justice to a great subject. [08 Jun 1995]

To turn a spotlight fittingly on Spotlight, it’s the year’s best movie so far, and a rarity among countless dramatizations that claim to be based on actual events. In this one the events ring consistently — and dramatically — true.

The movie has done what those who've cherished the book might have thought impossible -- intensified its singular beauty by roving as free and fearlessly as Bauby's mind did.

The Class is clearly a microcosm of contemporary France, beset by social and economic tensions. More than that, though, it's a saga of education's struggles in many parts of the modern world. If only the film were pure fiction.

If watching movie violence is cathartic, then this film amounts to heavy therapy. It's much more than that, however. This is the best film the Coen brothers have done since their glory days of "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," maybe the best they've done, period.

As in previous films, Mr. Baker mixes amateur and professional actors to exceptional effect.

If Timbuktu — a nominee for this year’s foreign-film Oscar — were politically astute and nothing more, it would still serve a valuable purpose. But the film throbs with humanity, and abounds in extraordinary images.

This feature-length documentary, currently entering national release, may be one of the most horrifying films you'll ever see, and one of the most edifying.

Whatever thematic clarity the added footage may confer is prosaic or didactic and intrusive; this stuff hit the cutting-room floor the first time around for good reason.

This tough-minded, forthright and exquisitely tender film transcends polemics. It’s the odyssey of a lost child in poorly charted territory.

Against all odds in an era of machine-made spectaculars, Mr. Jackson and his collaborators have created a film epic that lives and breathes.

It’s lacerating, a master class in how to show without showing.

The third film of the trilogy turns out to be gorgeously joyous and deeply felt.

His film makes it clear that these monstrous humans are very much a part of our species. In a way, I wish I’d never seen The Look of Silence, because now I won’t be able to forget it. But that’s the point, and the film’s purpose—calling attention to the cost of staying silent, and willfully forgetful, in the face of implacable evil.

Rich, evocative, crafty and exciting, it’s one of the few standout movies of the year.

The whole film feels magical in the way it gets at intangible, invisible, ineffable things without naming them, and tells a gripping story of obsession at a poet’s pace, without need of conventional explanations.

What it is can be summed up in a word that’s often used loosely but fits the case here—a masterpiece, a mysteriously enthralling creation that keeps you guessing about where it’s going, then reveals its essence with astonishing clarity.

The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

A sociologist might call Time a longitudinal study, a document whose value is enhanced by the decades it spans. I’d call it a joyous tribute to love and resilience, and a case study in eclectic technique.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

Good movies summon up worlds. Son of Saul, a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered — the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp.

Mr. Jonze approaches perfection in the department of deadpan humor. In other hands, his premise could have been a clever gimmick and little more. But he draws us into Theodore's world, then develops it brilliantly, by playing everything scrupulously straight.

Ms. Gerwig’s reimagining — and provocative restructuring — of the American classic is all ablaze with ferocious purpose, urgent passion, boisterous humor and the nourishing essence of family life in good times and bad.

The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.

A single seeing isn't enough to take in the eccentric marvels of The Triplets of Belleville, an animated feature by Sylvain Chomet that creates a visual language all its own.

We are all snapshooters these days, highly placed spectators to tragedy that seems to be beyond our comprehension, let alone control. Flee takes us down to sea level.

It is the library as an urgent idea, and the obligations that the institution’s leaders have embraced, that win Mr. Wiseman’s admiration and attention.

Tótem is neither tragedy nor tearjerker, exactly, though tears will probably be shed. It is an expression of life, deepened by death and rendered with an unusual and unerring sensitivity.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida, a compact masterpiece set in Poland in the early 1960s, gets to the heart of its matter with startling swiftness.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.

The comedy is elegant, frequently dark and genuinely witty. The spectacle is gorgeous.

Smart, surpassingly odd, extremely funny and mysteriously endearing at the same time.

The aesthetics of Mr. Wiseman’s visual storytelling have seldom been so prominent or important as in “Menus-Plaisirs.”

The Israeli journalist Dror Moreh has hit a documentarian's trifecta with The Gatekeepers. It's an exemplary piece of enterprise journalism, a vivid history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a polemic that's all the more remarkable for the shared experience of the polemicists.

As a work of nonfiction, it deserves its own nomenclature. "Docu-poem" is too inelegant; "masterpiece" works, although it's been used before.

A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film.

It's "My Dinner With Andre" for the relationship generation.

The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace.

This vibrant, buoyant drama, intimate in scope instead of vast, takes us to Oslo—not exactly another planet, but an adventure all the same—where it builds a world of mercurial passions while its enchanting heroine, Julie ( Renate Reinsve ), belatedly and erratically comes of age over the course of several years.

[Mr. Anderson's] screenplay soars above and beyond literal references by creating the oddest power couple you’ve ever seen. Whatever the psychodynamics between Gary and Alana may be, their bond has its own brilliant logic.