I can't begin to count the ways in which The Savages pleased me, but the very best of them is the way Tamara Jenkins's comedy stays tough while sneakily turning tender.

The film can be harrowing in its repetitive violence, but never less than fascinating as a piece of ethnology, with magic-realist dimensions, that amounts to an origin story of the Latin American drug trade.

This tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom is thrilling --for the radiance of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, who's wonderfully smart and perilously tender; for the grace of Lone Scherfig's direction, and the brilliance of Nick Hornby's screenplay.

Never before, not even in the claustrophobic submarine epic "Das Boot," has a physical point of view so completely dictated a philosophical point of view.

No one makes movies like Mr. Jia does. He’s a dramatist with the eye of a documentarian and the instincts of a historian, even a geographer. But he’s also a romantic poet, and his heroine, a strong woman with a pure heart, is driven by love as far as it can take her.

A marvelous story.

This poetic, laconic and ineffably beautiful drama has an unerring feel for its subject, a young cowboy struggling against his implacable fate in the American West. That’s notable in itself, and all the more so since the film was written and directed by Chloé Zhao, a Chinese woman born in Beijing.

the narrative, despite its crime-drama trappings, ends up as an ambling, affecting, sometimes funny exploration of what it means to live freely in the modern world.

Now age 84, Mr. Erice has made what is unmistakably an old man’s movie, and I mean that as a high compliment. Close Your Eyes moves with the serious, searching energy of a great artist through a cold and cloudy sea of memory, loss, grief and regret, pausing in the patches of warmth it finds in longtime friends and humble pleasures.

Poignantly funny, wrenchingly wise and meltingly beautiful, Eighth Grade is a not-so-small miracle of independent filmmaking.

This faux-documentary is droll, aerosol-thin and ultrameta.

A remarkable though sometimes frustrating film.

The delicately subversive Mr. Panahi makes his subjects perfectly clear -- the stupidity of authority, and the hypocrisy of discrimination. Offside is surprisingly entertaining, and edifying to boot.

Judd Apatow's high-density, high-intensity comedy of bad (and good) manners is a cause for celebration -- the laugh lines are smart, and they come faster than you can process them.

A cry of anguish for the youngest victims of every war.

The screenplay, by William Monahan, is simply sensational. Scenes play brilliantly. Feelings flow like molten lava. The dialogue overflows with edgy wit and acidulous arias of imprecation.

This beautiful -- and beautifully controlled -- film is also an object lesson in how to hypnotize an audience.

This version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy turns on the presence of Mr. Oldman, and he is an actor of great experience and accomplishment who has finally found a film that fully deserves him.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

The unlikely, bittersweet, bristling comedy Support the Girls is easily one of the best films of the year, and the most sympathetic to women, despite having been made by a man. How can this be? Luckily, Andrew Bujalski’s remarkable movie — with its killer performance by Regina Hall — is not just about women. It’s about men being idiots. And no one is arguing ownership of that narrative.

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

Rich in motion -- the very clothes of the characters seem under a choreographer's direction -- as well as imagery.

The Taste of Things is at once a delight for all five senses and an affecting drama of a relationship, as idiosyncratic as all loving ones are. Lingering on the tongue like a sip of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the film leaves one feeling a little drunk, desperately hungry and entirely alive.

In one sense, Neil Young: Heart of Gold is just a simple concert film -- no cutaways during the music for interviews, no cameras swooping and soaring on giant booms. But simplicity in this case also means no barrier between us and the people on stage, as they sing some of the most soul-stirring pop songs I've seen performed in a very long time.

It might have taken one actress to make a movie so reliant on others. It certainly took a director with a supreme confidence, not just in the talents of her performers but in the power of gesture.

Magical is not an oversize word for this exquisite film.

Mr. Vasyanovych’s approach is literally and figuratively visionary.

This extraordinary flight from the humdrum is not to be missed.