One of the wittiest comedies to come our way in a very long time.

Any movie with these two comics is a trip and a half. How about France for the next one? A perfect way to revisit Michael Caine.

A surprisingly agile and delightfully warm romantic comedy.

Mr. Zhang’s film is elegant fun. Along with all the ying-yangery, there’s the governing concept of movies as entertainment.

Wonderfully fresh and affecting fable from India.

The film is exuberant and heartfelt, and the hero’s journey takes him through spectacular territory; the picturesque land of the living pales by comparison to what Miguel discovers in the Land of the Dead.

Director, Darren Aronofsky, and the writer, Robert D. Siegel, have turned the story of this washed-up faux gladiator into a film of authentic beauty and commanding consequence.

A moving and even poetic mixed-media meditation on Albert Einstein, his life after Hitler and his sense of “responsibility, not to say guilt” about his theories and how they played into the destruction that, lest one forget, ended World War II.

It's a fleeting but memorable image in a film that defines Leonard Cohen largely through the admiration of fellow artists, who performed his songs at a tribute concert last year at the opera house in Sydney, Australia. Their admiration borders on the reverential, but reverence doesn't get in the way of their performances, which are varied, impassioned and thrilling.

But all of that — the visual style included — changes as the film develops an edge, then expands into a lyrical realm that is both very Japanese and entirely universal.

Undine isn’t a conventional romance, or a readily accessible one, but open yourself to this special film and you’re liable to be hooked.

The film is neither kind nor cruel, but wise, great-spirited and wonderfully enjoyable. It’s an addled dream of beauty unlike any other.

Z for Zachariah asks us to suspend a good deal of disbelief. Ann is absurdly beautiful, and Ms. Robbie emerges as a full-fledged star, even though her performance is precise and understated.

The violence is graphic, the dialogue can be awfully arch and the style is often mannered, but this long, dense adventure takes surprising side trips into thoughtfulness, ruefulness, whimsy and romance. It's high-grade entertainment sustained by a buoyant spirit.

The film may not propose a solution to any of our maladies, but it’s a bitterly convincing diagnosis.

Unexpectedly thoughtful, as well as touching.

A win-win situation in which a mainstream feature works equally well as stirring entertainment and a history lesson about a remarkable convergence of sports and statesmanship.

Mostly, though, The Last Black Man in San Francisco — which is what Jimmie sometimes feels like in the gentrifying city of his birth — glides from moment to meaningful moment with cumulative power and singular grace.

Taut, smart, intense and genuinely scary, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night fulfills the promise, and then some, of the filmmaker’s 2015 debut feature, “Krisha.”

“Reflection” is a highly playful exercise in its kaleidoscopic approach, though “kaleidoscopic” is about as useful as “surreal” in describing the film’s effect or philosophy.

Combining the best aspects of “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” but more satisfying in the end than either, this 2 1/2-hour epic Christian allegory recreates the same mix as the best Steven Spielberg fantasies—wonder, adventure, humor, warmth and pathos, all infused with a child’s sensibility.

The film, directed with exceptional flair and elegant concision by Scott Cooper, even comes from Warner Bros., the studio that specialized in psychopathic monsters played by such stars as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson during Hollywood’s golden age.

Talladega Nights may be brash, unbridled, even unhinged, but its cornpone humor is rich in parody, and its craftsmanship is superb -- smart writing, shrewd direction, precisely calibrated performances (whether the calibration calls for delicacy or broad-gauge burlesque), inventive language, inspired silliness and all-but-flawless timing.

To top it all off, no matter where you sit in the theater, no matter how far you arch back in your seat, there's no escaping the sensation that all the action on the screen is taking place about three feet from your face. I loved it.

Besides engineering top-notch performances from his actors, Mr. Demme also put together a soundtrack that enhances the movie's marvelous, quirky rhythms. He keeps you hooked into this unpredictable, pleasurable picture right through the closing credits. [6 Nov 1986]

One of the film's best moments of deliciousness comes with the revelation that Yoshikazu, rather than his father, made the sushi that won the Michelin inspectors over; so much for working humbly in the old man's shadow.

This modest drama invokes the power of incipience — fear of what will happen next — and amplifies it with lean writing in the service of flawless acting. Antiwar films don’t have to be great to be worthy; this one is very, very good.

Much of what makes “The Boy Who Lived” special are the inexplicable ways people respond to the unexpected, and the randomly tragic, and whether they stick around when it would be much easier to vanish, as if by wizardry.