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

Both literary and cinematic, “Poor Things” gives the audience everything we can ask for in a film—beauty and wonder; hefty ideas and clever storytelling; twists, shocks and laughter.

Spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency.

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.

The film is an improbably thrilling work of art by virtue of its physical beauty and its relentless intensity of feeling about people — not only Iya and Masha — who would prefer in their heart of shattered hearts to feel nothing.

Though Ms. Bigelow includes a few humanizing and even humorous touches . . . she is not interested in the imperatives of the action movie or the moral lesson. She simply lays out one nauseatingly possible future, which means A House of Dynamite is one of the most terrifying movies ever made, but not in a fun way.

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.

I don’t know how Ms. Arnold works the magic she does with her actors, whether amateur or professional — Mr. LaBeouf inhabits his role with sly charm and explosive ferocity — but it’s an expansion of what she started doing more than a decade ago in her remarkable “Wasp.”

Here's an iffy proposition. If A Hijacking was in English, or if U.S. audiences weren't finicky about reading subtitles, or if life was fair, this brilliant thriller, by the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, would be playing on multiplex screens throughout the country.

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

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.

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.

A dulcetly crazy, certifiably hilarious and eerily mysterious little comedy.

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

The loveliest part of Mad Max: Fury Road is its grungy, quasi-Gothic imagery — the production was designed by Colin Gibson and photographed by John Seale. And the fullest flowering of its images can be found in its muscle cars, muscle trucks, muscle trailers and muscle buggies.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

It’s hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.

Sly, wry, adorable and deplorable, Guillaume Marbeck is priceless as the endlessly irritating and yet frustratingly charismatic Godard in one of the year’s brightest pictures, a rare standout in a sea of multiplex mediocrity.

Stunning and, in the aggregate, almost overwhelming. This is not a feel-good travelogue, and Mr. Salgado has never pretended to be a cockeyed optimist.

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.

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

What we have from director Alex Holmes — a guy who knows a great cinematic story when he hears one — is a documentary with all the nervous-making energy of a first-rate drama; a cast of sailors who are both endearing and intelligent; and a delicately wrought suspense story.

The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school.

First Cow is vividly alive on arrival and grows into pure enchantment, although it starts at a saunter and its physical scale is small.

Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece.

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.

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.

Through it all -- the free-form conversations, the brilliant set pieces, the preposterous gross-outs, the flawless performances -- Kristen Wiig's forlorn maid of honor, Annie, seeks her own destiny with a wrenchingly cockeyed passion.