Late Marriage is a closely observed, somewhat funny, ultimately very sad movie.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

It offers a special "something" for everyone who ever appreciated the Quiet Beatle's musical gifts and spiritual explorations.

Richard Linklater's satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It's practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era.

Combines novelistic detail with cinematic sweep.

Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.

Captain Phillips is such an impressive dramatic achievement that it comes as a shock when it gets even better, during a devastating final scene in which Hanks single-handedly dismantles Hollywood notions of macho heroism in one shattering, virtually wordless sequence.

The movie takes place in Iran, yet it’s really situated in the crack of daylight that separates truth from a lie. It’s a tight squeeze, Farhadi seems to say, and one whose pinch this tragedy of the everyday makes us feel, acutely.

Enormously entertaining.

As arresting and elaborate as the images are in The Northman, there are just as many sequences that revert strictly to pulpy, B-movie type.

Watching John Woo's The Killer may be like eating popcorn, but it's not just any old brand; it's escape-velocity popcorn, popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel. Its story is a collision of exuberant pulp, samurai mythology and modern, urban noir.

This is not a film about Neruda’s life or controversial death. This is a film for folks who are unfamiliar with the writing of Neruda, or maybe even skeptical about poetry in general. They may not cherish every word of the poet’s most heartbreaking lines, but they’ll understand the man who wrote them a little better those who already do.

The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

Writer-director Alain Guiraudie takes an all-natural approach to his material, and not just because most of the men spend the movie in the buff. He takes long, lingering shots, never rushes a scene and uses no score, just organic sounds.

Its mixture of wisdom and whimsy -- exemplified by the movie's unnamed and occasionally cheeky narrator -- makes this Australian movie feel as timeless as it is timely. And instead of feeling dutifully cultural as we immerse ourselves in this story, we're genuinely intrigued, touched and even amused.

As played by the captivating Mariana Loyola, Lucy is a life force, cut from similar cloth as the perky schoolteacher of Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky": unsinkable, unswervable and more than a little irreverent.

Every scene of calm, potentially, is trip-wired for an explosion. But for all its chilling tension and horrific imagery, Sicario is also a beautiful movie.

As usual in Hui’s films, the personal and the political are stitched tightly together.

Combines the derring-do of classic adventure tales with far more serious issues of moral agency. And it serves as a haunting reminder to seek joy and beauty, even in the depths of despair.

Another Year allows viewers to occupy both psychic spaces, nesting into the warm comforts of a long-lived-in home and then, on a dime, seeing it through the searching eyes of the marginalized figures that, over the course of 11 films, Leigh has so often championed.

Blade Runner 2049, the superb new sequel by Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), doesn’t just honor that legacy, but, arguably, surpasses it, with a smart, grimly lyrical script (by Fancher and Michael Green of the top-notch “Logan”); bleakly beautiful cinematography (by Roger Deakins); and an even deeper dive into questions of the soul.

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.

Experimenter’s most striking quality is the way it encourages us to think deeply, from the first frame to the last, even if it’s just to consider what on Earth an elephant is doing on screen.

Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.

A cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema's premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for -- nor insight into -- the human condition.

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.

It is the Cambodian voices that give “Angkor Awakens” a welcome glimmer of light.

It's more than a detailed account of one man's petty vindictiveness in a bygone era. It's about how our hatred can consume us so deeply that we lose sight of everything.

At its core, Mass exerts the power of ritual at its most reflective and galvanizing, reveling in human connection at its most arduous, persistent and sublime.

Fresh is an electrifying, sobering movie, and with it, Yakin announces himself as perhaps the most gifted newcomer of the decade.

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.

Not only gives us a superb new cast of believable characters, it transcends its own genre. Only superficially a teen comedy, the movie redounds with postmodern -- but emotionally genuine -- gravitas.

Barry Sonnenfeld's irresistibly charming lampoon of Hollywood.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.

After Love, the feature-length debut from British writer-director Aleem Khan, is a quietly compelling exploration of identity, grief and the secrets loved ones take to the grave.

Dhont tells a familiar story in what feels like a fresh and urgently new way, with sensitivity, sadness and promising glimmers of hope.

Truman avoids preachiness as scrupulously as it evades certainty.

Jamal Khashoggi was a complex, even contradictory human being, and his death an affront to freedom and decency. Does the world need two documentaries about him, coming in rapid succession? Maybe not. But you wouldn’t go wrong by watching either one.

Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, Chocolat feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

Top Gun: Maverick showed us there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters. Godzilla Minus One is another reminder — and quite possibly the better movie of the two.

Not nearly as accomplished narratively as it is visually.

Admittedly, Top Five suffers from its share of too-convenient contrivances and clunky passages... But Top Five is also buoyantly self- sustaining, thanks in part to Rock and Dawson’s easy, convincingly seductive chemistry and some genuinely hilarious surprises.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

Savagely funny satire of the world of independent filmmaking.

Not only is it a wholly original story, but it also honors a culture that’s so often overlooked by the movie industry. That alone might have made it a hit, but Coco has so much more to offer.

Bridge of Spies expands from being a smart, engrossing procedural to a carefully observed character study of Donovan, a particularly intriguing, heretofore overlooked American figure.

The story holds a potential for sap that is mostly unfulfilled thanks to Beresford's stately approach, the stars' better judgment and the protagonists' sharp wits. Admirably, Driving Miss Daisy takes the road less traveled.

As with other Aardman productions, the greatest delights derive from relishing the details of the clay figures and intricate sets, crafted by the studio’s master model builders.

The progression of the story is steadily downward, and at times the style flirts with melodrama, the mood with moroseness. But in the film’s third act, masterfully staged by filmmaker Karim Aïnouz (who co-wrote the screen adaptation with Inez Bortagaray and Murilo Hauser), it takes a giant leap, both temporally and emotionally.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go.

Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerizing pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it so steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.

No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

Dolores is a fascinating corrective to 50-plus years of American history. It’s educational, to be sure, but also exhilarating, inspiring and deeply emotional.

That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.

The result is a film that does more than impart facts, or even tell a story: It builds a world, and once we’re in it, takes us on a potent and unforgettable emotional journey.

Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, Jackie would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent.

It's uncompromisingly steamy, in a way that seems designed to make people who are uncomfortable with a physical relationship between two men even more uncomfortable.

It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.

Rather than a self-indulgent portrait of two amazing men and their amazing careers, “Turn Every Page” bristles with ego and good-humored tension.

Few films are both genuinely erotic and off-putting enough to inspire the occasional walkout. Raw succeeds at both.

R.M.N. is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.

Inherent Vice unfolds so organically, so gracefully and with such humanistic grace notes that even at its most preposterous, viewers will find themselves nodding along, sharing the buzz the filmmaker has so skillfully created.

American Fiction would be an enormously entertaining and observant comedy even if it just stuck to the hilarious, if cringey, lengths to which the White establishment will go in the name of psychic safety and self-protection. But Jefferson overlays the story’s most biting wit with layers of warmth, sadness and discovery that make this movie far more than the sum of its parts.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

This Australian film by New Zealand director Jane Campion comes at you, and keeps coming at you, in peculiar, oddly enchanting bursts of detail.

The pleasures of Little Shop carry you past its dull stretches -- you enjoy its quick-witted wordplay, inventive sketch comedy and the Broadway- and Motown-influenced music (by Alan Menken). And most of all, you enjoy watching a story told through song, as the Hollywood musical, with its glitz and sass, is reborn.

No isn’t nearly as definitive or declarative as its title: It leaves viewers wondering whether they should cheer, shrug or shake their heads.

There are plenty of left turns (and the occasional dead end) here, but Riders of Justice is no waste of time. The mayhem is mixed with unexpected thoughtfulness.

Simultaneously warm and clear-eyed, “Best Worst Thing” is an unblinking look at how the sausage of theater gets made, as well as an emotional memoir.

It becomes apparent during the stuttering course of the movie itself that exploiting a nuclear power plant as an effective deathtrap in a doomsday thriller requires more than melodramatic wishful thinking. [16 March 1979, p.B1]

This is a bittersweet story, no question. But to the son's great credit, what emerges from his patient investigation is a remarkably rich, even sympathetic, portrait of the father.

Hot Fuzz deploys the same mix of genre conventions, slapstick and old-school British humor that made "Shaun of the Dead" such a dumb-but-good romp.

Like a dark-comedy sequel to the masterful German film "The Lives of Others," Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective gives viewers a penetrating glimpse of surveillance culture, in this case as it plays out in post-communist Romania.

A movie to cheer you up and on and help you feel that spring will, in fact, arrive before we are all too desiccated to enjoy it.

Breathes its own refreshing, occasionally demented, life into that time period, albeit in a pulpy, stylized cinematic language more akin to vampire-hunter cartoonishness than "Lincoln's" more classical reserve.

It’s a haunting story of love between two misfits who shouldn’t be together. In its doomed yet somehow hopeful spirit, it’s closer to the noir sensibility of “Let the Right One In” than the pop-horror of “Twilight.”

Both simplistic and overcomplicated, Us depends on some of horror’s most hackneyed cliches and gaps in logic — by now, shouldn’t all movie characters know never to go back into the house and to always stay together? — as well as a few windy speeches explaining why bizarre things keep happening. The viewer begins to wish that Peele had given his script one more pass, either to pare it down or beef it up.

This intriguing but somewhat overlong (at two hours) comedy is mostly concerned with the melancholy and frustrating aspects of gay life in Japan, where taboos remain deeply entrenched and there is next to no privacy in puritanical society.

A candid, colorful and deeply meaningful sociocultural time capsule, one that captured the black community at the height of its political energy and optimism.

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.

Closed Curtain is at times slow and constantly puzzling. It doesn’t carry the impact of some of Panahi’s more conventional films. It’s not his best movie, but the fact that he’s making a movie at all is remarkable.

While the main themes of Moana are identity and self-discovery — familiar territory, to be sure — the film manages to enliven such well-traveled latitudes with a breeze as fresh as the islands.

A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.

In the end, Shadow suffers from a kind of shallow narcissism. Yes, it’s beautiful. Sure, it’s hard to take your eyes off it, with all the slow-motion action, enhanced by an ever-present, photogenic drizzle. But in an ironic departure from the theme of the balance, it too often emphasizes style over substance.

The movie’s thesis is that the 1960s’ political clashes and cultural revelations were essentially linked, and equally liberating.

With the exception of the opening scene -- whose purpose is chiefly comic -- the movie is one, extended climax. Even with flashbacks and other time jumps, it never lets up. You have to go back to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1952 "The Wages of Fear" to recall suspense this relentless.

A delicious slow-burn of a movie, the kind of coming-of-age tale that looks familiar on the surface only to reveal hidden depths of beauty and meaning.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that Skyfall will be both classic and of-the-moment.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.