Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

Although The Go-Go’s works marvelously as a scrapbook that will surely delight the viewer who wants to remember the catchy songs and saucy attitudes, it’s also the first time that the band’s story has been rendered as a cultural triumph instead of a cautionary tale.

Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.

An electrifying documentary.

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

It's best appreciated by assuming something of a dream state ourselves and enjoying the giddy flow.

The film suggests that it doesn't really matter whether Harris ever gets back in uniform. He's forever carrying around a piece of unexploded ordnance in his head.

An enchanting Italian serio-comedy about the most unlikely of cinematic subjects-the origins, structure and reach of poetry.

Like the infamous “talk” that opens the film — the conversation that many black parents feel forced to have with their children about how to behave when you are stopped by the police — it is a movie that feels both essential and terribly, terribly sad.

The movie is more than an admonition for the living; it’s also an achingly bittersweet love story about caregiving.

When Hairspray is twisting and shouting and swiveling its hips, you can even dare to believe a great society is waiting in the wings.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

Not since the 1972 'Cabaret' has there been a movie musical this stirring, intelligent and exciting.

In the hands of director Julie Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit.

It’s a masterful example of genre filmmaking’s ability to transcend its limitations, leaving a viewer not just frightened, but also changed.

By turns silly and scathing, Glass Onion once again demonstrates Johnson’s gift for critiquing culture in the name of good fun — or, perhaps more precisely, having fun by critiquing culture.

For all its savagery and hopelessness, Starred Up manages to be sympathetic, not only because of O’Connell’s galvanizing turn, but also Asser and director David Mackenzie’s unwavering commitment to portraying his character with as much compassion as brutal honesty.

Sheer pleasure to watch, full of rich visuals and felicitous comic turns.

This handsomely staged production plays like a soothingly thoughtful balm.

The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.

That A War both delivers the results one might wish for and denies a sense of closure is not a failing but its chief virtue.

A vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

One heck of a tale of deliciously unladylike payback.

Strangely moving film.

This movie’s pleasures are less about its villains and more about the interplay between Pegg and Frost.

It’s rare that a documentary has the ability to take the kind of long view of events that establishes context and consequence.

Harbor no illusions about Lost Illusions. It’s no stuffy costume drama. Just close your eyes and imagine its characters in modern dress, toiling away in digital publishing, and its wild delusions and deceptions could be happening right now.

By focusing on the details of his characters’ lives, Weinstein finds common ground on both sides of the religious divide.

A sci-fi-fueled indictment of man's inhumanity to man -- and the non-human -- District 9 is all horribly familiar, and transfixing.

A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.

Purely visual cinema was accomplished successfully in "Days of Heaven," where there is no story line to speak of, but people and nature are made memorably vivid through the moving picture.Picnic at Hanging Rock is not up to that level visually, because it occasionally slips into the hair-color advertisement school of slow-motion beauty. But even the attempt is marred: Looking for game clues would spoil any painting, but having to look and not being able to find them is worse. [16 March 1979, p.18]

The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.

A movie as intensely subjective as Woman at War had better have an actress deserving of unwavering attention, and Erlingsson has found her in Geirharosdottir, who proves to be supremely at ease with both the physical demands of the film and its trickier internal journeys (not to mention a neat bit of visual legerdemain).

Overheated and recklessly violent.

A fun, engaging story that’s more about obsessive drive than actual driving.

To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty.

The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.

Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.

If the movie’s universal themes don’t impress, its specific details do.

Elaine Stritch’s strength, along with the film’s, comes from her honesty. She is herself, even when — maybe especially when — she knows she’s being watched.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim's scathing, moving critique of American public education, makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.