Who should have access to an artist’s legacy? That’s only one of many good questions that are raised in this mesmerizing exercise in artistic interrogation.

Swaggers across the landscape like a cinematic epic, but it’s basically a concert flick, with some extras. And those extras are not the best things in it.

A compelling, compact story about a country that was left to destroy itself while one man presided futilely over the carnage.

Waves is as exhilarating and terrifying as the roller-coaster ride of adolescence itself, plunging viewers into a world brimming with music and color and movement and hair-trigger reflexes that feels exterior and interior at the same time.

What’s being marketed as a sober, straightforward sci-fi drama (the words “Bring him home” superimposed on an unsmiling Matt Damon inside a space helmet) is instead a smart, exhilarating, often disarmingly funny return to classic adventures of yore.

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's provocative, punishing, weirdly brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, has a feverish intensity. And undeniably, there's a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.

What a pleasure it is to witness a masterful storyteller at work, and to see Craig lead a franchise he so thoroughly enjoys.

Moormann deserves credit, not only for choosing a wonderful and deserving subject for a film, but for doing him proud.

For all its virtues, Wendy and Lucy seems like the most overrated of art movies. Yes, it's obscure and distancing and makes you pay attention. Williams's performance is nuanced, moving and well worth any awards she gets. But Wendy is also anonymous.

In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” we are given the rare chance to watch an exploration of a religion born instead of female pain.

It has certain je ne sais quoi, if graphic nudity, self-referential humor and serial murder — neck stabbing, eye gouging, alligator munching and shotgun blasting — are your thing.

Beyond the music itself, The Sparks Brothers offers viewers a bracing example of musical curiosity and extraordinary resilience — not to mention the singular pleasure of working at your craft long enough to be accused of ripping off the acts who have been stealing from you for 50 years. The Maels live. And living Mael is the best revenge.

As good as Rourke is, and as willingly as he throws himself on the figurative hand grenade, his performance constantly begs the question of whether the story would be worth telling without him. Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy the pole dancer, delivers a courageous performance, one nearly as ego-battering as Rourke's.

With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate.

If Knock Down the House was supposed to be about the 2018 surge of female candidates, it misses the mark by focusing too much on one of them.

With its wise understanding of the magnetic pull (and invisible polarities) of family, Junebug is an auspicious debut for Morrison.

As enlightening as Coup 53 is as a secret history, it’s even more satisfying as an aesthetic exercise, treating viewers to one of cleverest workarounds in cinematic problem-solving in recent memory. It’s a nonfiction film that functions precisely as all documentaries should: as a piece of doggedly investigative, personally transparent reporting, and as simply great storytelling, full stop.

Even a character as sincere and innocently wise as Marcel isn’t above fan service, even if it means taking a sweetly captivating idea an inch too far.

An elegant romantic thriller adapted from a novel of the same name, is a terrific film.

What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures.

See Food, Inc. after dinner, but see it.

A marvelously moody meditation, beautiful to look at and beautiful to ponder as the camera slowly pans from one scene to the next, framing life as still life.

There's another satisfying benefit to Everlasting Moments. It's gloriously absent of the hyper-speed anxiety that passes for storytelling on our multiplex screens.

Upon leaving the theater, a girl of about 6 turned to her grandmother and said dreamily, "That.Was.The.Best.Movie.Ever." And that sums up why this little movie is so very big.

The infuriatingly slow pace proves a point, but it makes for a gritty-eyed viewer with mashed potatoes for brains...It's a relief to escape the theater after this one, though it's good for several hours of discussion over dinner. It's not entertaining, but it does fall into the should-see category. Pop a couple of Stress-Tabs before you go. [2 Oct 1981, p.17]

The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor. But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams (literal and figurative) behind the drudgery reveal themselves in a series of revelatory moments.

The movie is full of endearing grace notes. [11 Oct 2009, p.24]

Four Daughters is film as family therapy and family therapy as film.

A touching and unusual road movie-cum-buddy film.

You leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.

Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.

The Queen of Versailles turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.

As the quiet, compact vessel for roiling fears and ambivalence, Al-Hwietat’s Theeb winds up being a strikingly memorable character, whose deceptively simple tale possesses both haunting power and a whiff of prescient pessimism.

It knocks you off your feet and leaves you shaken.

Quite simply, a beautiful film, in both form and content.

A heartbreaker, plain and simple.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

It'll keep you amused enough to sit still and even remember it fondly.

To its credit, Trophy neither shames its subjects nor offers an easy solution. Rather, it takes a reasoned and thought-provoking view — from many angles — of a problem for which there is, as Trophy argues, no quick or simple fix.

It’s been a long time coming for Incredibles 2, but the punchline is worth the setup.

Matters of objective science and empirical observation have now become so mired in partisanship, authoritarian narrative and conspiracy blather that even a film this judicious and straightforwardly informative feels doomed to reach no further than its own self-selected constituency.

With its awkward reenactments and other stylistic clunkers, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry doesn’t break much formal ground. But it serves as a moving reminder of how crucial citizen action is in fomenting social change.

Gleason portrays great strength and great suffering in equal measure, lending vivid credence to tired platitudes about what it means to live life to the fullest.

Turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

The major problem with the film is that the exposition is not nearly as clever as the premise. After warming to the idea behind the movie, one tends to cool off as it trudges toward a resolution.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

Big Night, a scrumptious tale of great food and grand passions, belongs on the menu with such mouth-watering movie fare as "Babette's Feast" and "Like Water for Chocolate."

This is a story about people first, but also about the way we see. And the visual hodgepodge of JR’s images reveals very different perspectives that affect the way we treat each other.

Just about everything you ever loved (or hated) about Italian films can be found.

It would be difficult to identify a single frame in Saraband that is not a distinguished composition in itself; Bergman has the eye of a latter-day Vermeer.

In a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that Ad Astra feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.

Sayles brings familiar tools to "Roan Inish": a passion for language, labor-intensive lifestyles and, of course, the moody beauty of the geography. The writer-director frequently links his characters' personal happiness with their environment. That, more than the unusual marine life of Roan Inish, is the theme of this amiable visit to northwestern Ireland.

The beauty of Nine Lives is that its occasionally overlapping stories feel entirely unforced; Garcia's is a filmmaking style of rare lyricism, compassion and discretion.

This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.

The story is riddled with absurd coincidences and improbabilities. It doesn't have an original bone in its body. And no one's going to leave this film thinking De Niro should stay behind the camera. But none of these problems stops the movie from being enjoyable. If Bronx Tale feels too familiar, it's at least the familiarity of good Italian movies.

It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness.

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

Levinson was never one for narrative tightness. As with much of his previous work, Bugsy is a maze of episodes, a sprawling excuse for engaging human banter. Although the truth will inevitably catch up with Beatty -- especially concerning that expensive nightclub -- it's not entirely clear what the movie's about. But that's the kind of detail Beatty's Siegel wouldn't even worry about. Neither should you.

Arnold also brings to bear a euphoric appreciation for the spirit of freedom and the optimism — if not the innocence — of her subjects, who can seem at once world-weary and hopelessly naive. Call it a form of ecstatic naturalism, one that revels in the ugly paradoxes of life.

As a slice of life spiked with mordant, uncynical humor, it’s deliciously entertaining. In other words, it’s another Holofcener movie, which means it’s perilously close to perfect.

The result is a classic on a par with “Winesburg, Ohio” and “Our Town,” a narrow slice of contemporary American life that manages to be both admiring, yet capable of polite skepticism.

By looking closely, clinically and ultimately compassionately at one eccentric practitioner of a dying way of life...Peter and the Farm nevertheless manages to harvest not just understanding of one peculiar, broken little man, but a broader wisdom about the cycle of seasons that we all must endure on this planet.

True Grit has sweep and scope and entertainment value to burn, but it's Mattie who invests even the grandest aesthetic elements with meaning.

The great thing about Mystery Train is its open-endedness. It's a generously scripted ride that gives equal berth to all its characters, then cuts them loose with unfinished business, which also leaves them alive and drifting in your thoughts for a long time. That doesn't seem like a bad achievement at all.

A Hidden Life is indisputably the finest work Malick has produced in eight years, as an examination of faith, conviction and sacrifice, but also as proof of concept for his own idiosyncratic style. It marks an exhilarating return to form but also, more crucially, content.

Structurally, The Meyerowitz Stories is a shapeless and baggy thing.

He treats jocks like humans, not stars or superheroes, and in the end has managed something unique for documentaries these days: It's as entertaining as it is fair.

Low-tech inventiveness at its best.

The vignettes are linked as much by theme as story, yet they're carefully structured and delicately balanced.

It’s hard to fault Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners” for being chaotic and miserable. That’s the mood he’s after — and he captures it with such assurance that the film is a tough watch.

Iris serves as a spirited, often dazzling primer in how to fight the dying of the light and feel fabulous while doing it.

The Force Awakens strikes all the right chords, emotional and narrative, to feel both familiar and exhilaratingly new. Filled with incident, movement and speed, dusted with light layers of tarnished “used future” grime, it captures the kinetic energy that made the first film, from 1977, such a revelation to filmgoers who marveled at Lucas’s mashup of B movies, Saturday-morning serials, Japanese historical epics and mythic heft.

While Last Men in Aleppo could stand a trim here and there, it mostly uses its length to good and heart-rending effect, delivering a lingering, close-up — and ultimately tragic — look at the misery and joy taking place, side by side, under the eyes of the world.

It's precisely Henry's coldblooded affectlessness that is meant to shock and disturb us. But "Henry" leaves us feeling more numbed than moved. Half art film, half schlock-horror cheapie, "Henry" isn't quite sure what it wants to be.

Searing dramatization of a story of remarkable courage, stamina and spirit.

Could hardly be more suspenseful if it were scripted.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

Even those who don’t buy in completely to Mundruczo’s parable will be impressed by his canine crowd scenes, staged with ambition, skill and genuinely original vision.

Evokes its spirituality with deft strokes and wonderful humor.

Majewski's film is a captivating exercise that will interest fans of art, not to mention arthouse cinema. But the movie's lasting impression is about more than novelty. It's a portrait of suffering and subjugation that urges viewers to stop what they're doing and take notice of the world around them.

At the center of this oddly riveting little picaresque is a performance of such quiet power by Plummer — as an antihero both rash and precociously resourceful — that it’s easy to overlook the film’s flaws.

Bergman Island is a compelling, enchanting film that works both as a relationship drama and as a conversation between one generation of directors and another. It’s almost as though Mia Hansen-Love were teaching Ingmar Bergman how to get down.

Viewers who have nurtured a loving if complicated relationship with Barbie might feel seen by the end of the film. Whether they’ll feel satisfied is another question entirely — especially when it comes to the film’s letdown of an ending, which was no doubt perfect on the page but lands with a deflating, didactic thud. Then again, that gnawing sense of ambivalence was no doubt precisely what Gerwig’s “Barbie” was aiming for.

Spielberg's dark side may not be where everyone wants to live, but it's somehow encouraging to know that he has one.

A film that feels like something conjured out of memory and magic, a poetic, often ecstatic re-creation of childhood that captures its ungovernable pleasures as vividly as its most threatening terrors.

To its great credit, the movie turns left when you expect it to turn right, taking a route that is less well traveled, yet more plausible.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

Although “Strange Darling” dutifully delivers white-knuckle tension and cinematic panache, Mollner’s savvy script also speaks to the unbalanced power dynamic a woman typically accepts when inviting the advances of an unfamiliar man.

By land or by sea, there aren't many movies that can move you like that.

The make-believe world of Boy and the World is confusing, scary and gorgeous. But then again, so is the real one.

As Finders Keepers gets weirder, it also gets better and deeper. Somehow, Carberry and Tweel have managed to fashion an inspirational tale out of what one local newscaster calls a “freak show.”

The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama.

Director Pascale Ferran makes this a sort of opera of two bodies, as the characters discover not only each other but themselves. And the French filmmaker cannily turns their corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

In an era that seems fatally mired in fear, anger and mistrust, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood arrives as something more than a movie. It feels like an answered prayer.

It's a foregone conclusion that The Forty-Year-Old Version will be compared with films by Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Judd Apatow, the latter of whom is referenced in the title and the steady stream of vulgar humor that courses through Blank’s dialogue. But even with those obvious references, she’s crafted something all her own.

Kuosmanen has given us another affair to remember, this time about love as something for which you’d not just go to the ends of the Earth, but to the beginning of time.

What starts out trivial gradually turns into a drama about big ideas: mortality and the meaning of life; the value of relationships and the vulnerability they require.

7 Prisoners is an angry film, but Moratto, crucially, reserves his most intense judgment for an inhumane system, not the characters who are trapped by it, each in different ways.