The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.

While Iannucci whips up a fever-pitch frenzy, his film, based on a 2017 graphic novel, is not a farce, but a tragicomedy. The dark elements are too corrosive to be tempered by laughter.

To certain serious world-cinema aficionados, though, Tulpan's combination of understated comedy and documentary-level depiction of rural Kazakh life will be catnip.

Where some Leigh films bear down on their main characters, “Hard Truths” feels expansive and forgiving, except when it comes to the mystery of Pansy herself.

His (Martin McDonagh) movie fuses naturalism and hysterically pitched theatricality with sometimes uneasy, but bracing results.

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Suffused with wry humor, vulnerability and radiant warmth, Huppert’s performance captures that delicate period in life during which resignation morphs into graceful, even grateful, acceptance.

A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.

This meditation on life is a 102-minute respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point.

The film serves not only as a mesmerizing escape into another world, but also a compelling, compassionate deep dive into human frailty and self-deception.

What’s extraordinary about To Kill a Tiger is Kiran and Ranjit’s determination, and the possible changes for good that may result from it.

A well-seasoned, handsomely cured slab of showbiz schmaltz that hits all the right pleasure centers. With equal parts glitz and grit, Cooper has successfully navigated the most perilous shoals of making a classic narrative his own, managing to create one of its best iterations to date.

Citizenfour isn’t just a useful primer in the civil liberties and consent issues his disclosures raised. It humanizes a man who almost immediately became controversialized as a naive, self-important desk jockey or, worse, a handmaiden to terrorists everywhere.

Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.

The film is at times deeply moving and, for a show that is virtually all song and no dialogue, extraordinarily character-rich.

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

This is an example of a writer and director working in perfect harness, with Reed smoothly ratcheting up the story's suspense and Greene speculating on his cardinal theme of moral ambiguity. They don't make movies like The Fallen Idol anymore, all the more reason to see it now while you can.

The Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

Graced by superb performances, especially from Ashkenazi and Adler, this gentle but devastating portrait bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments.

Merchant and Ivory have regathered many of the cast and crew from their earlier films to work on this reproduction to exquisite effect.

If you think you've absorbed all you could about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the arcana of elaborate derivatives, think again. Inside Job traces the history of the crisis and its implications with exceptional lucidity, rigor and righteous indignation.

This shrewdly observed story asks another question: Is civilization possible in a nation where discrimination has such deep roots? In Sweet Country, the answer arrives with a tough fatalism.

Leave No Trace is not a sociological treatise. It has nothing grandiose to say about homelessness or PTSD. It does, however, deliver an effective (and deeply affecting) allegory of the inevitable leave-taking that all of us — housed or unhoused, happy or half mad — must undergo with our loved ones.

The visual comedy is brilliant.

If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.

It's the kind of absorbing, attractive, unfailingly tasteful enterprise that a critic can recommend without caveat.

The brothers, who have always seemed fond of their characters, have never taken quite so overt a stand for life's simple joys.

The geometry of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s masterful, moving Parallel Mothers, which follows the stories of two women who give birth almost simultaneously in a Madrid hospital, is really a crisscrossing set of two fascinatingly entangled lines.

In a word, Hell or High Water is terrific.

The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

The most nagging impediment to wholehearted acceptance of Tootsie and its little storytelling subterfuges is a failure to recognize the hypocritical aspects of Dorsey's imposture and alleged character improvement. Although Dorsey is supposedly sensitized to the desirability of honesty and consideration in romantic dealings by being forced to seethe on the sidelines while Ron treats Julie badly, the hero never does square things with Sandy, the woman whose trust he betrays in a far more deliberate, systematic fashion. Indeed, it seems downright outrageous for Dorsey to get indignant about Ron's oblivious sort of misbehavior when he's conning Sandy in premeditated ways. [17 Dec 1982, p.F1]

Mostly, though, it's a film about that hollow feeling that hits you when the tears have all dried up and your face hurts way too much to even crack a smile.

Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.

Welcome back to the art of storytelling! Back to the Future is a whirling merry-go-round of a movie, in which everything is precisely machined but nothing seems quite safe. It's a wildly pleasurable sci-fi comedy, filled with enchantment and sweetness and zip as only a bona fide summer hit can be. [3 July 1985, p.D1]

A sequel that eclipses the original. The toys are back with even more hilarious vengeance. The story's twice as inventive as its predecessor.

A film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.

Soaring, swooning and gently nostalgic, Brooklyn takes melodrama to a new level of reassuring simplicity and emotional transparency.

The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.

Leigh hasn't the affect of a poet, but he's a poet nonetheless. This movie captures the smallish details in life that perhaps you've felt before, but have never before seen on screen. He has a genius for the commonplace. It is truly sweet stuff.

It’s a more visceral trip than any moviegoer — even the armchair experts — has ever taken before.

Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society. But the film concludes on an optimistic note, at least for the Dardennes. It's still the worst of times, the filmmakers seem to suggest, but we're still capable of humanity, if not hope.

Deliberately paced, unapologetically mannered and contemplatively attuned, If Beale Street Could Talk invites audiences to venture beyond the screen in front of them to connect with the characters and their world on a deeper, more mystical plane.

What little dancing we do see is lovely to watch, but it’s also lovely to see a performer who once seemed to have an iron grip on the barre finally learn how to be gracious and let go.

The bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humor, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

Armstrong applies a dusting of contemporary feminism, but the stubborn sentimentalism of Alcott's endearing family portrait endures. [21 Dec 1994]

The movie does what any great musician should: It lifts an idea to the heights of ecstasy; it sells its song.

You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.

As haunting as it is haunted, The Missing Picture leaves viewers’ heads rattling with ghosts.

Amadeus works as pure entertainment, with some of the world's greatest tunes added to a funny and macabre plot. But hidden behind its twisting scenario are some basic questions about life and death. [19 Sep 1984, p.B1]

As a portrait, Pain and Glory is less a mirror than an impressionistic painting. It’s an emotional rendering of a person, not a literal one.

For the truth is, given the audacity, the organization, the seriousness of purpose, the movie isn't nearly as provocative as you think it might be.

This vibrantly disorienting cinematic import reinvents the vocabulary of the crime drama with a painterly eye and a feverish documentary style.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

Amounts to a rare gift and an opportunity to appreciate the end of an era and celebrate one of the screen's most subtly etched heroes: the soft-spoken Monsieur Georges Lopez.

A cuttingly smart comedy.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

The film follows two remarkable men in New Delhi: Mohammad Saud and his older brother Nadeem Shehzad, former bodybuilders who used their scientific curiosity, compassion and knowledge of human musculature to figure out how to care for sick and injured birds.

For Kieslowski, subtlety is a religion. He hints or implies -- anything to keep from laying his cards on the table. With "Blue," you never feel he's shown his whole hand; not even after the game is over.

The sexiest movie of the year.

Mulholland Drive is an extended mood opera, if you want to put an arty label on incoherence.

Even its most irritating parts don’t fatally damage a whole that works amazingly well, despite its own excesses.

The result is a curios, unsatisfactory pastiche of documentary tidbits acquired from Reichenbach and speculative filler supplied by Welles himself, who appears prowling around in his Felliniesque hat and cape, performing a couple of magic tricks and mostly pontificating about himself, Hughes, Irving, de Hory and the nature of art and illusion in the editing room or a the dinner table.

A small masterpiece of a documentary that takes us into the heart of a complex darkness.

Wolfe keeps the production simple, albeit with attractively rich visual values and gorgeous costumes, allowing the performances to exert their mesmerizing force. And nowhere is that magnetism more palpable than when Davis and Boseman are going toe to toe, their energies repelling one another one moment and fusing the next.

As the movie progresses, it deepens emotionally and becomes less of a detective thriller and more of a character study, and it's to Franklin's credit that he never allows his hard-boiled style to soften. Thematically, the movie doesn't make a strong statement, but it is strikingly expressive in its details.

An intermittently effective biography, marred by a frequently intrusive score.

The movie version of Jaws is one of the most exciting and satisfying thrillers ever made.

Dreamlike and deliberate, pedestrian and theatrical, bland and strangely beautiful, About Endlessness takes in the suffering, struggle and moments of vagrant joy in life and propels them into the cosmos.

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow.

Gromit's every facial move -- every grimace, scowl, eye-roll and glance askance -- is sublime.

The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged.

One needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.

Instead of a grand tableau vivant that lays out the great man and his great deeds like so many too-perfect pieces of waxed fruit, Spielberg brings the leader and viewers down to ground level.

Chandor’s attention to detail, and the expressiveness and utter believability with which Redford goes about the anything-but-mundane business of surviving, make All Is Lost a technically dazzling, emotionally absorbing, often unexpectedly beautiful experience.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

Love & Friendship is such a thoroughgoing delight that it’s tempting to riffle through Austen’s other works to find something else for Stillman to make into a film. As adaptations go, this is a match made in heaven.

Creepy, creepy, creepy. Writer-director Ari Aster makes an impressively unnerving debut with Hereditary, a meticulously crafted horror thriller.

Riley doesn’t merely make a fine nonfiction film about the life and legacy of the late conflicted artist. He virtually resurrects him.

A flurry of stunts, close shaves and deeds of desperate daring, it easily transcends its television origins to become a stylish pacemaker-buster.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

It's long, but it's also very real and worth every minute.

A gripping, deeply moving film

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

Koltai is an accomplished, Oscar-nominated cinematographer (for 2000's "Malena"), and Fateless is meticulously composed and shot.

McNamara fits perfectly into Morris's canon: He tells a story that knocks you right off your feet.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

Brokeback Mountain possesses handsome and sympathetic lead players, magnificent scenery, heartbreaking melodrama, righteousness and cultural import. But as a testament to the importance of following one's passion, it's devoid of one crucial thing: passion.

Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.

What accounts for the curious appeal of such a pretentiously amateurish scare movie? Surely not the raggedy direction of Robin Hardy, obviously struggling with his first feature. It must be the softcore sex, the illusion that Summerisle is an out-of-the-way paradise where you can get all the action you crave. [26 Nov 1980, p.B9]

For such a compact and efficient vessel, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” pours forth seemingly endless wellsprings of language, emotion and psychological depth.

It plays out with all the suspense of a thriller. Assisted by acclaimed editor Walter Murch, Levinson wisely shapes the story not around the hardware, which was plagued by malfunctions and other delays, but around the people tasked with making the LHC run.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

You may not have agreed with Ebert’s reviews — you may not have thought he was such a nice guy. But if you aren’t moved by Life Itself, you ought to have your heart examined.

The Shape of Water may not achieve the aesthetic and thematic heights of 2006’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which still stands as del Toro’s masterpiece. But it’s an endearing, even haunting film from one of cinema’s most inventive artists, one who manages to bend even the hoariest B-movie tropes to his idiosyncratic, deeply humanistic imagination.