If not new and significant, it's at least a funny attempt to pull off the trick of holding a mirror to our hall of mirrors. [1 June 1979, p.22]

Long Way North combines thrilling ad­ven­ture with a slightly somber mood. It’s a beautiful trip, even if it’s a little chilly and sad when it finally gets to where it’s going.

Overall, “Shoot First” is a breezy look at a professional whose work remains endearing, despite some highfalutin claims.

Dyrholm, who deservedly took the prize for best actress at last year’s Berlinale for her sensitive performance as Anna, movingly captures the struggles of a middle-aged career woman who revels in the new freedoms of the 1970s, while ultimately falling victim to them.

There are no huge revelations here — certainly nothing that would shock superfans. The movie offers a taste of the go-go-go pace of touring the world, which led to exhaustion and frustration, but mostly focuses on the happier times.

In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour’s film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story.

Its virtuosity, wit, fleet performances and cool self-awareness notwithstanding, T2 doesn’t feel like a necessary film as much as a respectful and respectable exercise in fan service.

Strange Weather is wise about loss, showing the ripple effects of an untimely death. It is hardly an original concept, yet it handles this subject with the care and integrity it deserves.

In an effort to make Fawcett a logical, upstanding guy, the story never fully convinces us of his obsession with returning to find the lost city.

Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade. Symbolism aside, Sid & Nancy is an indelible drama of undying love and meaningless decline.

We’ve seen these poignant lessons before: Ove is destined to learn that he can’t do it all on his own and that life is still worth living. Yet the moving twists and turns of the love story and the bright comedy elevate an otherwise familiar story line.

Even without the guidance of narration or a single story arc, it becomes clearer and clearer that the war on terror has unwittingly spawned another war: between police officers trained to fight like soldiers and the people they’ve sworn to protect.

Girl Asleep isn’t easy to categorize. It’s a wild curiosity that shifts on a whim. In that sense, there couldn’t be a better metaphor for the inner workings of a teenage girl’s mind.

Starving the Beast is still a worthwhile documentary.

This taut political thriller, set amid the soulless office architecture of K Street, has an ostensibly liberal bent, but its antiheroine’s Machiavellian methods turn the film’s subject away from its cause, portraying lobbyists and politicians in a dark light.

Peppering “Norman” with obliquely mordant observations about Middle East politics, Cedar effortlessly propels the narrative into a sweetly pensive character study of a familiar archetype, which he invests with an angel’s share of humanity and heart.

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.

As a 30-something coming-of-age story, Colossal is as relatable as they come, its deadpan depiction of lost sheep recalling the Charlize Theron movie “Young Adult.” Vigalondo doesn’t evince the same cynicism and anger as that film reveled in so bitterly, but he’s also not one for easy allegorical equivalencies.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.

It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

The movie is a tremendous accomplishment, especially considering that the cast had never seen cameras before — much less movies — yet still agreed to star in the drama. Their performances are as stunning as the setting, and that’s truly saying something.

Somber and serious-minded, the live-action Mulan is a movie that has grown up alongside its original audience, which is presumably old enough to crave something heavier in its entertainment diet. Little girls might be better off sticking with the cartoon for now; but this opulent, ambitious production and Liu’s focused, intrepid performance at its center, gives them something to grow into.

Like the gender-flipped “Ghostbusters” before it, this new movie neither reinvents not dishonors its inspiration, instead adding a modicum of zip — if less than turbocharged horsepower — to a vehicle that runs you through the staging of a crime by, ironically, obeying all the traffic laws.

The victims are impossibly brave as they sit for interviews, revisiting the worst moments of their lives. Their stories are the strongest part of the documentary, making up for uneven pacing and some otherwise strange editing choices.

Kennebeck may be a newcomer to feature filmmaking, but her grasp of the material is accomplished.

By showing animals in all their mundane splendor, Seasons makes a case for conservation.

Malek’s talents serve a much more personal, ultimately touching story.

By observing the struggle of the miner with a mix of resignation and resolve, the movie hints that this struggle is the struggle of every worker.

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

Even without every flaw completely ironed out, it offers values worth celebrating across the time-space continuum.

This is a movie squarely directed at adolescents in all their untamed desire, outsize emotion and near-bottomless self-obsession. The filmmakers have crafted a canny delivery system for their life lessons, by way of a movie that balances escapism, candor and ethics with admirable aplomb.

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

The Wall is a fairly hopeless film. In a sense, the fragile structure of the title acts as a double metaphor: for a barrier between enemies that keeps them from killing each other, as well as one that must come down if true understanding is ever to occur.

Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon (as Peter’s best friend, Ned) convincingly convey adolescent awkwardness, despite the fact that they’re all in their 20s.

The inherent superiority of the written word notwithstanding, Batra has done a credible and even commendable job of translating Barnes’s intricate prose to the screen, opening up some of its corners, burrowing into its time shifts and, most gratifyingly, elaborating on a few otherwise marginal characters.

This is a film that encapsulates the anxiety of the present moment, complicated by friendships that lean, at times, toward outright hostility.

Flustered, flirty and filled to the brim with compassion, The Lovers is charming, even when it’s proving how hollow charm can be.

Wonder does occasionally suffer from kid-movie pitfalls, straining to be cute or mining humor from ridiculously precocious little ones. But mostly it succeeds in telling not one complicated story, but many, and giving the experience of being a confused or lonely or scared youngster the space it deserves.

On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation.

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.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

Landline offers viewers a rueful glimpse of a vanished time and place. Along the way, it’s often unexpectedly and guffawingly funny.

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.

As compelling as Warner’s story is, Crown Heights never quite takes hold cinematically. It’s a procedural whose central protagonist remains necessarily passive and something of a cipher, despite the wellsprings of emotion that Stanfield manages to tap simply by gazing balefully out a cell window.

Patti Cake$ winds up being a celebration of art, enterprise and self-invention that’s as tough as it is touching. At the risk of mixing metaphors, not to mention musical genres, it rocks.

Filmmaker Kirsten Tan riffs on the tropes of both the buddy film and the road trip movie in her absurd yet subtly observed feature debut Pop Aye.

Yelchin’s performance — grizzled, neurotic — is sadly on-the-nose, making us feel as if we’re watching the last act of a troubled young man.

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.

Director Reginald Hudlin handles the story with just enough finesse to make its details more thrilling than uneasy.

“Corner” is a deeply sympathetic tale, using the possibilities of animation not just to pique curiosity, but to devastate.

The documentary I Am Jane Doe is the kind of film that lifts up a rock that’s been sitting in plain sight year after year, with only a heroic few bothering to see the slithering reality underneath.

The moments when A Fantastic Woman takes off come in bursts of magical realism, such as when Marina suddenly finds herself heading off impossible head winds, or leading a sparkly dance number.

Glatzer captures the visceral charge of moving wildly in tandem with another person, often in improvised bouts that forge strong bonds between partners, if only for a few minutes.

Its juiciest bits, which include Uncle Liu musing on meat buns as a childhood friend of his is beaten to a pulp for sleeping with the mobster’s wife, are reminiscent of early Quentin Tarantino. But here, scenes unspool at a far more meditative clip.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

In tone, School Life feels like a recruiting film for prospective students. It isn’t exactly profound, except perhaps in the way it makes a case for the theory that happiness comes first, and then learning.

A cheerful romp through a fussy New York hotel.

Outbreak is an absolute hoot thanks primarily to director Wolfgang Petersen's rabid pacing and the great care he brings to setting up the story and its probability.

O’Shea follows his twisted premise to its inexorable conclusion, so his film is ultimately more unnerving than sad.

It's as much fun as ever, a ground-meat-and-potatoes movie, with guys beating hell out of each other to a disco beat. Stallone pulls no punches; the familiar refrain features the Rocky I score, along with its characters and moral simplicity.

Director Matt Tyrnauer mixes lively archival footage, including a memorable news interview with an angry Italian grandmother, with testimony from passionate experts to demonstrate the importance of city design.

In Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary, documentarian John Scheinfeld shows that the music of one of jazz’s most experimental saxophone players still speaks to audiences today.

A warm, earnestly entertaining film.

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

Writer-director Jason Hall astutely conveys these and other facets of the modern veteran’s experience, generating authentic drama, in scenes that play out in unexpected ways.

Stronger isn’t always easy to watch; Jeff makes bad decisions and life gets messy. But it does feel like a realistic depiction of one man’s life.

As Polina, Shevstova delivers a performance that feels wonderfully unforced, if that’s the right word, in a role that can only be called “driven.” There’s almost an emptiness about her character. Polina’s expression of self is all on the surface — at least initially.

Truman avoids preachiness as scrupulously as it evades certainty.

About a musical genre not known for quiet contemplation, “Rumble” asks us to be still for a moment and to listen to the heartbeat — at once familiar and newly strange — that pumps the lifeblood that flows through the songs this country is known for.

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.

[A] well-told tale.

In his most bracing and maddening morality tale yet, Lanthimos doesn’t so much paint himself into a corner as he runs into it, headlong, dragging us with him all the way.

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.

Strang plays him as someone who’s almost crippled by a life lived in fear. It’s a moving performance, rendering a character who, even when the sun is out, can’t quite bring himself to emerge from the shadows.

This film manages to have the feel of an original -- and very effective -- piece of comedy. In part this is due to the delicate touch of director Michael Lehmann ("Heathers"), who never allows the film to slip into a silly mode.

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.

Whether Thelma is the victim of malign forces beyond her control or the Scandinavian equivalent of horror heroine Carrie, is the central question in this superbly controlled, if derivative, variation on a familiar theme.

The story it tells is conventional, chronological and straightforward. And that’s enough. With a story this charming, who needs bells and whistles?

Gorgeously photographed, and with a minimalist score by Fred Frith, Leaning Into the Wind offers viewers a welcome chance to consider the work of an artist who defies the recent commodification cult to embrace the ephemeral and the nominally “worthless.”

Campillo’s style is usually naturalistic, and the superb ensemble cast’s performances are entirely unaffected.

Although much about In the Fade is compelling, there’s a tonal imbalance to the three-act structure. The gritty early events are followed by a courtroom procedural that drags somewhat, with the film shifting into a devastating climax in the thrillerlike third act.

The movie still holds power, mostly thanks to Leuenberger’s arresting, self-contained performance as Nora. She plays the character as an enigma, the last person you’d expect to lead a cause.

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

Provost’s film is, in the end, a story about attaining the wisdom that comes from forgiveness and the acceptance of those things — namely the past and the future — that none of us can control.

Much of the film’s appeal is from the quiet determination of the patriarch Sung, unflappable under the stress, and the family and community who rally around him.

Nothing about this film feels remotely safe. Unlike the “Fifty Shades” series, Double Lover has little interest in romance, instead considering the psychological impulses that inform it.

Dafoe delivers his finest performance in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world markedly short on both.

It’s one that speaks not just to Presley’s (and, arguably, America’s) fall from grace, but to the imperfections — and, yes, the lofty ambitions — of this strange, in some ways beautiful and in some ways overburdened little film.

Let the Sunshine In doesn’t offer a consistently pretty picture. Where some viewers might view Isabelle as a hopelessly stunted victim of self-deception, others will see an avatar of empowerment and autonomy.

Filmworker is a tribute to the unsung artisans, assistants, best boys and girl Fridays whose indelible contributions make movies not just possible, but magical.

As the man who would inspire the character of Scrooge — first spied at night in a cemetery attending a threadbare burial for his business partner, while uttering, “Bah, humbug!” — Christopher Plummer is well chosen.

It provides a sturdy, often exhilarating bridge between the present and a past that not only isn’t distant, but isn’t even really past.

A movie of enormous humanity and heart.

An absorbing and entertaining portrait, of both the science evangelist and the guy behind him.

One of the great strengths of Roman J. Israel, Esq. is that no one is any one thing.

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

Swift, stylish, tough-minded and sharp-tongued, this engaging fact-based drama, about a young woman who at one point ran the richest poker game in the world, is worth recommending if only to see its star, Jessica Chastain, at the top of her nerviest, most icily self-controlled game.

If the family dynamics feel perfunctory and too-neatly resolved by the end of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal of stymied creativity, exacting taste and sensibilities too bold and well-judged for an uncaring world manages to be funny and uncompromising in equal measure.