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.