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.

Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.

The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

It's enough to make your head spin, but Almodovar, whose mastery of the medium has never been more assured, gives you plenty to think about, ultimately grounding the dizzy whirl of his idiosyncratic fictional world in a story that feels not just true but universal.

Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.

A must-see for any student of history, political rhetoric and film poetics at their most vagrant and revelatory.

Weird, warm, monumentally entertaining comedy.

As a meticulously composed piece of contemporary gothic, The Duke of Burgundy is exquisite to look at, but it succeeds best as a human drama, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want — and maybe even getting it in the end.

The movie masterfully crystallizes the unruly, episodic nature of memories, re-creating the way certain small things stay with us while other, much larger events recede into a haze of cigarette smoke.

Force Majeure leaves the audience squirming — in all the very best ways.

Good One takes advantage of the summer lushness of the Catskills, Wilson Cameron’s nature-centric cinematography and Celia Hollander’s ruminative acoustic score to cast a spell over its 89 sure-footed minutes.

Director Itami has produced an engaging cinematic hybrid, brilliantly stir-frying Japanese food -- and other -- obsessions into cowboy themes. He calls Tampopo a noodle western.

Playing with and making fun of paranoia is a DePalma specialty and he does it well. There are some very chilling touches in Blow Out. It's a good solid movie -- but it won't blow you away. [24 July 1981, p.D1]

In hewing so closely to life — in all its frailty and fellowship, its perseverance and mutual care — Jones has made something larger than life.

Shows us, in an extraordinarily simple way, the hopes and frustrations of one woman's life.

As one character observes in Tangerine, Los Angeles is “a beautifully wrapped lie.” Baker has created a fitting homage to artifice and the often tawdry, tender realities that lie beneath.

The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.

Hopkins and Thompson's downright marvelous duet is supported by a host of deft players, and the detailed re-creation of this small universe is in all ways remarkable.

Emerges as the summer's first true must-see film, required viewing for everyone, but especially audiences in Washington.

As wrenching as Room is, especially during its grim first hour, it contains an expansive sense of compassion and humanism thanks to the sensitive direction of Abrahamson.

While there are no salacious details or plot-moving drama about what makes Queen Bey tick — and there shouldn’t be — Renaissance reveals something else, showcasing the joy to be found in cultural touchstones like the tour and the community built around it.

If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.

A tour de force so haunting that other films can't exorcise the memory of its radiant cast, exquisite craftsmanship or complex system of metaphors. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Only someone with intimate knowledge of the Midwest’s singular cadences, social codes and confounding emotional stew (er, covered hot dish) of aggression and politesse could pull off something as masterful, meaningful and poetic as Nebraska.

The title may be a mouthful but Like Water for Chocolate is a feast for the soul. Hauntingly and exquisitely prepared, this Mexican adult fairy tale is garnished with mystery and wonder.

Given the source material, the film is as good as respectful adaptation could make it: a high-class soap opera, compulsively watchable despite a quality of insight eventually exposed as trite and dubious in the extreme. [26 Sep 1980, p.F1]

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

It’s just this impressive amalgamation of realism and stylization that allows “Across the Spider-Verse” to transcend its narrative shortcomings: Even at its most obscure or muddled, it’s never less than a pleasure to watch.

As Juliet, Winslet is a bright-eyed ball of fire, lighting up every scene she’s in. She’s offset perfectly by Lynskey, whose quietly smoldering Pauline completes the delicate, dangerous partnership.

The heart of Million Dollar Baby lies in the core relationships among Frankie, Maggie and Scrap, friendships so pure, so genuine, so authentic that it takes actors of Eastwood's, Swank's and Freeman's caliber to sell them in this otherwise cynical world.

In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.

It’s slightly fussy, in-your-face filmmaking, but it’s viscerally effective.

The feature debut of writer-director Jennifer Kent is not just genuinely, deeply scary, but also a beautifully told tale of a mother and son, enriched with layers of contradiction and ambiguity.

The movie is really almost tasteful considering [Cronenberg’s] stomach-churning capacities. He always does it for a higher purpose, though, which is why his films sometimes win wider audiences. This one probably won't cross over, because it's too queasy. [23 Sept 1988]

With a firm grasp on the duality implicit in its title, Little Men is a story that’s neither tragic nor triumphal in the way it resolves itself, but rather one that’s sadly, even satisfyingly true.

Arrives as the perfect midsummer movie, a comedy about a flawed-but-functional family that, like "Toy Story 3," captures the drama of growth and separation in all its exhilaration and heartache.

Cuts a path directly to the heart.

He (Herzog) emerged with a breathtaking tour of art that, in its formal sophistication, dynamism and rhythmic lines, looks as bold and new as Cezanne's work must have looked in the 1860s.

Director Howard Hawks’s movie is a film noir touchstone, and features one of Bogart’s best good-man-in-a-tough-spot performances, alongside the irresistible Lauren Bacall.

It's his best work by far.

If de Wit’s idea of story is sometimes gratingly simplistic and sentimental, there’s no denying its primal classicism, or the seductive pull of sound and image at their most pure and unfussy.

Hope and Glory is so enjoyable you want it to be a 16-part mini-series. When it's over, you sit staring at the credits, as you would the last page of a good book, wishing for another chapter.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

Stagnation, collapse, heartlessness — whether on an individual level or a national one — are the true subjects of Zvyagintsev’s film. Its message isn’t subtle, but it is delivered with deadly, haunting finality.

In her latest film, Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

What's on display here is '30s-style light comic acting at its wittiest and most effervescent. [14 Apr 1988, p.C7]

In the vein of such recent classics as "The Lives of Others" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," Christian Petzold's Barbara re-visits the quiet, everyday tragedies of the Iron Curtain era, when paranoia ran deep and for very good reasons.

Brilliantly written by Buck Henry, "To Die For" works on several levels. As a satire on the American obsession with celebrity and fame, the movie is nuanced and haunting. And for the most part, Van Sant keeps the tone chillingly light and ironic.

Nobody's Fool is so eloquently straightforward, it practically sings to the soul. A story about very real people caught in the everyday woes and worries of a small Upstate New York town, it shows the kind of character traits, tics and from-the-heart chatter you wish there was more of in the movies.

In addition to being a study in great acting, this is a study in great directing.

For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnes arrives like an exhilarating call to arms.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is sensational. This awesomely entertaining adventure spectacle, directed by Steven Spielberg from an idea hatched by executive producer George Lucas, succeeds in fusing the most playful and exciting elements of Spielberg's "Jaws" and Lucas' "Star Wars" in a fresh format. It is a transcendent blend of heroic exploits, cliffhangers and chases distilled with nostalgia and wit from the pulp thrillers, comic books and Republic serials of the World War II era. [12 June 1981, p.E1]

Even at its most despairing, the film never gives up a sense of hope.

Works best when it concentrates on O'Grady and the ever-rippling effect of his transgressions. Viewers may not remember the victims whose stories practically pierce the heart, but they're unlikely to forget O'Grady's deceptively innocent face.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

It's hard to remember a recent love story -- maybe "Moonstruck" -- that's as involving as this one. This is not to suggest that the two movies are in the same league, but this is a teen movie that transcends its teen limitations.

[Director Paolo Sorrentino] collects scenes of superficial extravagance and eccentricity, then finds the deeper yearnings they conceal.

The nearest thing to pandemonium ever seen on film and every minute of it is sublime. [27 Aug 1987, p.D7]

The film is a sobering reminder that the consequences of limiting access to safe medical care aren’t just theoretical but existential.

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a quietly astonishing directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter,” a crafty treatise on maternal ambivalence that delivers an unsettling emotional wallop.

It’s a movie that not only puts human imperfections and incongruities on display, but also revels in them.

This captivating, expertly machined political thriller jumps through every hoop the naysayer can set up: It's serious and substantive, an ingeniously written and executed drama fashioned from a fascinating, little-known chapter of recent history.

Assayas's actors are so fascinating that I wished at times he had given the house less screen time and let his performers explore their characters more freely.

Sinfully watchable ensemble movie.

A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.

[Huston] brings a vital conviction to her scenes; they're scorchingly immediate, and her ability to get in sync with what Lily's feeling is what gives the movie weight. She may be the best we have.

A movie of technical skill and rare depth of intellect and feeling.

By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

For all the When Irish Eyes Are Smiling's and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing's filling the soundtrack, Voices never engages more than your eyes and ears. It leaves you out in the cold and vaguely wondering, Is the entire British nation depressed?

There's a good chance you're going to enjoy Aladdin more than the children.

The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why.

This Is England, set in the social dystopia of Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain, gives us something far more humane and complex than a culturally specific memoir about Doc Martens shoes, reggae music and mindless aggression.

City of Ghosts provides a grim reminder of what journalism should look like, and why its stakes are literally life and death.

The film, which begins with a single, gorgeously sustained eight-minute camera move, is blissfully out of touch with contemporary trends in moviemaking...surprising, both in style and narrative.

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

Ponyo isn't Hayao Miyazaki's greatest film -- that would be a tall order in a 30-year feature career that includes the Oscar-winning "Spirited Away" -- but his beautiful, quirky fable has magic other children's movies can't touch.

The gritty film is realistically inspiring and, thankfully, not overly dramatized. While the interrupters succeed on many levels, a pervasive sadness remains.

Its charms, and they are both subtle and many, emanate like perfume.

Filmed with extraordinary attention to environmental detail and revealing human interactions, American Factory is that rare documentary that’s not only compelling in its content but a profound sensory pleasure.

At once ruminative and shocking, godwardly inclined and repellently graphic, First Reformed is indisputably the finest film Schrader has directed since his sensitive adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel “Affliction.”

As charming as Baby Driver strives to be, the appeal starts to curdle once Wright makes his fetishistic aims clear.

All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.

As absorbing and illuminating as Sabaya is — and as courageous as it is as an act of filmmaking — the viewer can’t escape the fact that it’s men who have taken these women hostage, men who are rescuing them and men to whom they are returning, as long as they obey their conditions and patriarchal codes.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

Directed with rigor and sensitivity by Jason Osder, this is the kind of nonfiction film that proves how powerful simple storytelling and a compelling through line can be.

It's depressing enough to watch this family's struggles with life. But their pain really hits home when you think that the pants you might be wearing could have contributed to it.

Hansen-Love’s semi-autobiographical script provides heart-wrenching glimpses of the empathetic academic within.

The Double Life of Veronique is a mesmerizing poetic work composed in an eerie minor key. Its effect on the viewer is subtle but very real. The film takes us completely into its world, and in doing so, it leaves us with the impression that our own world, once we return to it, is far richer and portentous than we had imagined.

Because it's one of the most beautiful films ever. Because it's a work of art on the order of a poem by Yeats or a painting by Rothko.

Here, [Park] takes a 1997 Donald E. Westlake novel, “The Ax,” and applies it to his home country with malice aforethought. The result is an entertainment that draws blood.

A spirited attempt at modern film noir, and huge parts of it are enjoyable.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

It's a cult movie in search of a cult. It'll probably find one. It certainly looks and feels like no other movie ever made.

The yarn that Lowery spins is rich with incident, but ultimately simple. Its enjoyment lies less in the story, but in the marvelous mystification of its telling.

The First Wave feels simultaneously hard to watch and vital, tragic and uplifting, like a backward glimpse over our shoulder at a period of conflict and struggle — in more ways than one — that we’re not quite done living through yet.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

With its heartening final note of hope and renewal, Deathly Hallows -- Part 2 provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all.

Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful.

If the conceit feels obvious and strained, it still gives Farhadi and his actors ample room to explore the ambiguities of commitment, ethics and revenge in a society where mistrust in public servants runs deep.

A humanistic gem of a movie, with unforgettable performances from Linney and Ruffalo.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

Like all great movies, Get Out faithfully obeys the conventions of its genre — in this case horror films shot through with brutal wit and sharp-eyed allegory — while getting at profound psychic and political realities. The shocks and the laughs are thoroughly entertaining, but it’s the truth of Get Out that’s so real.

It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.

Spielberg and Kaminski have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration for decades, but their work on West Side Story brings the partnership to breathtakingly poetic expressive heights.

Enchants on every level: story, voice work, drawing and music.

[A] sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary.

Oropelled by memorable performances by mostly unknown actors. The most famous of the ensemble, Hanna Schygulla, delivers a by turns serene and shattering performance as a mother struggling with loss, conscience and the first glimmers of unexpected connection. She's only one essential and unforgettable part of a flawless whole.

Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light.

It’s a watchable tale, yet it’s also hard to know just how much truth there is in the presentation of the Wayuu, whose presence in the film at times seems more picturesque than plausible.

Sensitive performances by the four main players suit the tone, which is naturalistic and even earthy — most of the characters are shown going to the bathroom — yet ultimately poignant.

A beguiling little film that, with deceptive restraint and forthrightness, opens up worlds of roiling, contradictory emotions.

While the title alone may send people into a tizzy, this actually isn't a movie about which side is right or wrong.

“Ash” may not hit the dizzying heights of “Sin” but, compared with “Mountain,” it’s a far more consistent and satisfying ride.

An engrossing chronicle.

Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.

Thanks to Burnham’s exuberant, alert writing and Fisher’s masterful command of vulnerability, anxiety, resilience and steadfast self-belief, Kayla emerges as an icon of her own — just by being herself.

Odd, complex and charming.

Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.

Girlhood is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.

At the most fundamental level, the real Chet Baker is a kind of nowhere man. He's too insubstantial for Weber to levitate him into greatness. This fact is the source of the film's dramatic tension, and Weber, to his credit, seems to have realized it.

Along with such colleagues as Abbas Kiarostami and Moshen Makhmalbaf, Panahi has perfected the art of realist filmmaking,

Mona Lisa is consistently undercut by sentiment, whether it's the cute routines between George and his best friend, a mechanic and junkman, or the "heartwarming" stuff between George and his estranged daughter. In the end, "Mona Lisa" is another movie about the lovable little people; the movie is mushy where it should be monstrous. [16 July 1986, p.D1]

Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!

All of the actors in Turtles Can Fly are nonprofessionals, and all bring electrifying authenticity and presence to their roles.

Crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence. Those brawls feel a bit rote, but what's different here is a newfound playful humor.

A delirious piece of pop ephemera.

Though lacking in any particular narrative surprise, the film nevertheless takes the viewer completely by surprise several times.

In truth, the story is practically beside the point with all the spectacular visuals. The steampunk aesthetic might be overdone, but there’s still a lot here worth marveling at.

As a stylistic and narrative throwback, Alfredson's adamantly un-thrilling procedural reminds viewers of an era when viewers allowed themselves to be entertained by a good yarn about a few colorful or at least colorlessly compelling characters.

The Wild Robot has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same.

Nearly every scene rings with its own ragged truth, which becomes increasingly painful as Dan's addiction becomes more unmanageable and as he refuses to confront the untenable politics of his own behavior.

A thoroughly enjoyable entertainment that should play just about everybody's strings right. Kloves proves to be quite a plucker.

A well-orchestrated nightmare that keeps you on edge until the very end.

It is a movie about the real challenge of heroism.

What gives About Schmidt its ultimate boost, what pushes it into the stirring heavens is Nicholson, who produces the most understated -– and one of the most powerful –- performances of his career.

It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

Director Demme is smart and sensitive enough to sit back and listen to the music without attention-getting intrusions. The tunes are subtly compelling.

This is a big movie, about big emotions and ideas, which Rees evokes and explores through an extraordinarily rich tapestry of atmosphere, physical setting, visual detail and sensitive, subtle performances.

The narrative moves toward its foregone conclusion with the low energy of a slow-moving locomotive on train tracks leading to a broken bridge.

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

The film by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov is a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable.

The film's not only funny and weird, it's oddly poignant. I miss Hedwig already.

An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.