This is not really riveting material if you didn't go to high school with these boys, and perhaps not even if you did. Played by Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon and Timothy Daly, they seem fundamentally decent, but hopelessly trapped in the limits of the time and place. That grubby atmosphere, looked upon as endearing, is the only thing the film has to offer, and while it's amusing at first, one quickly gets the idea. [5 March 1982, p.11]

Morrison, at 88, is as clear-eyed and sharp as ever. What’s most surprising about her interviews is not her candor, but her humor, revealed, as she speaks, in a way that makes you want to lean closer. (Her gifts as a storyteller are not just on the page.)

After years of dabbling, lyrically and literally, Taylor Swift has come for American cinema, and we can only wait for her next move.

The film honors Hujar not by impersonating him, but by doing exactly what he did in a different medium: demanding we look long and hard at the world.

Writer-director David O. Russell's exhilarating follow-up to "Spanking the Monkey," is even wilder, giddier and more unpredictable than that irreverent debut.

The trouble with this art movie is that it's more a movie than it's art.

The Second Mother feels lovingly handcrafted. All the elements of the story fit impeccably together for a humorous and occasionally wrenching examination of relationships.

A shattering vérité portrait of the disintegration of Iraqi society in the period immediately following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country, this urgent, of-the-moment film doesn’t explain the ensuing chaos as much as plunge viewers into it firsthand, offering a terrifying, ultimately moving portrait of the effects of war, both physical and psychic.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

As Kiefer’s monumental art decays, “Anselm” can endure as his memorial.

A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, “Hit Man” should be seen with a crowd grooving on its devilish comic energy, its off-the-charts sexual chemistry and the star-making turn at its center.

Made without stars or much of a budget but with a lot of heart and good vibes, it’s an exemplary and moving independent film.

Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn.

While its themes of revenge, mutual resentment and grim fatalism offer little hope for a ready solutions, the movie itself testifies to the power of creative collaboration in finding common ground.

Although Ralston's act of desperation is admittedly difficult to watch, viewers who might avoid the film out of squeamishness would be depriving themselves of one of the year's most exhilarating cinematic experiences.

A crafty, swift, subtly stylish thriller.

It's enough to make you laugh if you didn't feel like crying.

Riotsville, USA is as much a meditation as it is a history lesson.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

Improbably, The End of the Tour doesn’t just sustain the audience’s interest in Wallace and Lipsky’s exchanges, arguments and moments of bonding, but invites us to care deeply about the men.

It's a story of jaw-dropping chutzpah, grim, mostly hindsight-based humor and more stomach-churning drama than you could find in 10 screenplays.

Speaking of jail, "Shawshank"-the-movie seems to last about half a life sentence. The story, chiefly about the 20-year friendship between Freeman and Robbins, becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.

It’s tempting to call the semi-autobiographical film — inspired by both the death of Noé’s mother and his own recovery from a brain hemorrhage (and subsequent sobriety) — Noé’s most personal movie. But what makes Vortex stand out is its cruel universality.

That makes Maiden not just a ripping yarn but a meaningful one. Like “RBG” last year, it’s a story that reminds women — and men — not only how far we’ve come in one generation but how far we’ve yet to go.

War for the Planet of the Apes may have the body of an action film, but it has the soul of an art-house drama and the brains of a political thriller.

Documentary makers struggle for this effect -- a feeling for the land that is both grand and unsentimental. The makers of Duma, a fable fit for children, have found it.

Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.

You Won’t Be Alone can be ghoulish at times, but also gorgeous, in the swooning manner of a Terrence Malick film: all grass and leaves and sky and water, captured by tumbling camerawork that evokes the wide-eyed wonder of someone experiencing the world for the first time.

Short Term 12 is that rare movie gutsy enough to tell the truth about love: that it’s not a poetic longing or a magical-thinking happy ending, but a skill. And, the film suggests, we all have the capacity to learn it.

Weaned on the homilies of "Happy Days" and the hominy grits of Mayberry, Ron Howard brings sitcom aphorisms to bear on the sticky-fingered realities of the beamish Parenthood.

Residue is a delicately layered depiction of the dance between alienation and belonging. In this moving portrait, it’s a dance is defined by struggle, grief and undiminished grace.

A sobering reflection on our culture's attitude toward violence.

The total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that's something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.

With its multiple intersecting narratives, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s debut feature takes an almost novelistic approach to its central theme: the repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society.

A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.

At its heart, it's about the communities we forge - real and imagined - to save our own lives.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

Unfortunately, the movie’s second act tends to drag, getting bogged down by uninspired twists, while the first flies by with witty dialogue and a steady stream of novel details.

This is a captivating experience.

His dazzlingly brilliant "Nightmare" -- directed by Henry Selick -- is more of a postmodern fractured fable, one he scribbled as a poem-script 10 years ago when he and Selick were working as Disney animators...This is a modern classic that enriches the Christmas tradition by turning it on its head and spinning it like a bob.

Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's brilliantly entertaining documentary look into the New York subculture of drag queens and transsexuals, is a rapturous, desperate ode to self-invention.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

This story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too.

Mysteries still surround many aspects of bird migration. This film unravels exactly none of them. Rather, in some of the most remarkable footage you'll ever see, the film lets you look over the shoulders of migrating birds.

Rebels of the Neon God rarely cracks a smile, but it’s as droll as it is disaffected.

A movie for almost everyone, from boomer parents (who remember their teens and twenties) to their teenage kids (who can't wait to get started with same). And if there's anyone who can bring so many into the same mosh pit, it's Black, who so occupies the role you can't believe he's acting.

An Oscar nominee for best international feature, Denmark’s harrowing, slow-boil thriller “The Girl With the Needle” has been described by some as a horror film. And from the hallucinatory opening montage of distorted, leering faces, this black-and-white drama promises to be the stuff of nightmares.

This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion.

As a celebration of the physical expressiveness and visual storytelling of silent cinema, A Quiet Place speaks volumes without a word being uttered.

Only the third feature from writer and co-director Ilker Catak, who won a student academy award in 2015 for his film school project “Fidelity,” “Teachers’ Lounge” is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias.

Although we miss some of the finer details that made Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 book so meaningful, we're moved by the movie's themes of cultural displacement and the power of chance.

The writing is so musical, so attuned to human frailty and aspiration, that I defy anyone to watch the movie without smiling — with amusement one minute, rueful recognition the next, but probably always with some measure of simple, undiluted delight.

Johnny’s tentative dip into family life artfully captures the tedium, terror and confounding ecstasy of parenthood, but it more eloquently conveys the pain and discovery involved in simply trying to do one’s best.

McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art.

Miyazaki, like an evil sorcerer, has plucked the heart out of Jones's story and left it there to die.

Thanks to Schlesinger's exacting direction and Malcolm Bradbury's witty, restrained script, these characters are kept more amusing than horribly pitiable.

To refuse to call A Hijacking a thriller is not to say it isn’t thrilling, in a dryly cerebral way. Writer-director Tobias Lindholm has a point to make, and he makes it pungently.

Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.

Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

Bleak and post-industrial, this is no easy film to watch. It hasn't a conventional image of beauty anywhere within its grim 93 minutes, being shot in harsh natural light that somehow plays up the grime and chill of back-alley life. But by the end, it's suffused with something utterly rare: moral beauty. [27 June 1997, p.D6]

This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

The fun here — and there is a lot of it — is to be had simply in allowing an ensemble of game, generous-spirited actors to give their all in service to the fine art of misdirection and mayhem.

The movie captures the raw excitement and heartbreak of adolescence so completely that it manages to replace a seen-it-all jaded heart with the butterflies that accompany fresh experiences.

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

In the basest of terms, a horror flick. But it's also a spectacularly moving and elegant movie, and to dismiss it into genre-hood, to mentally stuff it into the horror pigeonhole, is to overlook a remarkable film.

Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.

The aim is oddball romantic comedy, with himself and Mia Farrow embodying a funny-grotesque mismatch; unfortunately, the obligatory demonstration of attraction and compatibility between these characters escapes Allen; the affair degenerates into a mawkish botch. [27 Jan 1984, p.D1]

Although it's tempting to call Gibney's documentary "the one Iraq film you MUST see this season!!!" (which, by the way, it is), it's not just about Iraq. It's about torture as policy.

Nuts!”is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.

It's a quirky film -- extremely profane and violent -- a respite from reverential sigh-fi. It's like visiting the bus depot late at night, and finding you kind of like it. [14 Sept 1984]

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Like the character at the heart of Pig — who is not, as it turns out, a pig at all, even metaphorically — it is smoldering and gentle.

As a sly chamber piece, it re­assures and unsettles in equal, exquisitely calibrated measure.

In this unsparing but deeply compassionate film, viewers get a chance to see the fatigue, stress and bewilderment of modern life for what they are: not the regrettable side effects of market-driven progress, but the results of cynicism and greed, and the unfathomable human cost of wanting what we want, right now.

Propelled by an ingenious script by Aaron Sorkin, given vibrance and buoyancy by director Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs is a galvanizing viewing experience.

Marley, the new documentary about reggae icon Bob Marley opens on April 20 - of course. That date - often referred to as 420 - has been, since the 1970s, a time for people to gather to consume or celebrate pot. It has become an unofficial marijuana holiday, and Bob Marley has become the unofficial saint of marijuana.

Has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.

Tells a tale of fortitude that comes not from muscle but from the ineffable, bungee-like sinew that is the human spirit.

Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.

Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.

It’s a small film made larger by Ahmed’s ability to take something so interior — hearing loss — and make it so visible, so palpable.

Embrace of the Serpent has some of the most vivid images captured on film in recent memory, and also some of the most haunting.

Da 5 Bloods is most invigorating when Lee is most sharply polemical, whether it’s during that vibrant prologue, or when he stops to drop some knowledge in interstitial flashes of history, wisdom and exuberant wit.

A lyrical, visually stunning tone poem to loss, lies, reclamation and making peace with the past, The Last Black Man in San Francisco virtually defies conventional description. To see it is to believe it, even when it doesn’t strictly make sense.

Is there anything new here? Honestly, not really. The content is the same, the plot the familiar litany of ordeals leavened by soapy interludes. But the fight that develops is taut, tough and extremely bitter; it's never showy in the grinding, big-movie Spielbergian way, but a portrait of the war's daily interface with hell in a very small space, as the four stand against a much larger unit.

Remains highly watchable throughout, for its atmosphere and the actors.

In its own messy, slightly ungovernable way, this digressive bagatelle feels looser than some of Anderson’s most tightly controlled mis-en-scenes. But the story, for all its busyness, is negligible. The script feels less like an organic whole than an effort to keep building up a scrawny central premise until it felt like a movie.

Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.

Fascinating and transgressive love story.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

You know a filmmaker is in supreme command of her medium when what she creates feels less like a movie than a candid glimpse of ongoing lives that will continue to play out long after the lights have come on.

The movie has some beautifully observed moments and a generous spirit, but in the end, it's undone by its own sweetness and charm....It's just not distinctive enough to sustain your interest. A lot of the movie is routine coming-of-age stuff.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

Despite a lull here and a lapse there, this superproduction turns out to be prodigiously inventive and enjoyable, doubly blessed by sophisticated illusionists behind the cameras and a brilliant new stellar personality in front of the cameras -- Christopher Reeve.

Neither federally admonishing nor irresponsibly romantic, Cowboy stays high without being highhanded.

Attention is duly paid in this tender and touching film; the strangest thing about Love Is Strange is how completely un-strange it is, from its familiar family dynamics to its exquisite honesty and compassion.

This mesmerizingly beautiful drama ponders themes of duty, patience, isolation and compassion.

Wiseman’s voracious curiosity and evenhanded approach to his subject ensures that viewers will have a wide range of responses to the material he has collected.

Late Marriage is a closely observed, somewhat funny, ultimately very sad movie.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

It offers a special "something" for everyone who ever appreciated the Quiet Beatle's musical gifts and spiritual explorations.

Richard Linklater's satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It's practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era.

Combines novelistic detail with cinematic sweep.

Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.

Captain Phillips is such an impressive dramatic achievement that it comes as a shock when it gets even better, during a devastating final scene in which Hanks single-handedly dismantles Hollywood notions of macho heroism in one shattering, virtually wordless sequence.

The movie takes place in Iran, yet it’s really situated in the crack of daylight that separates truth from a lie. It’s a tight squeeze, Farhadi seems to say, and one whose pinch this tragedy of the everyday makes us feel, acutely.

Enormously entertaining.

As arresting and elaborate as the images are in The Northman, there are just as many sequences that revert strictly to pulpy, B-movie type.

Watching John Woo's The Killer may be like eating popcorn, but it's not just any old brand; it's escape-velocity popcorn, popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel. Its story is a collision of exuberant pulp, samurai mythology and modern, urban noir.

This is not a film about Neruda’s life or controversial death. This is a film for folks who are unfamiliar with the writing of Neruda, or maybe even skeptical about poetry in general. They may not cherish every word of the poet’s most heartbreaking lines, but they’ll understand the man who wrote them a little better those who already do.

The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

Writer-director Alain Guiraudie takes an all-natural approach to his material, and not just because most of the men spend the movie in the buff. He takes long, lingering shots, never rushes a scene and uses no score, just organic sounds.

Its mixture of wisdom and whimsy -- exemplified by the movie's unnamed and occasionally cheeky narrator -- makes this Australian movie feel as timeless as it is timely. And instead of feeling dutifully cultural as we immerse ourselves in this story, we're genuinely intrigued, touched and even amused.

As played by the captivating Mariana Loyola, Lucy is a life force, cut from similar cloth as the perky schoolteacher of Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky": unsinkable, unswervable and more than a little irreverent.

Every scene of calm, potentially, is trip-wired for an explosion. But for all its chilling tension and horrific imagery, Sicario is also a beautiful movie.

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

Combines the derring-do of classic adventure tales with far more serious issues of moral agency. And it serves as a haunting reminder to seek joy and beauty, even in the depths of despair.

Another Year allows viewers to occupy both psychic spaces, nesting into the warm comforts of a long-lived-in home and then, on a dime, seeing it through the searching eyes of the marginalized figures that, over the course of 11 films, Leigh has so often championed.

Blade Runner 2049, the superb new sequel by Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), doesn’t just honor that legacy, but, arguably, surpasses it, with a smart, grimly lyrical script (by Fancher and Michael Green of the top-notch “Logan”); bleakly beautiful cinematography (by Roger Deakins); and an even deeper dive into questions of the soul.

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.

Experimenter’s most striking quality is the way it encourages us to think deeply, from the first frame to the last, even if it’s just to consider what on Earth an elephant is doing on screen.

Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.

A cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema's premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for -- nor insight into -- the human condition.

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.

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

It's more than a detailed account of one man's petty vindictiveness in a bygone era. It's about how our hatred can consume us so deeply that we lose sight of everything.

At its core, Mass exerts the power of ritual at its most reflective and galvanizing, reveling in human connection at its most arduous, persistent and sublime.

Fresh is an electrifying, sobering movie, and with it, Yakin announces himself as perhaps the most gifted newcomer of the decade.

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.

Not only gives us a superb new cast of believable characters, it transcends its own genre. Only superficially a teen comedy, the movie redounds with postmodern -- but emotionally genuine -- gravitas.

Barry Sonnenfeld's irresistibly charming lampoon of Hollywood.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.

After Love, the feature-length debut from British writer-director Aleem Khan, is a quietly compelling exploration of identity, grief and the secrets loved ones take to the grave.

Dhont tells a familiar story in what feels like a fresh and urgently new way, with sensitivity, sadness and promising glimmers of hope.

Truman avoids preachiness as scrupulously as it evades certainty.

Jamal Khashoggi was a complex, even contradictory human being, and his death an affront to freedom and decency. Does the world need two documentaries about him, coming in rapid succession? Maybe not. But you wouldn’t go wrong by watching either one.

Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, Chocolat feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

Top Gun: Maverick showed us there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters. Godzilla Minus One is another reminder — and quite possibly the better movie of the two.

Not nearly as accomplished narratively as it is visually.

Admittedly, Top Five suffers from its share of too-convenient contrivances and clunky passages... But Top Five is also buoyantly self- sustaining, thanks in part to Rock and Dawson’s easy, convincingly seductive chemistry and some genuinely hilarious surprises.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

Savagely funny satire of the world of independent filmmaking.

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.

Bridge of Spies expands from being a smart, engrossing procedural to a carefully observed character study of Donovan, a particularly intriguing, heretofore overlooked American figure.

The story holds a potential for sap that is mostly unfulfilled thanks to Beresford's stately approach, the stars' better judgment and the protagonists' sharp wits. Admirably, Driving Miss Daisy takes the road less traveled.

As with other Aardman productions, the greatest delights derive from relishing the details of the clay figures and intricate sets, crafted by the studio’s master model builders.

The progression of the story is steadily downward, and at times the style flirts with melodrama, the mood with moroseness. But in the film’s third act, masterfully staged by filmmaker Karim Aïnouz (who co-wrote the screen adaptation with Inez Bortagaray and Murilo Hauser), it takes a giant leap, both temporally and emotionally.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go.

Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerizing pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it so steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.

No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

Dolores is a fascinating corrective to 50-plus years of American history. It’s educational, to be sure, but also exhilarating, inspiring and deeply emotional.

That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.

The result is a film that does more than impart facts, or even tell a story: It builds a world, and once we’re in it, takes us on a potent and unforgettable emotional journey.

Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, Jackie would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent.

It's uncompromisingly steamy, in a way that seems designed to make people who are uncomfortable with a physical relationship between two men even more uncomfortable.

It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.

Rather than a self-indulgent portrait of two amazing men and their amazing careers, “Turn Every Page” bristles with ego and good-humored tension.

Few films are both genuinely erotic and off-putting enough to inspire the occasional walkout. Raw succeeds at both.

R.M.N. is as gripping and scrupulously humane as Mungiu’s admirers have come to expect from an artist of supreme discipline and dramatic skill. It’s one thing to be a master of mise-en-scene; it’s all the more impressive when that talent for detail — pictorial and behavioral — results in an illumination of the world that’s both ruthless and surpassingly compassionate.

Inherent Vice unfolds so organically, so gracefully and with such humanistic grace notes that even at its most preposterous, viewers will find themselves nodding along, sharing the buzz the filmmaker has so skillfully created.

American Fiction would be an enormously entertaining and observant comedy even if it just stuck to the hilarious, if cringey, lengths to which the White establishment will go in the name of psychic safety and self-protection. But Jefferson overlays the story’s most biting wit with layers of warmth, sadness and discovery that make this movie far more than the sum of its parts.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

This Australian film by New Zealand director Jane Campion comes at you, and keeps coming at you, in peculiar, oddly enchanting bursts of detail.

The pleasures of Little Shop carry you past its dull stretches -- you enjoy its quick-witted wordplay, inventive sketch comedy and the Broadway- and Motown-influenced music (by Alan Menken). And most of all, you enjoy watching a story told through song, as the Hollywood musical, with its glitz and sass, is reborn.

No isn’t nearly as definitive or declarative as its title: It leaves viewers wondering whether they should cheer, shrug or shake their heads.

There are plenty of left turns (and the occasional dead end) here, but Riders of Justice is no waste of time. The mayhem is mixed with unexpected thoughtfulness.

Simultaneously warm and clear-eyed, “Best Worst Thing” is an unblinking look at how the sausage of theater gets made, as well as an emotional memoir.

It becomes apparent during the stuttering course of the movie itself that exploiting a nuclear power plant as an effective deathtrap in a doomsday thriller requires more than melodramatic wishful thinking. [16 March 1979, p.B1]

This is a bittersweet story, no question. But to the son's great credit, what emerges from his patient investigation is a remarkably rich, even sympathetic, portrait of the father.

Hot Fuzz deploys the same mix of genre conventions, slapstick and old-school British humor that made "Shaun of the Dead" such a dumb-but-good romp.

Like a dark-comedy sequel to the masterful German film "The Lives of Others," Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective gives viewers a penetrating glimpse of surveillance culture, in this case as it plays out in post-communist Romania.

A movie to cheer you up and on and help you feel that spring will, in fact, arrive before we are all too desiccated to enjoy it.

Breathes its own refreshing, occasionally demented, life into that time period, albeit in a pulpy, stylized cinematic language more akin to vampire-hunter cartoonishness than "Lincoln's" more classical reserve.

It’s a haunting story of love between two misfits who shouldn’t be together. In its doomed yet somehow hopeful spirit, it’s closer to the noir sensibility of “Let the Right One In” than the pop-horror of “Twilight.”

Both simplistic and overcomplicated, Us depends on some of horror’s most hackneyed cliches and gaps in logic — by now, shouldn’t all movie characters know never to go back into the house and to always stay together? — as well as a few windy speeches explaining why bizarre things keep happening. The viewer begins to wish that Peele had given his script one more pass, either to pare it down or beef it up.

This intriguing but somewhat overlong (at two hours) comedy is mostly concerned with the melancholy and frustrating aspects of gay life in Japan, where taboos remain deeply entrenched and there is next to no privacy in puritanical society.

A candid, colorful and deeply meaningful sociocultural time capsule, one that captured the black community at the height of its political energy and optimism.

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.

Closed Curtain is at times slow and constantly puzzling. It doesn’t carry the impact of some of Panahi’s more conventional films. It’s not his best movie, but the fact that he’s making a movie at all is remarkable.

While the main themes of Moana are identity and self-discovery — familiar territory, to be sure — the film manages to enliven such well-traveled latitudes with a breeze as fresh as the islands.

A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.

In the end, Shadow suffers from a kind of shallow narcissism. Yes, it’s beautiful. Sure, it’s hard to take your eyes off it, with all the slow-motion action, enhanced by an ever-present, photogenic drizzle. But in an ironic departure from the theme of the balance, it too often emphasizes style over substance.

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

With the exception of the opening scene -- whose purpose is chiefly comic -- the movie is one, extended climax. Even with flashbacks and other time jumps, it never lets up. You have to go back to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1952 "The Wages of Fear" to recall suspense this relentless.

A delicious slow-burn of a movie, the kind of coming-of-age tale that looks familiar on the surface only to reveal hidden depths of beauty and meaning.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that Skyfall will be both classic and of-the-moment.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

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.

Your Name is still highly watchable, even when this mystical Young Adult love story cloys — or confounds.

Scent is a captured memory, a living, breathing reverie rather than a narrative. It's also the birth of a great talent.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

Although The Go-Go’s works marvelously as a scrapbook that will surely delight the viewer who wants to remember the catchy songs and saucy attitudes, it’s also the first time that the band’s story has been rendered as a cultural triumph instead of a cautionary tale.

Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.

An electrifying documentary.

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

It's best appreciated by assuming something of a dream state ourselves and enjoying the giddy flow.

The film suggests that it doesn't really matter whether Harris ever gets back in uniform. He's forever carrying around a piece of unexploded ordnance in his head.

An enchanting Italian serio-comedy about the most unlikely of cinematic subjects-the origins, structure and reach of poetry.

Like the infamous “talk” that opens the film — the conversation that many black parents feel forced to have with their children about how to behave when you are stopped by the police — it is a movie that feels both essential and terribly, terribly sad.

The movie is more than an admonition for the living; it’s also an achingly bittersweet love story about caregiving.

When Hairspray is twisting and shouting and swiveling its hips, you can even dare to believe a great society is waiting in the wings.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

Not since the 1972 'Cabaret' has there been a movie musical this stirring, intelligent and exciting.

In the hands of director Julie Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit.

It’s a masterful example of genre filmmaking’s ability to transcend its limitations, leaving a viewer not just frightened, but also changed.

By turns silly and scathing, Glass Onion once again demonstrates Johnson’s gift for critiquing culture in the name of good fun — or, perhaps more precisely, having fun by critiquing culture.

For all its savagery and hopelessness, Starred Up manages to be sympathetic, not only because of O’Connell’s galvanizing turn, but also Asser and director David Mackenzie’s unwavering commitment to portraying his character with as much compassion as brutal honesty.

Sheer pleasure to watch, full of rich visuals and felicitous comic turns.

This handsomely staged production plays like a soothingly thoughtful balm.

The good news isn’t just that Dead Reckoning lives up to its star’s notoriously high standards; it’s that it isn’t even over yet.

That A War both delivers the results one might wish for and denies a sense of closure is not a failing but its chief virtue.

A vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

One heck of a tale of deliciously unladylike payback.

Strangely moving film.

This movie’s pleasures are less about its villains and more about the interplay between Pegg and Frost.

It’s rare that a documentary has the ability to take the kind of long view of events that establishes context and consequence.

Harbor no illusions about Lost Illusions. It’s no stuffy costume drama. Just close your eyes and imagine its characters in modern dress, toiling away in digital publishing, and its wild delusions and deceptions could be happening right now.

By focusing on the details of his characters’ lives, Weinstein finds common ground on both sides of the religious divide.

A sci-fi-fueled indictment of man's inhumanity to man -- and the non-human -- District 9 is all horribly familiar, and transfixing.

A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.

Purely visual cinema was accomplished successfully in "Days of Heaven," where there is no story line to speak of, but people and nature are made memorably vivid through the moving picture.Picnic at Hanging Rock is not up to that level visually, because it occasionally slips into the hair-color advertisement school of slow-motion beauty. But even the attempt is marred: Looking for game clues would spoil any painting, but having to look and not being able to find them is worse. [16 March 1979, p.18]

The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.

A movie as intensely subjective as Woman at War had better have an actress deserving of unwavering attention, and Erlingsson has found her in Geirharosdottir, who proves to be supremely at ease with both the physical demands of the film and its trickier internal journeys (not to mention a neat bit of visual legerdemain).

Overheated and recklessly violent.

A fun, engaging story that’s more about obsessive drive than actual driving.

To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty.

The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.

Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.

If the movie’s universal themes don’t impress, its specific details do.

Elaine Stritch’s strength, along with the film’s, comes from her honesty. She is herself, even when — maybe especially when — she knows she’s being watched.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim's scathing, moving critique of American public education, makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.