Steve Macfarlane

Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.

Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.

The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.

The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema.

By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.

Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.

The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.

Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship.

The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.

Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.

Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.

Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.

The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.

The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody.

The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me.

When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.

Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.

The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.

As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.

This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.

Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.

What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.

Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.

Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.

The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.

The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.

The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.

It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.