Movie Reviews

In dramatizing a real-life hostage crisis from 1977, Gus Van Sant teases out enticing themes that remain undeveloped.

Our critics rank their favorite movies of the year.

The first feature by the Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus, featuring nonprofessional actors in natural settings, explores and expands modern traditions of political cinema.

The latest reanimation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is a labyrinthine tour of a filmmaker’s career-long obsessions.

This action drama, set in 1970 and starring Josh O’Connor, brings political conflict and existential comedy into the finely observed details of crime and escape.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s spectacular, exquisitely detailed fantasy of revolution and resistance, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, looks to history for visions of hope.

This year’s Revivals section spotlights a hidden classic by a major modern filmmaker whose new movie is equally great.

Despite Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson’s taut performance, Benny Safdie’s bio-pic about the mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr proves distanced and passionless.

This year’s edition teems with artistically ambitious movies that confront politics and mores in a wide variety of formats, from historical spectacles to intimate confessions.

Mike Figgis’s documentary reveals the risky freedom of Coppola’s approach to his self-financed political fantasy.

Ari Aster’s drama, set in 2020, about conflict between a New Mexico town’s sheriff and its mayor, rips plotlines from the headlines and leaves them in shreds.

Darren Aronofsky brings philosophical heft to his violent and frantic neo-noir, starring Austin Butler as a bartender trapped in a vortex of danger.

In Ron Howard’s historical potboiler, an off-the-grid social experiment veers clumsily—but sometimes compellingly—into “Lord of the Flies” terrain.

The first year of the magazine’s movie writing included proto-auteurist criticism, gossip, and a large dose of Charlie Chaplin.

Ethan Coen, working with his wife, Tricia Cooke, endows this neo-noir comedy, about a lesbian detective, with dazzle but little more.

In Julia Loktev’s epic documentary, filmed before, during, and after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, several courageous Moscow reporters see their worst fears realized.

Decades after “28 Days Later,” the director Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Alex Garland return to—and advance—a frighteningly effective franchise.

Ana de Armas energizes this turbulent but thinned-out spinoff from the Keanu Reeves martial-arts franchise.

The band Pavement, big in the nineties and bigger in memory, returns to help celebrate themselves wryly in Alex Ross Perry’s loving, metafictional rock-bio-pic parody.

In Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 crowd-pleaser, two gay couples strike a bargain that turns both Faustian and farcical.