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Lincoln (2012)
Steven Spielberg’s masterful Lincoln might more accurately have been called The 13th Amendment — and while the choice of the more marketable title is easy to understand, the more crucial decision to limit the scope of the film to the last few months of Lincoln’s life, and to focus less on Lincoln himself than on the political machinations of bringing about his most enduring legal legacy, must have been harder to make.
12 Years a Slave (2013)
What if I were to tell you that there has never until now been a major historical motion picture about the slave experience in America? Could that possibly be true?
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Wait, where did this movie come from? Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is so not the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes I expected or was prepared for.
Life for Life: Maximilian Kolbe, martyr of Auschwitz (1991)
Two great mysteries hover over the cardinal moment in St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life, a quiet exchange of words with the deputy camp commander at Auschwitz-Birkenau heard by few and lasting probably less than a minute.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
(Review by Jimmy Akin) Khan stood above the crowd of crass, original series Klingon captains, Star Fleet officers gone bad, and assorted alien malefactors. He was something different. Strong. Mysterious. Charismatic.
The Overnighters (2014)
Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters is an existentially probing documentary with more layers than a twisty Hollywood thriller, at turns inspiring, challenging, sobering and finally devastating.
Watership Down (1978)
Newly remastered for Blu-ray and DVD, the classic animated adaptation of Richard Adams’ beloved tale is available from Criterion.
Song of the Sea (2014)
Like Miyazaki, Tomm Moore isn’t afraid to take the time to breathe deeply, savor moments of silence and beauty, and open the door to wonder and mystery.
Two Days, One Night (2014)
It is about self-interest and empathy, practical necessities and moral choices. It’s about the importance of work and the ruthlessness of economics based purely on self-interest and competition. I can think of no film that more persuasively or powerfully illustrates in human terms what popes from Leo XIII to Francis have been talking about for over a century regarding the dangers of pure capitalism unrestrained by moral concerns.
Timbuktu (2015)
A haunting scene in Timbuktu depicts two teams of young athletes running back and forth on a field engaged in offensive and defensive patterns familiar the world over: kicking, dribbling, passing, blocking. All that is missing is a ball and goal markers.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Building on the momentum of its predecessor, McQuarry whips up a similar blend of brilliantly constructed set pieces, spectacular stunts, humor, exotic locations and — well, that’s about it, really. What more do you need?
The Young Messiah (2016)
The Young Messiah is an impressive achievement of Christian imagination, a work that does one of the noblest things a Bible movie, or any literary adaptation, can do: It brings persuasive emotional and psychological depth to characters and situations that were either hidden or else so familiar we may have trouble seeing them at all.
Brooklyn (2015)
Brooklyn is what seems like an increasingly rare gift: a film about the drama and discovery of an ordinary human life: about love and loss, sorrow and self-discovery, in a story that for once is not overshadowed by some deep injustice or extraordinary human conflict.
Silence (2016)
When 17th-century Japanese authorities in the time of the Tokugawa shogunate found it necessary to send the colonial powers of Europe packing and their European Jesus with them, they didn’t just shatter the missionaries’ bodies. They shattered their narrative.
Paterson (2016)
For the second year in a row, my favorite film is a winning love story named for an urban area more or less in my backyard.
Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk is the first film Christopher Nolan has made that feels bigger than the director’s preoccupations and obsessions.
The Unknown Girl (2017)
Jenny will do a lot of listening in the drama that follows. First, though, will come a moment when she does not listen — the only time in the film she ignores a bid for her attention, but that one time hangs over the rest of the film.
Paddington 2 (2018)
I don’t want to review Paddington 2: I want to live in it, and invite you to live in it with me.
![Mudbound [video]](/uploads/articles/mudbound.jpeg)
Mudbound [video] (2017)
The more firmly rooted in a sense of time and place a film is, the more revelatory it often is of the present.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Here, at last, is the Spidey that family audiences need and the Spidey they deserve — and that’s just two of them!
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