DmitryPortnoy

Afire is the most suspenseful romantic comedy I've seen in a long time: you think you know how it's all supposed to turn out, but the more the story develops, the more impossible a happy ending seems. Sexy, funny, and idyllic like an undiscovered Shakespeare play or Mozart opera; like those, it's also deadly serious. The performances are pure magic and completely real.

James Gunn is not a great genius like, say, George Lucas, the director of Star Wars, but he is a much better entertainer than George Lucas, the director of Phantom Menace. Judging by this movie, he would have made Jar Jar cool. Fast, fun, and charming, "Guardians of the Galaxy" revives the pleasures of 70's and 80's blockbusters that had been buried in a quagmire CG in the leaden coffins of dull writing. Unlike in "Dawn of the Apes," the live actors are just as good as the animated ones (and all are awesome.) Vividly colored, packed with Easter eggs (scandalous, delicious visual quotes from all those 70s and 80s movies), overflowing with jokes, and trickling with two or three tears, it should also give a shot in the arm to Marvel, whose post-"Avengers" features have felt a tad pretentious and morose. James Gunn can fix that. (Disney should also give him a Star Wars or two to keep him busy.) He's not the old Lucas. He is the new Howard Hawks.

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is a masterly work of exquisite beauty, rigorous discipline, and supreme confidence. The Coens have purged the violence of "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing," and "No Country for Old Men," the jokiness of "Raising Arizona," the grotesquery of "Barton Fink," the college-dorm philosophizing of "The Big Lebowski" and "A Serious Man," the cornball regionalism of "Fargo" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou"--in short, all of their trademarks as filmmakers--and the result? With all those crutches kicked away, this movie levitates in mid-air, as perfect as a pearl, priceless, graspable, mysterious, layered, aglow. It demands to be seen in a theater, in the dark, with an audience that erupts in laughter, then lapses in rapt silence. With Woody Allen's "Manhattan," and William Friedkin's "The French Connection," it is also that rare cinematic portrait of New York worthy of its subject.