The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.

It looked like Ben Stiller was one of the showbiz meteorites who was moving so fast he would soon have no worlds left to conquer.

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don’t think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn’t genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women.

André Bazin wrote that art emerged from our desire to counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings. But in “Boyhood,” Mr. Linklater's masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn't fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.

Moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it’s Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger’s face into a life.

Ben Stiller isn't funny - honest. Ben Stiller is very funny, and smart, and cute, too, in a neurotic, New York kind of way.

The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.