Amy Nicholson

At Lonergan's best, he turns the sounds of Patrick's home into its own claustrophobic, percussive sympathy.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?

This cut sutures the two halves together while sustaining its unusual momentum. It’s a film so flush with ambition that it rarely crescendos; it can afford to chop sequences, songs, even genres, down to a string of snippets. The exhausting, invigorating totality of the thing sets its own tone.

The film wants to prove that hope isn’t fools gold. And when it does, Rocks glows.

For all the distractions and gags, Inside Out argues a more complex idea: that sometimes, Sadness deserves to steer, and that as we age, our happy memories deepen when tinted a wistful blue.

If only the script measured up to the craft. La La Land gives us no reason to root for Mia and Seb’s romance, except for its blithe assurance that you will because you loved Stone and Gosling together in Crazy, Stupid, Love.

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound.

The Brutalist argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation.

Jesse Moss's documentary The Overnighters is a heart-wrencher about the clash between economics and ethics. Its story sounds like the sort of dry news blurb you'd skim over in the Sunday paper but unfolds into an epic tragedy.

The movie’s moxie makes it impossible not to get caught up in Marty’s crusade. We’re giddy even when he’s miserable.

Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths invites you to spend an hour and a half with the most insufferable woman in the world. (If you personally know a worse one, my condolences.) That the unpleasantness turns out to be time well spent is a credit to Leigh’s curiosity about miserable jerks and the joy-sucking traps they set for themselves and others.

Grand Budapest is Anderson's most mature film, and his most visually witty, too. It's playful without being self-congratulatory, and somehow lush without being cloying.

This solid genre pic salutes its touchstones.

Back to the Future just might be Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster — and its attention to detail deserves to be re-celebrated.

Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.

To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.

Morgen’s structural inspiration is to organize Jane not around the facts Goodall found about chimps, but the emotions the chimps help this strong, independent woman find in herself.

[Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.

Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.

In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.

Nebraska is the antidote to other family charmers about goofballs in matching sweaters.

The first hour of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert convinces you that the King is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. By the end of it, he’s a god.

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

Peele is so attuned to the tiny ways race sneaks into conversations that we hear it in every line. Our suspicions are so heightened, we start to second-guess our own senses.

Hall’s performance — tender, tough, empathetic, controlled — crumples from tears to laughter in a blink. It’s phenomenal.

Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.