Ann Hornaday

Once again demonstrating her own strong, clear vision — not to mention superb control of her craft — Campion proves her ability to illuminate hidden truths and let us see what was hiding in plain sight all along.

Handsomely filmed, intelligently written, accented with just a dash of outright hokum, Darkest Hour ends a year already laden with terrific films about the same subject — including the winsome comedy-drama “Their Finest” and Christopher Nolan’s boldly visual interpretive history “Dunkirk” — and ties it up with a big, crowd-pleasing bow.

Weird and wonderful, zigging where it should zag and zagging where it should zig, this wildly imaginative flight of fancy strikes an admirably poised balance between whimsy, screwball comedy, social satire and generous meditation on the foibles and highest aspirations of human nature.

It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness.

The Social Network has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will.

A film that feels like something conjured out of memory and magic, a poetic, often ecstatic re-creation of childhood that captures its ungovernable pleasures as vividly as its most threatening terrors.

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow.

In this mesmerizing, revelatory and deeply compassionate film, viewers are left with an indelible impression of girlhood at its most precarious and indomitable.

This is an example of a writer and director working in perfect harness, with Reed smoothly ratcheting up the story's suspense and Greene speculating on his cardinal theme of moral ambiguity. They don't make movies like The Fallen Idol anymore, all the more reason to see it now while you can.

The Princess and the Frog invite viewers to see the world as a lively, mixed-up, even confounding place, to recognize essential parts of ourselves in what we see, and to say: This is what we look like.

For those willing to join Reggio in his extended meditation, Visitors offers a sublime, even spiritual experience, as well as a bracing reminder of cinema’s power to create a transformative occasion.

What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by the tidal pull of place and history.

A movie that will endure.

This is one of the most exciting breakout films of the year, introducing Attanasio as a vibrant new voice in American cinema. More, please.

What’s surprising is that Jonze has taken what could easily have been a glib screwball comedy and infused it instead with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling.

It proves how smarts and style can elevate even the pulpiest material into something shrewd, socially attuned and bracingly observant. Rarely has a movie been so illuminated by a single character simply breaking into a smile, and rarely has a smile been so unequivocally earned.

A big, fat old-fashioned gush of passion as drawn through a post-modernist prism that makes it less easily comprehensible but more beguiling.

In American Utopia, Lee brings the same insight and sensitivity to Byrne’s stage show, which bursts forth with an exuberant mixture of optimistic joy and wistful nostalgia.

Force Majeure leaves the audience squirming — in all the very best ways.

Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.

Funny, poignant and ultimately triumphant, Kajillionaire is a precarious balancing act, one that July pulls off with astute writing, careful staging and trust in her actors to strike precisely the right emotional tones, whether they be tender or breathtakingly tough.

Reality isn’t just stranger than fiction: It’s subtler, sadder and exponentially more haunting.

Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).

Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.

A film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.

The great joy of watching a Pixar production is how it rewards not only younger viewers but their older companions as well.

The Farewell pays delightful, insightful homage to the facades and pretenses nearly everyone adopts in the name of compassion.

Working with his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick.

Directed with rigor and sensitivity by Jason Osder, this is the kind of nonfiction film that proves how powerful simple storytelling and a compelling through line can be.

In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he's created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes.

Locke is so distilled, such a pure example of cinematic storytelling, that it almost feels abstract.

Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer.

In a mesmerizing series of images, encounters and delicate juxtapositions, Cameraperson testifies to a world in which it would be clear to see that we’re all connected, if only we took the time to look at one another with reverence and simply listen.

An exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing comedy

What ensues in Corpus Christi, Jan Komasa’s absorbing and spiritually attuned drama, turns out to be a fascinating exercise in fake-it-till-you-make-it, with a hefty dose of fatalism and small-town hypocrisy thrown in for maximum provocation.

As a celebration of the physical expressiveness and visual storytelling of silent cinema, A Quiet Place speaks volumes without a word being uttered.

We might go into a Kelly Reichardt movie thinking we’ll be told a story, but we emerge with our consciousness subtly and radically altered.

Improbably, The End of the Tour doesn’t just sustain the audience’s interest in Wallace and Lipsky’s exchanges, arguments and moments of bonding, but invites us to care deeply about the men.

One needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.

This is that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions.

Thanks to his courage and Rasmussen’s compassion and creativity, “Flee” morphs from a tale of dispossession to a testament to the power of narrative — to overtake a life, and to liberate it.

This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion.

Affliction turns the sound on with sudden, crystalline clarity, and echoes with the haunting power of a suppressed truth that has finally been released.

Low-key, sleek and sophisticated, Drive provides the visceral pleasures of pulp without sacrificing art. It's cool and smart. Some critics might even call it European.

Ingenious, exhilarating, funny and profound.

For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnes arrives like an exhilarating call to arms.

Soaring, swooning and gently nostalgic, Brooklyn takes melodrama to a new level of reassuring simplicity and emotional transparency.

Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.

In an era that seems fatally mired in fear, anger and mistrust, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood arrives as something more than a movie. It feels like an answered prayer.

Fukunaga imbues this study of ma­nipu­la­tion and manufactured loyalty with an unsettling degree of visual richness and lush natural detail.

It's a funny, fearless, poignant, spectacular performance. Come to think of it, those words could well apply to the entirety of Tadpole.

Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.

Part travelogue, part road picture, part meditation on class, mortality and intimacy, this extraordinary little movie might be the perfect harbinger of summer, as astute as it is steamy.

The best films teach you how to watch them within the first few minutes. Blindspotting is no exception. The film gets off to an exhilarating start, with split-screen images of Oakland, Calif., unspooling to the tune of a soaring aria.

Lady Bird is a triumph of style, sensibility and spirit. The girl at its center may not be a heavyweight, but her movie is epic.

Liberated from playing the hits, Benjamin eloquently captures Hendrix’s emerging style without having to succumb to jukebox-musical opportunism.

A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.

The title of Never Look Away is deliciously ironic: This is one of the most mesmerizing, compulsively watchable films in theaters right now.

What makes it a must see is its timelessness.

The Act of Killing is a must-see.

As wrenching as Room is, especially during its grim first hour, it contains an expansive sense of compassion and humanism thanks to the sensitive direction of Abrahamson.

Intimate, moving and superbly underplayed, Loving is every bit as soft-spoken and subtly implacable as its protagonists. It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.

Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.

Instead of a grand tableau vivant that lays out the great man and his great deeds like so many too-perfect pieces of waxed fruit, Spielberg brings the leader and viewers down to ground level.

It’s not often one can have a genuinely spiritual experience watching a movie. But that’s precisely what’s on offer with The Departure, Lana Wilson’s quietly galvanizing portrait of life, death and the thin places in between in modern-day Japan.

This is a throwback movie in the best sense of the term, asking the audience to consider the not-too-distant past of anti-Black racism as prologue to its similarly murderous present. It’s also a return to a brand of muscular, serious-minded filmmaking that has been virtually forgotten in recent years.

See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better.

Roma, a masterful drama by Alfonso Cuarón, is many things at once: epic and intimate, mythic and mundane.

This invigoratingly fresh, optimistic film - which features the breathtaking debuts of director Dee Rees and leading lady Adepero Oduye - plunges the audience into a world that's both tough and tender, vivid and grim, drenched in poetry and music and pain and discovery.

Amazing Grace can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory. And even more gratifyingly, it is as simple and unaffected as Aretha Franklin herself is in the film.

This is a “just see it” movie, as in: Forget flowery language, redundant synopsis, clever paraphrasing or hyperbolic praise. Just see the dang thing.

Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

Ringing with both ancient wisdom and searing relevance, Fences feels as if it’s been crafted for the ages, and for this very minute.

In this absorbing and rigorously disciplined account, Konchalovsky proves that a healthy embrace of nuance doesn't need to result in muddled thinking. Indeed, it can lead to something sharp, bright and dazzlingly precise.

What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized.

It’s a movie that not only puts human imperfections and incongruities on display, but also revels in them.

In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.

Faces Places is a film of sheer joy, its exuberance surpassed only by its tenderness and purity of purpose.

A diverting, visually dazzling concoction of wily schemes and daring adventures, Toy Story 4 achieves that something that eludes most sequels, especially this far into a series: a near-perfect balance between familiarity and novelty, action and emotion, and joyful hellos and more bittersweet goodbyes.

A revealing, intimate, quirky and generous portrait of nothing less than the American Dream.

The result is something akin to cinematic hypertext, and thanks to Thompson’s steady hand, the brief but deep dives are richly rewarding.

One of the best performances -- and movies -- of the year so far.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect.

City of Ghosts provides a grim reminder of what journalism should look like, and why its stakes are literally life and death.

Actually moves, whisking the audience on a funny, sad and extraordinary journey through a singularly compelling moment in American pop culture.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

Chandor’s attention to detail, and the expressiveness and utter believability with which Redford goes about the anything-but-mundane business of surviving, make All Is Lost a technically dazzling, emotionally absorbing, often unexpectedly beautiful experience.

An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.

As visually stunning as it is, though, the film's most enduring gift is the simplicity and sensitivity with which it was made by Truffaut. [19 Dec 2008, p.WE29]

Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.

Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.

You’ll laugh, all right. You’ll cry. You’ll do both at the same time. CODA is just that kind of movie. And thank goodness for it.

Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.

Devoid of muckraking sensationalism, it instead evolves into something more tactful, and compassionate, as teams of exhausted medical professionals do anything to save their patients’ lives, or at least grace their final moments with gestures of caring and connection.

For all of the outrage that Mustang inspires by its depiction of sexist oppression, it’s still enormously pleasurable to watch, in part because of its enchanting setting (it was filmed in the northern Turkish town of Inebolu) and Warren Ellis’s thoughtful score, but mostly because of Sensoy and her four equally beguiling co-stars.

A lyrical, visually stunning tone poem to loss, lies, reclamation and making peace with the past, The Last Black Man in San Francisco virtually defies conventional description. To see it is to believe it, even when it doesn’t strictly make sense.

The writing is so musical, so attuned to human frailty and aspiration, that I defy anyone to watch the movie without smiling — with amusement one minute, rueful recognition the next, but probably always with some measure of simple, undiluted delight.