Ann Hornaday

The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

It’s a good movie, executed with affectionate humor, wistful honesty and tender care.

Seymour: An Introduction gives viewers a soaring, sublime and enduringly meaningful glimpse of a man who is undoubtedly the real thing.

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

Goodbye Solo is visually simple and stunning, especially the haunting nightscapes of Solo's perambulations. But more important, Goodbye Solo is driven by deep feeling and sensitivity. Don't miss it.

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.

The Artist is anything but mute, with a lush orchestral score and a little sonic wink at the the end; fewer movies this year reward listening - and watching - so lavishly.

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.

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.

Plenty of movies are wish-fulfillment fantasies, but Kirsten Johnson has created a first: a dread-fulfillment fantasy that brims with love, humor and, of all things, life.

Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self-conscious artifice.

Viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.

With City Hall, Wiseman brings his quiet observational skills to the day-to-day operations of local government, which is why the film is so well-timed for this particular moment.

May not be "Fargo," but it nestles comfortably somewhere beneath that masterpiece and "Miller's Crossing," yet far above such forgettables as "The Ladykillers" and "Intolerable Cruelty."

His (Martin McDonagh) movie fuses naturalism and hysterically pitched theatricality with sometimes uneasy, but bracing results.

Suffused with wry humor, vulnerability and radiant warmth, Huppert’s performance captures that delicate period in life during which resignation morphs into graceful, even grateful, acceptance.

A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.

The film serves not only as a mesmerizing escape into another world, but also a compelling, compassionate deep dive into human frailty and self-deception.

A well-seasoned, handsomely cured slab of showbiz schmaltz that hits all the right pleasure centers. With equal parts glitz and grit, Cooper has successfully navigated the most perilous shoals of making a classic narrative his own, managing to create one of its best iterations to date.

Citizenfour isn’t just a useful primer in the civil liberties and consent issues his disclosures raised. It humanizes a man who almost immediately became controversialized as a naive, self-important desk jockey or, worse, a handmaiden to terrorists everywhere.

Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

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 Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

Graced by superb performances, especially from Ashkenazi and Adler, this gentle but devastating portrait bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments.

Can be recommended even if just for the presence of Elaine May, who turns in her most charmingly ditzy performance since "A New Leaf."

If you think you've absorbed all you could about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the arcana of elaborate derivatives, think again. Inside Job traces the history of the crisis and its implications with exceptional lucidity, rigor and righteous indignation.

That rare kids' movie that may be even more entertaining for its intended audience's adult companions.

If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.

It's the kind of absorbing, attractive, unfailingly tasteful enterprise that a critic can recommend without caveat.

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.

In a word, Hell or High Water is terrific.

The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

Prove(s) once again how ingenious, artful and flat-out entertaining animation can be.

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

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

The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.

Harrowing, controlled and diabolically self-assured, Joshua leaves filmgoers teetering on their own emotional precipice, wondering just where pathos ends and pathology begins.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society. But the film concludes on an optimistic note, at least for the Dardennes. It's still the worst of times, the filmmakers seem to suggest, but we're still capable of humanity, if not hope.

Deliberately paced, unapologetically mannered and contemplatively attuned, If Beale Street Could Talk invites audiences to venture beyond the screen in front of them to connect with the characters and their world on a deeper, more mystical plane.

The bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humor, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

Hard to take in its particulars.

You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.

Hypnotically absorbing film.

Tells Yuri's story with the same bravado and stylishness as Scorsese at his finest, with bigger-than-life characters and situations splashing across the screen in breathtaking scale.

Even its most irritating parts don’t fatally damage a whole that works amazingly well, despite its own excesses.

Wolfe keeps the production simple, albeit with attractively rich visual values and gorgeous costumes, allowing the performances to exert their mesmerizing force. And nowhere is that magnetism more palpable than when Davis and Boseman are going toe to toe, their energies repelling one another one moment and fusing the next.

Dreamlike and deliberate, pedestrian and theatrical, bland and strangely beautiful, About Endlessness takes in the suffering, struggle and moments of vagrant joy in life and propels them into the cosmos.

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.

Gromit's every facial move -- every grimace, scowl, eye-roll and glance askance -- is sublime.

The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged.

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.

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.

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.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

Love & Friendship is such a thoroughgoing delight that it’s tempting to riffle through Austen’s other works to find something else for Stillman to make into a film. As adaptations go, this is a match made in heaven.

Creepy, creepy, creepy. Writer-director Ari Aster makes an impressively unnerving debut with Hereditary, a meticulously crafted horror thriller.

A gripping, deeply moving film

Koltai is an accomplished, Oscar-nominated cinematographer (for 2000's "Malena"), and Fateless is meticulously composed and shot.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

Brokeback Mountain possesses handsome and sympathetic lead players, magnificent scenery, heartbreaking melodrama, righteousness and cultural import. But as a testament to the importance of following one's passion, it's devoid of one crucial thing: passion.

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.

For such a compact and efficient vessel, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” pours forth seemingly endless wellsprings of language, emotion and psychological depth.

You may not have agreed with Ebert’s reviews — you may not have thought he was such a nice guy. But if you aren’t moved by Life Itself, you ought to have your heart examined.

The Shape of Water may not achieve the aesthetic and thematic heights of 2006’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which still stands as del Toro’s masterpiece. But it’s an endearing, even haunting film from one of cinema’s most inventive artists, one who manages to bend even the hoariest B-movie tropes to his idiosyncratic, deeply humanistic imagination.

The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

Almodovar has created an ecstatic homage to the women who have inspired him all his life.

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.

A must-see for any student of history, political rhetoric and film poetics at their most vagrant and revelatory.

As a meticulously composed piece of contemporary gothic, The Duke of Burgundy is exquisite to look at, but it succeeds best as a human drama, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want — and maybe even getting it in the end.

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

In hewing so closely to life — in all its frailty and fellowship, its perseverance and mutual care — Jones has made something larger than life.

Kiarostami has been hailed as the premier humanist filmmaker at work in a larger Iranian cinematic renaissance, and all his formal signatures are on view here -- the small, intimate canvas, the loose, improvised air of the performances, the absence of an authoritarian directorial hand.

As one character observes in Tangerine, Los Angeles is “a beautifully wrapped lie.” Baker has created a fitting homage to artifice and the often tawdry, tender realities that lie beneath.

Emerges as the summer's first true must-see film, required viewing for everyone, but especially audiences in Washington.

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.

If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.

Fallen Leaves casts an irresistible spell, one that’s as playful as it is full of longing and pathos.

Only someone with intimate knowledge of the Midwest’s singular cadences, social codes and confounding emotional stew (er, covered hot dish) of aggression and politesse could pull off something as masterful, meaningful and poetic as Nebraska.

It’s just this impressive amalgamation of realism and stylization that allows “Across the Spider-Verse” to transcend its narrative shortcomings: Even at its most obscure or muddled, it’s never less than a pleasure to watch.

The heart of Million Dollar Baby lies in the core relationships among Frankie, Maggie and Scrap, friendships so pure, so genuine, so authentic that it takes actors of Eastwood's, Swank's and Freeman's caliber to sell them in this otherwise cynical world.

In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.

A grand, sweeping nostalgia trip that evokes the sickness of an era even as it tries to find its essential humanity.

Arrives as the perfect midsummer movie, a comedy about a flawed-but-functional family that, like "Toy Story 3," captures the drama of growth and separation in all its exhilaration and heartache.

An engaging yarn and a moving character study, but it's also a sweet, sad glimpse of everyone's future.

He (Herzog) emerged with a breathtaking tour of art that, in its formal sophistication, dynamism and rhythmic lines, looks as bold and new as Cezanne's work must have looked in the 1860s.

If de Wit’s idea of story is sometimes gratingly simplistic and sentimental, there’s no denying its primal classicism, or the seductive pull of sound and image at their most pure and unfussy.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

In the vein of such recent classics as "The Lives of Others" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," Christian Petzold's Barbara re-visits the quiet, everyday tragedies of the Iron Curtain era, when paranoia ran deep and for very good reasons.

In addition to being a study in great acting, this is a study in great directing.

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.

It's less a movie than a delivery system for sensory pleasures, sunny romance and designer-label stuff that in real life would result in diabetic shock (or at least a ruined credit rating).

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a quietly astonishing directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter,” a crafty treatise on maternal ambivalence that delivers an unsettling emotional wallop.

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