Ann Hornaday

By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been.

Too sketchy about her protagonist's interior life, and too fast and loose with the details of this story, to make much of an impact beyond its initial shock.

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

Filmed with extraordinary attention to environmental detail and revealing human interactions, American Factory is that rare documentary that’s not only compelling in its content but a profound sensory pleasure.

At once ruminative and shocking, godwardly inclined and repellently graphic, First Reformed is indisputably the finest film Schrader has directed since his sensitive adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel “Affliction.”

As charming as Baby Driver strives to be, the appeal starts to curdle once Wright makes his fetishistic aims clear.

As absorbing and illuminating as Sabaya is — and as courageous as it is as an act of filmmaking — the viewer can’t escape the fact that it’s men who have taken these women hostage, men who are rescuing them and men to whom they are returning, as long as they obey their conditions and patriarchal codes.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

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.

With its heartening final note of hope and renewal, Deathly Hallows -- Part 2 provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all.

Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful.

If the conceit feels obvious and strained, it still gives Farhadi and his actors ample room to explore the ambiguities of commitment, ethics and revenge in a society where mistrust in public servants runs deep.

Like all great movies, Get Out faithfully obeys the conventions of its genre — in this case horror films shot through with brutal wit and sharp-eyed allegory — while getting at profound psychic and political realities. The shocks and the laughs are thoroughly entertaining, but it’s the truth of Get Out that’s so real.

Spielberg and Kaminski have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration for decades, but their work on West Side Story brings the partnership to breathtakingly poetic expressive heights.

[A] sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary.

Oropelled by memorable performances by mostly unknown actors. The most famous of the ensemble, Hanna Schygulla, delivers a by turns serene and shattering performance as a mother struggling with loss, conscience and the first glimmers of unexpected connection. She's only one essential and unforgettable part of a flawless whole.

Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light.

Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.

Thanks to Burnham’s exuberant, alert writing and Fisher’s masterful command of vulnerability, anxiety, resilience and steadfast self-belief, Kayla emerges as an icon of her own — just by being herself.

Builds slowly but passionately, not dancing to some Hollywood tune, but finding its characters where they are and letting them be who they are.

Girlhood is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.

Along with such colleagues as Abbas Kiarostami and Moshen Makhmalbaf, Panahi has perfected the art of realist filmmaking,

Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!

All of the actors in Turtles Can Fly are nonprofessionals, and all bring electrifying authenticity and presence to their roles.

Crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence. Those brawls feel a bit rote, but what's different here is a newfound playful humor.

A delirious piece of pop ephemera.

As a stylistic and narrative throwback, Alfredson's adamantly un-thrilling procedural reminds viewers of an era when viewers allowed themselves to be entertained by a good yarn about a few colorful or at least colorlessly compelling characters.

Nearly every scene rings with its own ragged truth, which becomes increasingly painful as Dan's addiction becomes more unmanageable and as he refuses to confront the untenable politics of his own behavior.

Tells an important story about a story that might never have been told at all.

Dworkin, having led viewers so deeply into her subjects' lives, resists coercing them into any pat conclusions. We're left to wonder about Love and Diane -– and root for them -– on our own.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

This is a big movie, about big emotions and ideas, which Rees evokes and explores through an extraordinarily rich tapestry of atmosphere, physical setting, visual detail and sensitive, subtle performances.

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

As small and specific as it is, Everybody Wants Some!! feels improbably expansive, even universal.

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

At its best, The Tree of Life makes the viewer lean forward, eager to enter Malick's own dreamy, poetic consciousness. At worst, it leads to the vague feeling that we're listening to the meanderings of someone who's not sure we're smart enough to keep up.

The Fabelmans does it all, with an expansive spirit and that quintessential Spielbergian combination of honesty and sentiment. It tells the truth, at a honeyed, ameliorating slant.

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.

Neville has created a film that operates both as a dewy-eyed nostalgia trip and stirring appeal for civility.

A mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.

What makes it a must see is its timelessness.

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.

Even though it's pretentious and overlong, A Christmas Tale is still maddeningly engaging, thanks in large part to its attractive and gifted cast.

Even at its most contrived, The Hero exerts a soothing attraction not unlike the man at its center.

Van Sant is such an assured filmmaker that Paranoid Park is almost inescapably absorbing; he has found a particularly engaging leading man in Miller, whose expressive, even painterly face goes from blank to angelic in the blink of a long-lashed eye.

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.

This endearing, thoroughly entertaining movie might be what we all need right now: An invitation to stop and smell the roses — or, if you’re lucky, their far less showy fungal cousins.

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.

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.

It's a gentle, surprising little movie whose rewards lie in what its characters don't say as much as in what they do.

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

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is often diverting to watch, and it’s been shot on 35mm film with lovingly expressive care by Robert Richardson. But true to its title, it plays like a bedtime story concocted by a petulant child who insists on getting his own back from the people who poisoned his most honeyed dreams.

Moonrise Kingdom is already shaping up to be this summer's art house sleeper hit, and no wonder: It traffics in the very kind of escapist spectacle -- in this case of a thoughtfully composed world brimming with whimsy, enchantment and visual brio -- that the season was made for.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

As Booksmart takes its shape, albeit haphazardly, Wilde’s filmmaking skills become more and more evident, bursting forth in a third act that builds into something beautiful and even transcendent.

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

Candid, pitiless and deeply humanistic, Fleifel’s portrait feels simultaneously timeless and urgently new.

A movie that will endure.

Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, Fireworks Wednesday gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work — before he was acknowledged as a master.

The mopey, midwinter atmosphere of Nancy becomes increasingly and oppressively bleak, leavened only by Smith-Cameron’s spot-on portrayal of her character’s trembling, painfully fragile optimism.

As an example of the filmmaker’s house style — which she calls “Afrobubblegum” — Rafiki presents a radiant, vivacious portrait of young love that owes as much to “Romeo and Juliet” as “Bend It Like Beckham” and “Moonlight.”

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.

What gradually comes into focus is a terrifying, appalling, infuriating cycle of exploitation and corruption.

Their individual voices may not be literally captured in On the Record. But in this anguishing and essential film, they are heard — and the implications of being silenced for so long come through loud and shamefully clear.

To quote In the Heights itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer.

Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, Blood Simple is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way.

Oslo, August 31st builds to an unforgettable climax, a bravura sequence that starts at a party, crawls through a variety of nightclubs and raves, and ends on a note of utterly surprising lyricism.

For fans of horror at its most sinister, The Witch is not to be missed. It casts a spell that lingers long after its most disquieting mists have cleared.

Thanks to the assured hold Johnson exerts over this ingeniously structured game of cat-and-cat, we'll go anyplace he has in mind.

The power of the film is cumulative, as the filmmaker spins a mesmerizing morality tale from the dross of daily life. In his skillful hands, the ordinary turns out to be anything but.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy You Were Never Really Here depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche.

In this vibrant, lyrical, graphic, sobering and finally soaring testament to aesthetic and political expression, Noujaim consistently provides light where once there was heat.

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.

The gently perfumed air of impending doom suffuses 3 Hearts, a tasteful, mildly intriguing romantic drama from writer-director Benoît Jacquot.

Museum Hours is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film’s lively cast of supporting characters.

A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

Like its protagonist, First Man doesn’t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively.

Never quite breaks out of its talky inertia.

Subtlety may not be the film’s strong suit, but it creates a richly imagined world, as glitteringly arresting as it is savagely merciless.

Won't break your heart -- it will make it soar.

The narrative is lean, the supporting performances are solid, and, perhaps most crucially, the emotional tone of the piece is spot-on.

Hubris, narcissism, tabloid spectacle and massive self-deception collide with the mesmerizing inevitability of a slow-motion train wreck in Weiner, an engrossing, almost shamefully entertaining documentary.

A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.

If Mystic River is just a bit overplayed, a tad too highly pitched, it still resonates with grief and fury and feeling.

The three leads deliver funny, convincing performances in a film that wears both youthful callowness and intellectual sophistication lightly. Mutual Appreciation is the kind of movie whose dialogue mostly hews to the rhythms of "like, you know, whatever" but then occasionally throws in a word such as "puissance." And, like, it totally works.

With grace, discretion and supreme tact, Nicks sweeps viewers to a climactic montage that wordlessly honors the best ways we care for one another. The Waiting Room bears poetic witness to an overlooked fact: America's health care system may be broken, but its people are anything but.

It's the kind of movie that succeeds as a culmination of moments that ring true and sweet.

Accompanied, appropriately enough, by Bach piano pieces, The Children Act is an unmitigated pleasure to watch and listen to, primarily as a showcase for Thompson’s incomparable gifts as an actress.

As regrettable as Hite's fate was, The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule, or willful misunderstanding.

A documentary in which one of the most voyeuristic directors in American cinema delivers an engaging, if maddeningly unresolved, tutorial in film production and appreciation.

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

Isn't a noble story, or even a cautionary one: It just feels pretty painfully real.