Ann Hornaday

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

Harbors some indelibly arresting images and characters whose stories, even at their most superficial, manage to be authentically inspiring.

For an agonizing and ultimately transcendent cinematic portrait of sacrifice, love and saving grace, audiences need look no further than this unpretentious and deeply moving film.

The greatness of The Battle of Algiers lies in its ability to embrace moral ambiguity without succumbing to it.

Manages to be one of the genuinely fresh discoveries of the summer, a little gem that deserves to become a big sleeper hit.

A delirious piece of pop ephemera.

A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.

That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious.

A small, self-contained gem of incisive writing, superb acting and rich, expressive visuals.

Small, quiet movie that imperceptibly takes its viewers by their throats and doesn't let go

A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.

Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.

The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go.

The movie, a lyrical blend of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques, offers a bold example of the rewards of crossing boundaries -- stylistic, cultural, temporal and even commercial.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

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.

It's an exhilarating, funny, very sweet movie.

Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.

Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes.

Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.

Senna is what film critics might call a TMSI movie, as in: Trust me, see it.

In this engrossing and ultimately inspiring examination of ideals in action, the team behind The Fight wind up illustrating a cardinal rule of nonfiction filmmaking: When it comes to humanizing even the loftiest principles, a documentary lives or dies by its principals.

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.

If you think "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" define the alpha and omega of boxing movies, think again. David O. Russell's The Fighter proves there's still punch in the genre, especially when a filmmaker tells a familiar story in a brand-new way.

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.

Equal parts playful, sophisticated and engrossing, The Adjustment Bureau is like the first songbird of spring, signaling that the winter of our collective brain-freeze is over and it's safe to go back to the multiplex.

Suffice it to say that, in addition to celebrating the energy, enterprise and idealism of America’s postwar generation, Spaceship Earth provides a sobering primer in how some dreams die, and others are strangled mercilessly in their cribs.

For its frequently painful contours, there’s an abundance of pleasures to be had in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s irresistible memoir about growing up amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

With long, quiet takes in which he simply observes Johansson wordlessly taking in the world around her, Glazer infuses the everyday modern world with a surpassing sense of strangeness and doom.

Telling an old story in a new way and infusing what might have been a dry political polemic with poetry, passion and unlikely warmth.

It's as soothing and pure as the sweetest water from the deepest well.

If Phantom Thread isn’t exactly a narrative triumph, it still manages to deliver, especially as a haunting evocation of avidity, appetite and aesthetic pursuit at its most rarefied.

The warmth that courses through American Hustle makes it irresistible, with Russell’s affection for his characters and his sharp-eyed evocation of their recessionary times, honoring their struggle, however dishonest, rather than denigrating it.

In a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that Ad Astra feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.

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.

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.

Well worth the wait.

The conventional and the cliche are slam-dunked in favor of a fresh, authentic take on passion, ambition and coming of age.

Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.

As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.

As a sly chamber piece, it re­assures and unsettles in equal, exquisitely calibrated measure.

Thanks to Lewin's light but assured touch, The Sessions never wears its theological preoccupations heavily, instead allowing transcendence to creep up on the audience quietly.

The classic college party-crawl comedy gets a smart, self-aware refresh with Emergency, a funny, adroitly executed satire that manages to find genuine laughs in the unlikeliest places.

Rather than probe Giacometti and Lord’s curiously arms-length relationship, Final Portrait is at its best simply watching the artist work — the “artist,” in this case, meaning both Giacometti and Rush.

At its core, this clever, wrenching, profound story underscores the tenacity of faith in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Evil may be good, story-wise. But virtue, at its most tested and tempered, is even better.

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

The result is a classic on a par with “Winesburg, Ohio” and “Our Town,” a narrow slice of contemporary American life that manages to be both admiring, yet capable of polite skepticism.

Finally, one of our finest actresses has been given material that calls on her to utterly transform herself — vocally, physically, seemingly existentially — and prove how gifted she’s been all along.

Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

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.

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.

The Irishman is a feast for the ages, a groaning board of exquisitely photographed scenes, iconic performances and tender nods toward old age that leave viewers in a mood more wistful than keyed-up.

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.

(Penn)'s is a lovely, soulful performance in a movie that manages to imbue tragedy with just the right grace note of insouciance -- a movie worthy of Woody Allen himself.

In Gerwig’s capable hands, though, even the most familiar contours of Little Women feel new, not because she has the temerity to redefine Alcott’s masterpiece, but because she subtly reframes it.

Toni Erdmann, it turns out, is Hüller’s movie all the way, with her character not just matching wits with the bumptious, often irritating father, but ultimately coming into her own with the genuine feeling he seems determined to deflect.

Bazawule’s simple, arrestingly composed frames accumulate into something transcendent and deeply affecting.

Somehow Baumbach manages to find a nugget of humor at even the most painful points.

She Said takes a story we thought we knew and gives it new, utterly shattering life.

Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.

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.

You Resemble Me would be a vivid, beautifully acted reflection of dispossession and cultural dislocation if it stayed one thing. But, like its mercurial protagonist, it changes shape to become a deeply meaningful meditation on narrative itself, blending fact and fiction into a seamlessly poetic whole.

Skillfully directed by Rod Lurie, this engrossing and deeply wrenching thriller dances the same fine line as most latter-day movies that want to honor service and sacrifice, without lapsing into empty triumphalism. For the most part, The Outpost balances those competing impulses, with a canny combination of unadorned bluntness and technical finesse.

This captivating, expertly machined political thriller jumps through every hoop the naysayer can set up: It's serious and substantive, an ingeniously written and executed drama fashioned from a fascinating, little-known chapter of recent history.

McTeer delivers a messily cheerful performance as a woman who thinks nothing of brushing her teeth with beer.

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

Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalized industrial practice.

Filmed with dynamism and propulsive, energetic flair, The Jungle Book allows viewers the vicarious pleasure of sidling up to magnificent (sometimes mangy) beasts as if they were household pets.

My Name is Pauli Murray delivers a lively, revelatory litany of all the things Murray got right first, in a career that was driven by equal parts intellectual curiosity and call to service.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in Empire of Light, a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

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.

In the capable hands of these fine filmmakers and actors, even its most bitter observations about life and aging are nearly always reliably balanced by moments of warmth, understanding and out-and-out screwball humor.

Hard to take in its particulars.

With Ex Machina, Garland makes an impressive debut as a director, spinning an unsettling futuristic thriller with the expertise and exquisite taste of a seasoned veteran.

Considering that any one of those elements could have scuttled its fragile mix of drama, comedy and life-and-death stakes, 50/50 beats the odds with modest, utterly winning ease.

Will Smith delivers a ferocious, all-consuming performance in King Richard, a thoroughly entertaining portrait of Richard Williams — better known as Venus and Serena’s father.

Johnny’s tentative dip into family life artfully captures the tedium, terror and confounding ecstasy of parenthood, but it more eloquently conveys the pain and discovery involved in simply trying to do one’s best.

With Palm Trees and Power Lines, Dack has created a haunting portrait of how trust is manipulated and abused; the trust she builds up with her characters and audience, however, remains steadfast, resulting in a film of disarming candor and power.

There are as many awkward, discomfiting sequences in Obvious Child as there are interludes of genuine fun and romance. The result is a movie that feels risky and forgiving and, despite its traditional rom-com contours, refreshingly new.

In this swift, smart, often very funny film, Polsky takes an unprecedented look at the legendary Soviet-era hockey program and its life after glasnost, exposing an athletic system that became a crucial symbol of Communist history and politics, but also discipline, grace and brooding, melancholy soul.

That makes Maiden not just a ripping yarn but a meaningful one. Like “RBG” last year, it’s a story that reminds women — and men — not only how far we’ve come in one generation but how far we’ve yet to go.

The Woman King may be a fable, but its power is real: Her name is Viola Davis, and she’s nothing less than magnificent.

Warm, funny, humane and deeply sincere, this ode to Bruce Springsteen, breaking free and belonging isn’t content merely to revel in Springsteen’s greatest hits — although it does, with vibrant, vicarious exhilaration. It delves into the singular power of music, and by extension art itself, to make its audience feel comprehended.

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.

Although Ralston's act of desperation is admittedly difficult to watch, viewers who might avoid the film out of squeamishness would be depriving themselves of one of the year's most exhilarating cinematic experiences.

A deliciously diabolical comedy of ill manners and outré palace intrigue.

In a word, Hell or High Water is terrific.

Taymor conjures images that are as indelible as they are wordlessly articulate.

There’s a low-key, lackadaisical charm about Sword of Trust that might lead viewers to mistake its modesty for lack of ambition. But there’s virtuosity at work in this beguiling comedy that’s no less impressive for being improvisational, understated and refreshingly self-effacing.

Holofcener has accrued a rabid, loyal following for her singular brand of observant wit and aching tenderness. Both pour forth in abundance in Please Give, a wry, wistful portrait of contemporary urban manners.

Sully is a classy, enormously satisfying ode to simple competence. To paraphrase the title character, it’s just a movie doing its job. And amen to that.

Manages to be both engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.

A delicious slow-burn of a movie, the kind of coming-of-age tale that looks familiar on the surface only to reveal hidden depths of beauty and meaning.

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.

Coogan and Brydon might scoff at such sentimentality, but over the course of the Trip films, they’ve shown us that world, at its most aspirationally easeful and epicurean. Even more brilliantly — and affectingly — they’ve constructed a world between them, an airy, reality-adjacent universe conjured in billowing clouds of witticisms, idle observations, passive-aggressive feints and silent, solitary reflections. Did they ever really live there? Maybe not. But it’s been a delightful place to visit.

The Cider House Rules is about many things -- chance, passivity, free will and self-invention -- but ultimately it comes back to Larch, who emerges as a toweringly noble figure even in his weakest moments.

Despite its unconventional source material, it turns out to be surprisingly well-crafted, elevated by breathtaking central performances and the stylish, slyly knowing sensibility of director Janicza Bravo.