Ann Hornaday

Fantastic Mr. Fox imparts lessons as profound as "The Road's" about love and gratitude and awareness of others. It just has more fun doing it.

Still, there’s no denying that the wise, funny, loving protagonists of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets make for unforgettable company, even after the hangover has worn off.

This dazzling, if ultimately frustrating, movie seems to pick up where the far superior “Inside Out” ended, leaving behind the inner workings of young people’s emotional lives for an exploration of metaphysical realms that are fuzzier, more speculative and, to put it bluntly, not nearly as involving.

The Salt of the Earth remains worshipful when it should be more probing, especially around questions of ethics, privacy and consent.

This moving, illuminating slice of American life and social history serves as a stirring example that we should all do much better. And we can start right now.

Winds up being a touching portrait of that rarity in the movies: a recognizably human couple with recognizably human problems and quirks.

Fayyad — who directed a team of cinematographers remotely when he was prevented from entering Ghouta himself — films The Cave with a grace and compositional sensitivity all the more impressive for being achieved under the most difficult circumstances.

An absorbing, agonizing documentary about ambition, lust and anthropomorphism at their most heedless, records suffering and manipulation so extreme that description can barely do them justice.

May not achieve the transcendent heights of "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," but it has its own pleasures.

By presenting Avatar in 3-D, Cameron is staking his claim and building a fence around his own precious resource, making it unobtainable on any but his own terms to increasingly emboldened and technologically savvy natives.

As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back. But it also lifts us up on a wave of openhearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life.

Strangely, Scorsese's very passion for the subject matter turns out to be both a blessing and a curse for Hugo.

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

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

A smart, alert, supremely entertaining movie.

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.

As a filmed version of a play, One Night in Miami has the same talky, slightly claustrophobic contours one might expect. But that pent-up quality is an advantage for a movie in which the room where it might have happened is a character in itself.

Watching Thurman's character "triumph" in a context as joyless and self-referential as Tarantino's is a soul-deadening experience, one that over two hours takes on the same dreary monotone as the cheapest pornography.

Accompanied by an expressively lush jazz-blues score by Lee’s regular composer Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman announces from the jump that viewers are in for a lush, sensory treat as Lee plays with the film vernacular he’s manipulated so adroitly and expressively for three decades.

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.

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.

If the film has an MVP, it’s Bob Odenkirk, who does a splendid and quietly amusing job of playing The Post’s unsung Pentagon Papers hero, assistant managing editor Ben Bagdikian.

Helped immensely by a lush and poignant musical score by Joe Hisaishi, Fireworks makes a quietly powerful impact. [22 May 1998]

A stirring, emotionally galvanizing film, not only due to its shattering subject matter but thanks to Mullan's spot-on eye for casting and fluid, uncoercive style.

The pure athletics of Free Solo, which chronicles Honnold’s months-long training regimen as well as his subsequent attempts, would be spectacle enough to create an entertaining film.

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.

James White gets up close and personal in often discomfiting ways, but it’s never exploitative or glib. It hits the highs, and the rock bottoms, and all the damnable stuff in between.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

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

Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.

It’s a movie that’s all too happy simply to go through the motions when its star is clearly capable of busting bigger, more interesting moves. Luckily, there are other films in the sea. This is one that Lopez should have left at the altar.

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.

After years of dabbling, lyrically and literally, Taylor Swift has come for American cinema, and we can only wait for her next move.

A shattering vérité portrait of the disintegration of Iraqi society in the period immediately following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country, this urgent, of-the-moment film doesn’t explain the ensuing chaos as much as plunge viewers into it firsthand, offering a terrifying, ultimately moving portrait of the effects of war, both physical and psychic.

Luckily, The Mustang overcomes its most predictable story beats thanks to de Clermont-Tonnerre’s intimate, unfussy style and a quietly captivating performance by Schoenaerts.

Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn.

While its themes of revenge, mutual resentment and grim fatalism offer little hope for a ready solutions, the movie itself testifies to the power of creative collaboration in finding common ground.

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 crafty, swift, subtly stylish thriller.

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.

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.

Short Term 12 is that rare movie gutsy enough to tell the truth about love: that it’s not a poetic longing or a magical-thinking happy ending, but a skill. And, the film suggests, we all have the capacity to learn it.

Residue is a delicately layered depiction of the dance between alienation and belonging. In this moving portrait, it’s a dance is defined by struggle, grief and undiminished grace.

A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.

At its heart, it's about the communities we forge - real and imagined - to save our own lives.

An exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing comedy

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.

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

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.

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.

McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art.

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.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.

The fun here — and there is a lot of it — is to be had simply in allowing an ensemble of game, generous-spirited actors to give their all in service to the fine art of misdirection and mayhem.

Nuts!”is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.

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

In this unsparing but deeply compassionate film, viewers get a chance to see the fatigue, stress and bewilderment of modern life for what they are: not the regrettable side effects of market-driven progress, but the results of cynicism and greed, and the unfathomable human cost of wanting what we want, right now.

Propelled by an ingenious script by Aaron Sorkin, given vibrance and buoyancy by director Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs is a galvanizing viewing experience.

Has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.

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.

Filmed in subdued tones of burnished browns, The Holdovers might best be described as the movie version of that favorite pair of corduroys that miraculously still fit: stylish, if a little worn in places, softened by time and made more generous by the life lived inside them.

Da 5 Bloods is most invigorating when Lee is most sharply polemical, whether it’s during that vibrant prologue, or when he stops to drop some knowledge in interstitial flashes of history, wisdom and exuberant wit.

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.

In its own messy, slightly ungovernable way, this digressive bagatelle feels looser than some of Anderson’s most tightly controlled mis-en-scenes. But the story, for all its busyness, is negligible. The script feels less like an organic whole than an effort to keep building up a scrawny central premise until it felt like a movie.

Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.

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

You know a filmmaker is in supreme command of her medium when what she creates feels less like a movie than a candid glimpse of ongoing lives that will continue to play out long after the lights have come on.

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

Attention is duly paid in this tender and touching film; the strangest thing about Love Is Strange is how completely un-strange it is, from its familiar family dynamics to its exquisite honesty and compassion.

Late Marriage is a closely observed, somewhat funny, ultimately very sad movie.

Thanks to its thoughtful protagonists and filmmaker Jeremy Workman, what starts out as a quirky human interest story becomes a profoundly humane portrait of creativity and community.

Captain Phillips is such an impressive dramatic achievement that it comes as a shock when it gets even better, during a devastating final scene in which Hanks single-handedly dismantles Hollywood notions of macho heroism in one shattering, virtually wordless sequence.

This audacious hybrid of cinematic styles is pure entertainment.

As arresting and elaborate as the images are in The Northman, there are just as many sequences that revert strictly to pulpy, B-movie type.

An absorbing glimpse not only at the phenomenon of punk rock but also at British social history and the rock star mystique.

Combines the derring-do of classic adventure tales with far more serious issues of moral agency. And it serves as a haunting reminder to seek joy and beauty, even in the depths of despair.

Another Year allows viewers to occupy both psychic spaces, nesting into the warm comforts of a long-lived-in home and then, on a dime, seeing it through the searching eyes of the marginalized figures that, over the course of 11 films, Leigh has so often championed.

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.

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

Guest has proven to be this era's master of humanist satire.

Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.

At its core, Mass exerts the power of ritual at its most reflective and galvanizing, reveling in human connection at its most arduous, persistent and sublime.

Muted, measured and meditative, Arrival brings taste and restraint to a genre in the midst of a mini golden age: It comes in peace.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.

Dhont tells a familiar story in what feels like a fresh and urgently new way, with sensitivity, sadness and promising glimmers of hope.

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.

Not nearly as accomplished narratively as it is visually.

Admittedly, Top Five suffers from its share of too-convenient contrivances and clunky passages... But Top Five is also buoyantly self- sustaining, thanks in part to Rock and Dawson’s easy, convincingly seductive chemistry and some genuinely hilarious surprises.

From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.

Bridge of Spies expands from being a smart, engrossing procedural to a carefully observed character study of Donovan, a particularly intriguing, heretofore overlooked American figure.

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

Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerizing pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it so steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.

No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako.

It's the talk...and the extraordinarily expressive faces of those who do the talking, that accounts for its engrossing, enchanting powers.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

Warfare is a process movie: It’s less interested in character development and “narrative” than in simply plunging viewers into an environment and giving us a sense of what life is like within it.

That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.