Ann Hornaday

Despite small but powerful gestures in the finale, it leaves the audience feeling just as immobilized and powerless as its characters. Labaki chose the title Capernaum because the word was often used to mean “chaos” in French literature. That’s precisely what she presents to us, with precious little relief in sight.

For Kidman, Destroyer is simply the latest in a long career of fascinating, often nervily risk-taking career choices, in which she submerges her lithe grace and porcelain beauty to inhabit the toughest characters and stories.

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.

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

With its air of intimacy and fractious affections, Shoplifters feels like “The Borrowers” by way of Yasujiro Ozu, a discreetly observed drama about resourcefulness, loyalty and resilience in an era of obscene income inequality and a fatally frayed civic safety net.

Did you find “The Favourite” just too weird, too raunchy, too . . . too? Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots will be more your cup.

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

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

Creed II is a respectable if not revelatory sequel to the sequel, even if it lacks its predecessor’s grace and narrative texture.

Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.

Most winningly, Green Book puts two of the finest screen actors working today in a sexy turquoise Cadillac, letting them loose on a funny, swiftly-moving chamber piece bursting with heart, art and soul.

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.

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.

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.

In this immersive, often deliciously sensuous documentary portrait of the late opera star Maria Callas, viewers are treated to another rise-and-fall story of a great but tortured artist, this one punctuated by the occasional real-life bed of roses and pleasure cruise.

Winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.

Mid90s” is often painful to watch as Stevie puts himself through the punishing rituals of proving his street bona fides. But Hill takes even the most treacherous dangers in stride, suffusing his story with as much tenderness as stark terror.

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

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.

As the chief avatar for parental distress, Carell is sympathetic if not always entirely convincing: The toughest moments of Beautiful Boy simply seem out of his range as an actor, especially when he takes reportorial zeal one step too far by trying hard drugs himself.

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.

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.

The Old Man and the Gun ambles along with such unhurried, folksy ease that it’s easy to overlook the people — mostly women — Tucker leaves in his wake, victims who may not be physically scarred, but often look as if they will bear unseen injuries into the future nonetheless.

This is Audiard’s first English-language film, and he evinces sure instincts with both the visual and spoken vernaculars. The Sisters Brothers looks terrific and, propelled by Desplat’s beautiful music, ambles along with pleasing, if routinely episodic, ease until its unexpectedly touching conclusion.

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.

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.

An absorbing, illuminating film.

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.

A handsome production that delicately skewers literary-world pretensions and Great Man mythmaking. But primarily, The Wife offers viewers a chance to observe one of the finest — and most criminally underpraised — actresses of her generation working at the very top of her shrewd, subtle, superbly self-controlled game.

The result is a movie that feels both hard-edged and dreamy; punk-rock and lyrical; wised-up and unbearably tender.

If Bowers’s present-day life has slowed down considerably, his memories haven’t, and the subject of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood exerts his luridly voyeuristic pull, as he shares name after name of his most shocking exploits.

Like the finest forebears of the rom-com genre — including its urtext, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” — Crazy Rich Asians indulges in the escapist pleasures of aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism and invidious judge-iness.

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.

One of the great gifts of Far From the Tree is simple visibility, whereby viewers are given the opportunity to watch people live their lives, share their wisdom and flourish within the loving care of their family and friends.

In Puzzle, Macdonald has finally found a movie that she doesn’t need to steal, because it belongs to her completely.

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

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.

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.

Uplift winds up getting the better of “Don’t Worry,” in which Phoenix delivers an impressively committed performance that nonetheless can’t overcome the movie’s worship of Callahan’s most immature, solipsistic and self-dramatizing foibles. A movie that’s supposed to inspire winds up being irritating instead.

This crafty sociological thriller, set amid the pristine townhouses and lawns of a quiet Reykjavik suburb, builds slowly but surely into a film that feels utterly of a piece with a much wider world.

The director tries to infuse Shock and Awe with the taut procedural drama of “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight” or “The Post.” But he winds up demonstrating just how difficult it is to make shoe-leather journalism entertaining, much less artful.

This is a movie of myriad worthy, even urgently necessary, ideas; when it reaches its climax, it goes completely haywire in a preposterous, increasingly scattershot sci-fi pastiche.

Although Whitney follows a familiar structure, Macdonald infuses it with artful editorial choices, marking the chapters of Houston’s life with brief but vivid montages of the times in which she lived.

In Damsel, sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have created the perfect western for the #MeToo era, delightfully twisting and torquing the traditional woman-in-jeopardy narrative to create a clever, comical and uncannily relevant allegory.

As “Guardians” and, later, “Deadpool” doubled down on the snark, “Ant-Man” kept things light, its playfulness made all the more endearing by the boyish, twinkle-eyed persona of its star, Paul Rudd.

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.

This handsomely staged production plays like a soothingly thoughtful balm.

The best way to appreciate this fitfully funny collection of japes and jests is to treat it like any teenage boy in your midst: Focus on the positives and know that even its worst is only a phase.

Benefits from a sensitive, even-tempered tone, as well as terrific supporting performances from Spencer, Ann Dowd (as Alex’s status-obsessed mom) and a scene-stealing Amy Landecker, who plays an ambivalent therapy client of Greg’s.

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

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

Filmworker is a tribute to the unsung artisans, assistants, best boys and girl Fridays whose indelible contributions make movies not just possible, but magical.

At its best, The Gospel According to Andre gives viewers the rare chance to get to know someone who, until now, has mostly been known as that impeccably turned-out gentleman who seems to know everybody at the annual Costume Institute gala.

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.”

In this stirring portrait, it’s possible to see evangelism not in hectoring words or holier-than-thou bromides, but in loving action. Who wouldn’t say amen to that?

It has brio, rueful humor and celebratory verve that is nearly impossible to resist.

Solo: A Star Wars Story gets the job done with little fuss, but also with precious little finesse. It might arguably succeed in teeing up the cinematic narrative that would change movies forever. But in both substance and execution, it bears but a whisper of the revolution to come.

It’s when the dream of “Annihilation” collides so felicitously with lived reality that the film coalesces and takes hold. It may be broken eventually, but for a while the spell is a powerful one, and nearly irresistible.

Let the Sunshine In doesn’t offer a consistently pretty picture. Where some viewers might view Isabelle as a hopelessly stunted victim of self-deception, others will see an avatar of empowerment and autonomy.

A diverting bagatelle that could have been tougher, a pastiche that could have probed deeper. Tant pis, as Godard himself might have said: Too bad.

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.

Sometimes a movie comes along that, devoid of a noisy publicity push or festival buzz, quietly ambushes the unsuspecting viewer with an absorbing, skillfully executed, meaningful and thoroughly entertaining experience. Ladies and gentlemen, Borg vs. McEnroe is just that kind of film.

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.

Beirut is an engaging, well-crafted thriller, offering a showcase not just for Hamm but for Rosamund Pike (playing his levelheaded handler) and an ensemble of terrific character actors, including Dean Norris, Shea Whigham and Larry Pine.

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

Blockers suffers from ungainly, choppy pacing. It feels like a slapdash collection of scenes rather than a balloon sent smoothly aloft, with jokes often falling as flat as Cena’s buzz cut (a running gag centers on his tough-guy character’s propensity for crying, a go-to bit that ages fast).

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.

This taut, emotionally wrenching snapshot of both the mythologies and grim realities of war possesses useful reminders about self-deception and abuse of power, especially at a time when bellicose rhetoric and war cabinets seem to be the order of the day.

Clearly well timed with Lenten reflections on sacrifice, service, suffering and responsibility. But it offers an equally relevant — and inspiring — portrayal of principled steadfastness and spiritual integrity in the face of a petty, corrupt and tyrannical leader.

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.

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.

Gorgeously photographed, and with a minimalist score by Fred Frith, Leaning Into the Wind offers viewers a welcome chance to consider the work of an artist who defies the recent commodification cult to embrace the ephemeral and the nominally “worthless.”

Even without every flaw completely ironed out, it offers values worth celebrating across the time-space continuum.

Bolstered by good supporting performances from Kyra Sedgwick, Janeane Garofalo and Ritchie Coster, Submission is a handsome-looking film that aims to fulfill the most meek, well-behaved implications of its title.

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

The moments when A Fantastic Woman takes off come in bursts of magical realism, such as when Marina suddenly finds herself heading off impossible head winds, or leading a sparkly dance number.

With his hard-bitten squint and studied air of scowling detachment, Bale seems to be channeling Clint Eastwood at his most enigmatic and reserved; like Eastwood and his characters, Bale allows both the camera and his fellow characters to come to him, rather than proving his bona fides through more obvious and eager means.

It’s only upon reflection that viewers may realize that, despite its nominal title character, the movie never delves that deeply into who Gloria Grahame was, aside from a femme fatale slinking across a black-and-white screen.

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.

Swift, stylish, tough-minded and sharp-tongued, this engaging fact-based drama, about a young woman who at one point ran the richest poker game in the world, is worth recommending if only to see its star, Jessica Chastain, at the top of her nerviest, most icily self-controlled game.

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.

An almost sinfully enjoyable movie that both observes and obeys the languid rhythms of a torrid Italian summer.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi unspools like a one-movie binge watch, a lively if overlong and busily plotted second chapter to the latest Star Wars trilogy that advances the story and deepens its characters with a combination of irreverent humor and worshipful love for the original text.

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.

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.

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.

Whether Thelma is the victim of malign forces beyond her control or the Scandinavian equivalent of horror heroine Carrie, is the central question in this superbly controlled, if derivative, variation on a familiar theme.

One of the great strengths of Roman J. Israel, Esq. is that no one is any one thing.

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.

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

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.

A movie of enormous humanity and heart.

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.

The Square may be one of the most timely films of this season, but it squanders its own relevancy by shooting fish in the world’s most shallow, painfully obvious barrel.

A movie that possesses the stylized, lethal-Looney-Tunes slapstick we’ve come to associate with Coenesque humor, as well as the fiery, thinly disguised polemic of such past Clooney projects as “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

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

There are moments in Dina that invite viewers to wonder whether Santini and Sickles aren’t veering into voyeurism, such as when Dina presents Scott with a copy of “The Joy of Sex” and proceeds to have a conversation about masturbation and other matters.

Dafoe delivers his finest performance in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world markedly short on both.