Ann Hornaday

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.

With its unflinching portrayal of cynical school officials and their corrupt symbiosis with the sports teams and Greek systems to which they’re beholden, The Hunting Ground is, at its most basic, a damning indictment of entitlement and impunity.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

Filmmaker Clint Bentley makes a tender, visually poetic feature directorial debut with “Jockey,” a closely observed portrait of a man embarking on the downslope of his career.

Vallée, working with a lean, lively script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, neatly avoids excess, letting Woodroof’s terrific yarn stand on its own and getting out of the way of his extraordinary actors, who channel the story without condescension or manipulative cheats.

An absorbing primer in one of the most fascinating chapters in American social history.

What begins as an intriguing visit to a forbidding but fascinating past becomes the kind of perfunctorily moralistic fairy tale that Kahlen himself might scoff at, before getting back to work. Like the wilderness it depicts, this is a movie that ultimately might not want to be tamed.

How fitting that Firth should carry A Single Man, a movie of quiet but potent emotional power, perfectly suited to his singular gifts.

Supremely idiotic.

Equity isn’t perfect — far from it — but it’s an intriguing attempt at rebalancing a system that’s been dreadfully out of whack for far too long.

Like “The Revenant,” The Nightingale becomes something of a slog, as Clare’s journey plods toward its maybe-inevitable end.

Extraordinary on many levels...because Mountain Patrol instead becomes what might be the first Chinese conservationist spaghetti western ever made.

A compelling, complex, confounding film.

Like all of her greatest creations, Tomlin brings Elle to life with compassion and candid, sometimes withering knowingness.

The result is a vivid portrait, not just of one unforgettable young man but also of a country in transition.

Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

Let's get it out, loud and clear: Jerry Maguire is not a sports movie. It's a stealth chick movie, wrapped in a swaddling of jock stuff so that it gets through guy radar without setting off the missile defenses.

A deep core of emotion gives 3  1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets its ballast, but Silver, who also serves as cinematographer, infuses the production with simple, elegant sophistication.

The through-line of Chi-Raq is a sense of crisis that Lee refuses to reduce to binary causes, but interprets in terms of history, economics and psychology, as well as the personal, political and spiritual.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen delivers an astonishingly restrained and expressive central performance in The Hunt, an engrossing psycho-social drama by Thomas Vinterberg.

On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation.

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.

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.

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.

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

Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

Even Lawrence’s magnetic powers can’t keep Mother! from going off the rails, which at first occurs cumulatively, then in a mad rush during the film’s outlandish climax.

Snarky and sensitive in just the right measure, what initially looks like a glib exercise in adolescent mortification has the nerve to dig a little deeper. And it winds up mining a little bit of wisdom and compassion in the process.

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.

Once you get the hang of Figgis' own brand of coercion -- one based on an intricate sound design and musical score -- you find yourself happily going along for the ride.

There’s no doubt that Audiard has invested a story of grief, dispossession and desire with immediate, almost tactile, urgency. Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.

Thoughtful, searching and wonderfully moving in its wistful final moments, Lo and Behold may not be Herzog’s most artistically ambitious film, but it’s an intriguing, even important one nonetheless.

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.”

As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.

Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.

Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.

The fact that Guy-Blaché isn’t a household name — even after making nearly 1,000 films — is due pure and simply to sexism, and literally being written out of history, either through animus or laziness. Thank goodness “Be Natural” is here to set a brilliant, distinguished, invaluable record straight.

Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” this is a movie rooted in the scruffy but golden days of the 1970s, populated by strivers and schemers and would-be stars whose breakthrough is as much a function of willpower as raw talent.

Has all the energy and spontaneity of a bowl of waxed fruit. If watching "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching "Lords of Dogtown," which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect.

Does it make it as a movie? Only in fits and starts.

Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, Corsage offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

Engaging entertainment and a great work of art.

A yawn and most unforgivably features some appalling arrangements of the Beatles' best-loved songs.

While qualifying as the most gorgeously appointed and finely detailed version of the novel so far, still lacks the element of essential fire to make it come fully, even subversively, to life.

If the zombie genre steadfastly refuses to die, we can be grateful to Shaun of the Dead for breathing fresh, diverting life into the form, with subtle visual humor and a smart, impish sense of fun.

For all the energy and personality of its subjects, Planet B-Boy tends to drag, especially toward the competition finals.

Seems propelled by a doomed sense of inevitability and is all the more gripping for it.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

Zappa gives its subject his well-earned due within the rock firmament. But even more valuable, Winter gives Zappa pride of place among the most important composers of the 20th century, sharing some extraordinary performances of his little-known classical work.

Just in time for the holiday travel season, Flight brings audiences perhaps the most harrowing scenes of a troubled airplane ever committed to film.

Briskly paced, bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, seamlessly blending conventional courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage (including Wexler’s), The Trial of the Chicago 7 offers an absorbing primer in a chapter of American history that was both bizarre and ruefully meaningful.

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.

Unlike other movies about unpleasant characters, "In the Company of Men," for example, Chuck & Buck doesn't have that sharp observational edge.

Nightwatch is passable stuff for undiscriminating fans of the ickier-the-better genre; for the rest of us, it offers nothing new. [17 Apr 1998]

A film of admirable ambition but vexingly uneven execution.

Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp.

As a history lesson every bit as clarifying as it is cockeyed, Hail Satan? possesses unarguable value. But it also serves as a reminder of why we embrace nonconformity, pluralism and tolerance.

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.

Nichols establishes such a grounded sense of atmosphere and such superb control of mood and pacing, that the odd hiccup barely matters.

The story is so nasty, so depraved and troubling, that viewers may well wonder at its value beyond prurient interest.

At its best, The Last Station vividly illustrates the enduring Russian gift for iconography, whether spiritual, secular or something in between.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

Magnificent.

Structurally, The Wonders suffers from awkward bulges and sags, especially toward the end. Still, it’s a beautiful, richly imagined ride that doesn’t end as much as evaporate into a dreamlike puff of smoke.

Wonder Woman may not cure all the ills of pop culture’s superhero-saturation syndrome; in fact, in many ways it succumbs to some of its worst excesses. But at least it brings an exhilarating, vicarious kick to the sagging, bagging table.

A wise, funny film about the little leaps of faith it takes to just get through the day.

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

Despite the literal and figurative pains it takes to persuade viewers of its own importance, The Revenant can’t escape the clutches of crippling self-regard.

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.

Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved.

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.

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.

Shirley sometimes feels as unfocused as the stymied protagonist at its core, but its point of view remains crystalline throughout: As Shirley tells Rose early in their friendship, best to be born a boy. “The world is too cruel for girls.”

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

Mortensen has called A Dangerous Method Cronenberg's "Merchant-Ivory picture," but it just as often resembles a Woody Allen movie - literate, sophisticated and deeply concerned with sex and manners. (It's even mordantly funny, as an early scene at the Freud family dinner table attests.)

What on the surface seems to possess all the melodrama and photogenic suffering of a banal prime-time weepie instead becomes a lucid, tough, deeply sensitive examination of emotional fortitude.

Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time

A stunningly inert piece of cinema, a movie that basically boils down to serial shots of people talking to each other.

This is where a filmmaker’s taste and reflexive sense of balance makes all the difference. Southern culture may be on the skids in Mud, but Nichols’s sensitive portrayal is gratifyingly on the level.

The film has a sulfuric, Dostoyevskian quality — and sick sense of humor — that captures the muted aquarium that Los Angeles becomes at night, a spell that’s broken once plot overtakes mood.

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

Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.

As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.

Everyone hits their marks with gusto and believability in Catching Fire... But the engine of the entire operation is Jennifer Lawrence.

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Wild is an accomplished movie, and often a beautiful and moving one, but the woman at its center remains warily at arm’s length.

Christopher Mintz-Plasse steals the movie in his screen debut as a nerd di tutti nerds, a kid whose fake I.D. reads "McLovin."

The only thing missing from this rich production is an emotional charge, which Highsmith could create on the page but which Minghella doesn't quite capture on screen.

Flustered, flirty and filled to the brim with compassion, The Lovers is charming, even when it’s proving how hollow charm can be.

A delicate, if slightly smoggy, feeling of regret hangs over Greenberg, a quietly funny portrait of grown-ups growing up.

Peppering “Norman” with obliquely mordant observations about Middle East politics, Cedar effortlessly propels the narrative into a sweetly pensive character study of a familiar archetype, which he invests with an angel’s share of humanity and heart.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

Even at its most daft and infectiously ditzy, Mistress America is a sharp, aware and surpassingly kind portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.

Depp possesses one of the finest speaking voices in the business - a nimble, mellifluous instrument that can go from sexy growl to fey warble in no seconds flat.

Beneath those puppet-headed antics, and true to its title, Frank is improbably, disarmingly honest.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.

With such classics as "El Norte" and, more recently, "Sin Nombre" and "Under the Same Moon" having addressed the subject matter already and so well, viewers might be forgiven for asking just how many immigration movies we need. As A Better Life proves, as many as there are stories to tell.

One thousand points of light never looked so fetching.

A wild, inventive ride through the unconscious, by way of Art History 101 and An Introduction to Film Tropes. The story of a famous psychoanalyst struggling with his Oedipal demons with the help of some hardened burglars isn’t a story at all, really, but a decidedly rickety scaffold on which Krstic can hang his images, an array of ecstatic references to the painters and directors who have inspired him.

Written and directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond with superb control and insight, My Little Sister never goes precisely where the audience expects, as the filmmakers dole out crucial information at well-timed intervals, illuminating the pieces of Lisa and Sven’s past that have brought them to this life-or-death point.

An absorbing, illuminating film.

It's beautiful. I loved it. And it broke my heart.

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.

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

Elizabeth Olsen delivers an utterly transfixing turn as the title character of this chilling psychological thriller.

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.

The wine Coogan and Brydon are opening this time may lack some of the novel fizz of the first one, but The Trip to Italy is like most vacations: a few bumps here and there, but over all too quickly.

Throughout the film, it’s Baez who holds the audience spellbound, not just in live performances that remained transfixing from the late 1950s to the 2010s, but in her very being.

Through some astonishing archival footage and perceptive commentary from Who guitarist Pete ­Townshend, the filmmaker puts the band in its complicated context as both reflector and creator of the postwar British teenage gestalt.

As a winsome glance back, and as a piece of artistic preservation, Stan & Ollie would be enjoyable enough. But it becomes truly transcendent in the hands of John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, who play Ollie and Stan with intelligence and spirit that go beyond their own uncanny physical performances.

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 Wolf of Wall Street remains one-note even at is most outré, an episodic portrait of rapaciousness in which decadence escalates into debauchery escalates into depravity — but, miraculously, not death.

This lively, intriguing and insistently humanistic flight of fancy — imagined conversations between hard-line conservative Pope Benedict XVI and his more progressive successor, Pope Francis — brims with wit, warmth and some tantalizing what-ifs. Whether the fact that it’s mostly pure speculation will get in the way of the audience’s enjoyment will depend on each viewer’s threshold for artistic license.

In spirit, and sheer joie de vivre, it's everything the movie business should aspire to. Win Win exemplifies movies the way they oughtta be.

It's the moral journey of Nolte's character that is the real story in Clean, but Assayas instead focuses on the manipulative habits of an addict, resulting in a mannered study of narcissism and self-pity.

What elevates Heaven Knows What above other run-of-the-mill wallows in aimlessness and self-destructive compulsion is Arielle Holmes.

A bit hard on the posterior, it is definitely easy on the eyes.

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.

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

Romance, intrigue and old-fashioned movie glamour make a dazzling return in Girl on the Bridge, Patrice Leconte's sumptuous love story with a razor-sharp edge.

The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

Interspersing "real" people with professional actors, Linklater creates a vivid, gossipy Greek chorus that serves as a kind of collective unreliable narrator -- an altogether appropriate stance given the moral gray zone the sweetly confounding Bernie inhabits.

Wiig has the natural beauty and self-deprecating expressiveness it takes to be a star comedienne; she spends much of Bridesmaids looking like a slightly girlier version of Lucinda Williams.

The Invisible Woman is less a conventional love story than a wise, often troubling contemplation of myriad modern impulses, from the lure of celebrity and public acclaim to the compartmentalizing of identity and the gender politics of Great Man-ism.

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.

In The Automat, Hurwitz and writer Michael Levine trace the rise and fall of Horn & Hardart, illuminating not just a surprisingly compelling corporate history, but a facet of American culture that feels both brimmingly optimistic and thoroughly extinct.

A nifty piece of work -- with, by the way, a fantastic musical score and soundtrack -- that, if there's any justice in the movie world, will eventually earn a mystique all its own.

Even if its most ironic humor will sail over the heads of very little ones, Enchanted is that rare comedy that will appeal to the whole family.

The power of this quiet little film lies in the lyricism of its images of life on Bangladesh's waterways and in its towns...and in the naturalistic performances from its cast of mostly nonprofessional actors.

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.

As cinema, Spy is content to cater to its own conventions, hit the required marks and earn a few laughs along the way. As a cultural bellwether, it does something bigger and more important, without ever italicizing that fact.

Nader haters may not be mollified, but An Unreasonable Man, like its subject itself, is a one-stop civics lesson no one should miss.

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.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

The title represents size and power, speed and hubris -- the very things the ship has come to stand for and the things that Cameron has restored to the cinema with grand, generous style.

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.

Dick, whose films include a revealing expose about the movie industry's film ratings board, has created yet another galvanizing call to action with The Invisible War.

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.

VanDyke might have set out to give himself a crash course in manhood, but Point and Shoot gives us a crash course in the myriad and contradictory things the word has come to mean.

If the film’s pace is sometimes as awkward as its hero, and the story a little thin, it still brims with authentic life and affection for the characters (even the dubiously attentive Katrin).

Full of heart-rending moments, in which people of good faith search for answers to what, in the end, remain painfully irreconcilable questions.

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully acted and often refreshingly amusing, “Civil War” injects doses of much-needed fun into a genre of filmmaking that’s become mired in dour pretentiousness, when it’s not ridiculing its own excesses in such meta-snark exercises as “Deadpool.”

One of the great strengths of Finding Vivian Maier is the filmmakers’ willingness to gently thread ethical inquiry in and out of the film.

In this mesmerizing, revelatory and deeply compassionate film, viewers are left with an indelible impression of girlhood at its most precarious and indomitable.

Takes both its characters and the audience to the depths, but it's a journey Kidd redeems with wit and fluency and, ultimately, a deeply persistent humanism.

Well worth the wait.

Whether they're navigating a recently flooded Prague or the pristine waters of a Tuscan swimming pool, the fiends and angels who populate Beauty in Trouble are like so many scorpions explaining why they sting the fabled frog trying to help them: "It's my nature."

What Mayor lacks in terms of wiki-esque biography it more than makes up for in immediacy and exquisite timing.

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.

Both grimly naturalistic and infused with classical values at their most thoughtfully composed, Land of Mine is epic but deeply intimate; elegant but tough.

Does a terrific job of capturing the outlaw energy of the original production.

Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.

As much as any earnest historical drama, Secret Ballot serves as an eloquent argument for civic life, showing its human elements to be no less flawed for being so necessary.

That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.

The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed.

As a family-approved document, In Her Own Words is celebratory rather than probing, critical or comprehensive.

Omar feels as trapped and enmeshed in hopelessness as the vicious political cycle it depicts.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.

Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary.

Life, Animated makes fascinating points, about the power of cinema, about meeting our loved ones where they are and, as Ron says, about who gets to decide what constitutes a meaningful life.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl succumbs to the same cloying too-cuteness and solipsism that often plague its glib and sentimental genre. But those limitations are leavened by the film’s lively, ultimately affecting flourishes and sprightly voice.

A Bigger Splash manages to infuse even the most straightforward questions with vicariously alluring ambiguity.

Primarily, What Maisie Knew is a showcase for consistently superb performances that, while utterly grounded in their characters, succeed in keeping viewers off-balance as to who will do what, and when.

Antic, puzzling and disturbing film.

Like the warm summer day it chronicles, Southside With You possesses a mellow, languorous vibe, an infectious easygoing charm that insinuates itself gently, then seductively, as the couple at its center experiences the stirrings of what might be true love.

Equal parts celebration and self-congratulation.

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.

Shot through with cheeky wit and hilarious musical numbers by the aforementioned slugs, Flushed Away features an eye-popping boat chase through London's watery nether regions, as well as the winning vocal talent of Kate Winslet, Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet. Well done!

Following Cushman’s epistolary structure, Catherine Called Birdy unfolds as a series of diary entries, narrated in a self-satisfied tone that grates over time. Still, Dunham keeps the action brisk and the humor quotient high, as Birdy foils a succession of suitors, often by way of slapstick high jinks and general over-the-top japery.

Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels, a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes.

Computer Chess makes an affecting preservationist plea, in this case for a visual and material culture that, while not objectively beautiful, possessed its own form of buttoned-down passion — before it became obsolete by taking over the world.

Hard to take in its particulars.

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

With a wistful look at the wages of ambition and the failure of promise, Wonder Boys finally celebrates self-awareness, ending on a muted, quietly moving note of triumph.

A startling portrayal of how the cycle of abuse plays itself out in the lives of its victims.

Howard directs Rush with speed and jangly, jarring verve, bringing the races themselves to white-knuckled life and allowing the men’s stories to play out with only slightly predictable reversals, upsets and, inevitably, those hard lessons learned.

That rare movie that manages to be not only an adroit, carefully observed study in character and suspense, but important.

This intimate, straightforward, often wrenching portrait of five families dealing with bullying and its aftermath doesn't hold many surprises at a time when such campaigns as "It Gets Better" and special programming on kids' cable networks are bringing the issue to the fore.

Written and directed with tart intelligence by Alice Wu, and featuring some dazzling breakout performances, this breezy, self-aware and utterly adorable coming-of-age tale keeps one eye on literary and cinematic classics, and the other firmly on a future full of exploration, self-expression and buoyant expectation.

Armageddon Time is a pungent, disarmingly honest evocation of love and loyalty, striving and struggle, and how identity morphs from one generation to the next. In revisiting his own coming of age, Gray has managed to illuminate a much larger one that hasn’t stopped.

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.

Plan B possesses the requisite number of outré sight gags and gross-out humor to qualify it as a sophomoric teen flick. But director Natalie Morales keeps the action running smoothly, allowing her two gifted stars to deliver genuine breakout performances in vivid roles.

Possesses moments of fleeting grace, pathos and beauty, even if it ultimately doesn't amount to much.

What makes Wilbur worth watching are its smaller bits: Mads Mikkelsen's hilarious performance as a taciturn psychiatrist and Julia Davis's equally funny portrayal of a needy group therapy counselor.

This bracing movie...gets off to a spirited start and rarely lets up, sharing with viewers a little-known chapter of history as inspiring as it is intriguing.

Intriguing, marvelously inventive documentary.

John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.

Joins such wonderful recent films as "The Lives of Others" and "The Baader Meinhof Complex" as a clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.

Writ small, Golden Door is an absorbing and moving love story; writ large, it's the story we've never stopped telling ourselves.

It's a smart, bold genre exercise that's enormous fun to watch, harking back to gritty urban thrillers of the 1970s with an assured sense of tone and style.

Even at its most troubling, Cyrus is powered by a deep vein of humanism, one that offers hope to even the weirdest among us.

After Tiller does viewers the great service of providing light where there’s usually only heat, giving a human face and heart to what previously might have been an abstract issue or quickly scanned news item.

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.

A shapeless collection of encounters with Texas prison inmates and their victims, what could have been a well-aimed examination of the most troubling contradictions of capital punishment instead becomes a maudlin, unrestrained wallow.

Interstellar tries so hard to be so many things that it winds up shrinking into itself, much like one of the collapsed stars Coop hurtles past on his way to new worlds. For a movie about transcending all manner of dimensions, “Interstellar” ultimately falls surprisingly flat.

The news is good for Bridge to Terabithia fans. The beloved children's book has not just survived but thrived in its adaptation to the screen.

Combines nonstop action with an absorbing story to become a classic on par with "Hoosiers" and "Hoop Dreams."

Regan directs Scrapper with exceptional verve, interrupting the narrative with witty documentarylike asides whose framing evokes the poppy aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

Jewison's focus on the Canadians' dogged do-gooderism might have actually prevented a good movie from being a great one.

It’s true that satire is the perfect weapon of reason, and Justin Simien deploys it with resourcefulness, cool assurance and eagle-eyed aim.

If A Most Violent Year has a weakness, it’s in that structural looseness.... Still, A Most Violent Year is an engrossing, often beautiful film, and a breakout opportunity for Isaac.

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.

A taut, meticulously crafted police procedural.

Like "Winter Soldier," Sir! No Sir! will surely reopen old wounds, as the Vietnam War -- like the Civil War 100 years before -- refuses to die. But hawks and doves alike should be grateful to Zeiger for preserving a fascinating piece of American cultural history.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Invictus, which features outstanding performances from both its lead actors, succeeds wonderfully on its simplest level, as a portrait of political genius.

Eat Pray Love finally settles into its own cinematic destiny as an attractive escapist love story, in which the romance is more with the I than with the guy.

The volatile, unbridled emotion of Mommy — its sheer life force — makes up for its structural weaknesses, giving viewers an often breathtaking glimpse of a director who, like his own adamantly unconventional protagonists, is fairly bursting at the seams with spiky, headstrong brio.

The movie's chief value is to preserve Phoenix at the height of his wary physical grace, which recalls a young Marlon Brando.

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

Absorbing, funny, exhilaratingly entertaining ride through two years in the life of the most successful heavy metal band in history.

Shower makes for a lovely and poignant journey.

A taut, mostly well-crafted race against the clock that combines the time-loop conceit of "Groundhog Day" and the postwar paranoia of "The Manchurian Candidate."

At its best, Queen & Slim isn’t just a crime drama but a nuanced portrayal of family, legacy and self-preservation — how they’re distorted by trauma and history, and how they thrive despite the near-constant threat of annihilation.

It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

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.

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.

A wonderfully complex character at the center of a gratifyingly satisfying yarn.

Without a note of music or any other extraneous narrative device, Emitai plunges the viewer deep into the lives of the Diola, to the point where the subtitles translating the Diola and French languages are almost superfluous. [02 Feb 1998]

Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

By the time it's ended, past and present have fused inextricably to create a movie that, in its own down-home way, is nothing less than epic.

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.

Creadon and his editor, Douglas Blush, add verve to an otherwise talky exercise by cutting Wordplay as if it were a puzzle itself, with Across and Down camera moves and blocks of black space. A visual pun altogether worthy of those being filled in on screen.

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

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

A fascinating experiment that, if the viewer is willing to surrender to Haynes's sometimes hermetic meditations on Dylan's life, heartily rewards the investment.

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.

Despite Madagascar's formulaic tendencies, it's a formula that works, so parents are urged to sit back, relax and enjoy -- the kids surely will.

The Australian director John Hillcoat makes an audacious, unsettling American feature debut with The Proposition, a revisionist western that brings its own brand of sanguinary honesty to the genre.

A deceivingly simple film, one that grows in power in retrospect, as the cumulative impact of so many quiet moments makes itself felt.

For the most part, Creed III is a matter of clear, straightforward storytelling, with a well-balanced variety of action, feeling, character development and fan-pleasing callbacks. It’s a good movie.

This is a must-see film, not just for the primer it offers in how foodways, farming practices and larger environmental forces are crucially connected but for its dazzling imagery of nature in action, both by way of breathtaking close-ups and sensational aerial shots of the farm and its environs.

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

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.

There are few cinematic pleasures as satisfying to behold as an actor in a role that fits him like a Savile Row suit. Richard Gere offers just such gratification in Arbitrage, a silky, sophisticated Wall Street thriller that finds the actor utterly in his prime, wearing his age and accumulated emotional wisdom with warmth, charisma and nonstop appeal.

Somersault faces the difficulty of representing a girl's unspoken desires and anxieties, a challenge Shortland rises to with terrific skill and aplomb.

The Princess and the Frog invite viewers to see the world as a lively, mixed-up, even confounding place, to recognize essential parts of ourselves in what we see, and to say: This is what we look like.

The story, held at well-mannered arm’s length by Piani, never gets too messy; even Agathe’s deepest psychological issues — a phobia that makes travel difficult and, later, the explanation of its traumatic roots — are handled with efficient, unfailingly discrete politesse.

Deeply absorbing and moving with the caffeinated speed of Smith's own feisty campaign, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is at once a celebration of small-d democracy and an elegy to it, a portrait that will surely inspire and infuriate viewers.

A gorgeous and surprisingly profound meditation on a place and its people.

Although Sheridan has approached the setting with the sensitivity and respect of his deeply empathic protagonist, the film still bears a slight but inescapable whiff of cultural tourism.

Apparently, the answer is yes: Working from a well-judged script by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery and enlisting a superb cast of appealing ensemble players, Affleck has created something that Hollywood has seemed incapable of making in recent years: a smart, entertaining movie that, for all its foregone conclusions and familiar beats, unfolds with the offhand confidence of the most casually impressive layup.

Viewers are urged to grab an aisle seat, the better to dance when the music moves them -- as it surely will.

The fact that Beyond the Lights is so effective at both celebrating and critiquing extravagance and artifice can be credited to Prince-Bythewood’s shrewd understanding of the highly pitched cinematic vernacular she’s working with. Even more crucially, when it came time to cast the transformational figure at her fable’s center, she found the real thing.

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.

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.

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.

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

Designed to educate, outrage and finally spur viewers to action. That it does so with vibrant visual style and an engaging narrative makes it that rare consciousness-raising film that's not only good for you, but a joy to watch.

On one level, The Clan is an accomplished but not terribly original genre exercise — another story about amorality run amok, given an extra jolt from its real-life roots and heightened political context. What sets the film apart are the performances.

Arrives as a balm to seared adult psyches that have endured all manner of assaults at the multiplex this season.

So understatedly good.

So many of our problems remain, but 40 Years a Prisoner presents a valuable primer on what mistakes not to repeat.

If you can survive the F-bombs and the near-constant ethnic invective, Gran Torino is not to be missed, if only as the gutsy, thoroughly unexpected valedictory of an icon fully willing to spend every bit of his considerable capital.

Well, surprise: Honey Boy, Shia LaBeouf’s startlingly forthright, cathartic and beautifully acted movie based on his confusing and chaotic life as a child actor, winds up demonstrating what can go right, when the right elements are in place.

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.

The kind of movie that gives mainstream Hollywood star vehicles a good name.

The good news might be that Huppert wasn't available for Alias Betty, but the bad news is that it didn't stop France from exporting yet one more cold, pretentious, thoroughly dislikable study in sociopathy.

Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.

The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance. Still, Gordon-Levitt is superb, and Jeff Daniels delivers a wry and wily performance as Pratt's blind roommate.

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.

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.

A warm, earnestly entertaining film.

There's a place in the movies for wish fulfillment, no doubt, including the wish for it all to be over.

Surprisingly formulaic. So many scenes seem lifted from a 1950s melodrama, from Blake and Francis' repentent mother (Leslie Ann Warren) to the film's tearjerker of a final scene.

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

In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.

But even appreciated simply as a little-known chapter of European history, it proves consistently engrossing, edifying and affecting.

A charming, if limited, romantic comedy that examines post-collegiate angst with easy, unself-conscious humor.

These guys are funny.

You’ll laugh, all right. You’ll cry. You’ll do both at the same time. CODA is just that kind of movie. And thank goodness for it.

Actor and screenwriter Joel Kim Booster gives Jane Austen a brisk, lighthearted refresh in Fire Island, a hedonistic — but disarmingly sincere — ode to the eponymous gay vacation spot.

Like any successful comedy — or movie, for that matter — “Bros” succeeds in its specificity: in this case, gay life and culture that are brimming with foibles, contradictions, triumphs and failures just waiting to be mined for comic gold.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

Rather than a movie that breaks the mold, it looks like Anning has inspired one we've seen before.

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

It's a nicely balanced blend of comedy, drama and athletic dancing that plies its trade with winking, unforced self-assurance.

Straight Outta Compton reminds viewers not only who N.W.A. were and what they meant, but also why they mattered — and still do.

Captain Fantastic leaves viewers with the cheering, deeply affecting image of a dad whose superpowers lie in simply doing the best that he can.

As a film that dares to honor small moments and the life they add up to, Boyhood isn’t just a masterpiece. It’s a miracle.

A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.