Ann Hornaday

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

Beautifully shot and edited with swift efficiency, Black Gold joins a cadre of recent films that shine a welcome light on how the stuff we buy gets to us and, more to the point, how the price of that stuff often has little to do with its real cost.

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

Tells Yuri's story with the same bravado and stylishness as Scorsese at his finest, with bigger-than-life characters and situations splashing across the screen in breathtaking scale.

If the setting is claustrophobic, it's also bracingly beautiful, a contradiction that is every bit in keeping with Sokurov's preference for ambiguity over clarity.

Imbued with a greater degree of psychological darkness than before.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society. But the film concludes on an optimistic note, at least for the Dardennes. It's still the worst of times, the filmmakers seem to suggest, but we're still capable of humanity, if not hope.

Engaging entertainment and a great work of art.

A crafty, swift, subtly stylish thriller.

With one foot planted in the world of comic book fantasy and the other firmly stuck in the grim realities of high school, this is one of those rare family films that truly work for the whole family, even if Mom and Pop might find themselves needing earplugs during some exceedingly long and loud passages.

The Cortez family flies into action with the same testy family dynamics, silly humor and cool gadgetry that animated the first Spy Kids.

Jarmusch manages to imbue banality with surprising beauty and humor.

It testifies to art's vitality and endurance, despite its marketers' -- and sometimes even its makers' -- efforts to the contrary.

A bummer, but one that manages to stick to its depraved convictions until the strange and bitter end.

This is an exceptionally assured debut, and Montiel exhibits rare care with editing and sound design. His real forte, though, is casting, to which a brief scene featuring Downey and the incandescent Rosario Dawson powerfully attests.

Ravishing, often entrancing paean to a pastime that has hooked more than its share of hard-core addicts.

Thanks to Rock's running monologue, combining scathing humor with trenchant observations, the film manages to be side-splitting even while making its most poignant points.

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

Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie we need, right now.

An engrossing piece of social history, a lively, astonishingly well-documented excavation of that period.

Smith makes it look easy, but underneath the physical high jinks and slick veneer of I, Robot lies a performance of real discipline and intelligence.

If “The Black Panthers” has been designed to leave viewers outraged and energized in equal measure, it succeeds with admirable style. It counts both as essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now.

That Detropia won't be just another well-reported urban obituary is clear from the film's arresting opening moments.

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

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

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.

Elmo graciously shares the stage with a cast of players who will not only delight youngsters but will come as sweet relief to grown-ups.

Like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday before him, Tatum is sublime at playing dumb (as a dim pretty boy, he seems to be channeling Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading"), just as Hill shrewdly deploys his body mass for maximum physical comedy (even slimmed down, with an Oscar nomination under that tightened belt, he carries himself with a fat man's comically elephantine grace).

Tough, tender and observational, “Sorry, Baby” suggests that Victor’s promising career has been suitably launched.

An engaging, modestly amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious comedy of manners in which the usual millennial excesses are skewered, from the invidious hellhole of social media to the mendacities of online dating.

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.

It takes superior artistry to take the rude, crude and socially unmentionable and make it feel upliftingly wholesome. Such is the magic of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the dynamic duo at the playful, prurient, occasionally perverse heart of Sisters.

Director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) brings handsome period production values and a lyrical, restrained sensibility to a narrative that might not qualify as riveting, but exerts its own unmistakable emotional pull.

If Pelosi’s preoccupation with extremes gives short shrift to the majority of Americans who don’t see everything through a political lens, her wide range and curiosity provide a portrait that is vivid, textured and deeply disheartening.

In the taut, emotionally gripping documentary Dinosaur 13, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller meticulously re-creates seven eventful, tense and finally heartbreaking years.

As with Wadjda, Mansour gives audiences a candid, often wryly amusing glimpse of life inside the Saudi kingdom, which is so often cloaked in opacity and menace.

First Class happily delivers on the escapism and rich narrative texture the best of its predecessors have promised.

With warmth, unsparing self-awareness and that ineffable Everyman appeal sometimes called "relatability," Birbiglia proves to be as engaging a presence on the screen as he has been all these years onstage and over the radio waves.

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.

Through vivid archival material and voice-overs, the filmmakers create moving vignettes that, taken together, form a fascinating primer on nonviolence as a political force and discipline.

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

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

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.

What does The Future hold? Wonders, each of them weirder and more unnerving than the last.

Lasseter and his team plunge the audience into a collective case of empty- nest syndrome, with a dash of mortal terror thrown in for grins. And again, they make it work.

Provides a welcome seasonal dash of wholesomeness and humor.

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

With modesty, precision and wry compassion, I Used to Go Here limns human nature at its most contradictory and indefinable, offering a textbook example — at least until the right German word comes along.

Spielberg has created an appropriate showcase for the magnificent creature that emerges, one that recalls the great movie horses of yore in a story guaranteed to pluck, grab and wring viewers' hearts, but thankfully not break them.

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

The wittiest jokes and cameo appearances are designed to soar far over the heads of young filmgoers and into the atavistic pop consciousness of their adult companions.

It's popcorn pulp that collided -- at 100 mph, natch -- with a far more sober and crafty grown-up movie.

Aside from Lillard, the stand-out here is Cook, who plays a new breed of post-feminist Cinderella with a convincing mix of seriousness and vulnerability (although just once, it would be nice if Cinderella could keep her glasses on and still be beautiful). With her doe eyes and peaches-and-organic-yogurt complexion, Cook resembles a young Winona Ryder (if that's possible), right down to the appealing blend of sweetness and self-assurance. [29 Jan 1999: 1E]

Filled with so much heartbreaking beauty, Bringing Out the Dead might be best described as an artist's sketchbook, a series of tableaux and ideas that provide a telling glimpse of a director whose work is always evolving.

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.

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.”

This handsomely staged production plays like a soothingly thoughtful balm.

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.

The comedy that Feldstein and the filmmakers find in Johanna’s often disastrous attempts to become herself keeps the movie afloat; what keeps it tethered to reality is the universal drama of a young woman finding her voice without losing her soul.

Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.

Like a seductively lambent hall of mirrors, The Bling Ring lays bare the venality of train-wreck celebrity culture, striving and self-deception by dramatizing a fact that’s as delicious as it is depressing.

Luckily, Morris caught up with Harcourt-Smith before she left for the next stop: She’s the best thing about My Psychedelic Love Story, and a far more sympathetic and compelling character than the man she almost risked her life for.

The new Karate Kid brings fresh life and perspective to the classic tale of perseverance and cross-generational friendship, thanks to Harald Zwart's sensitive direction and two exceptionally appealing stars.

With Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon has crafted an endearing bagatelle, made with equal parts brio and love, ambition and pared-down modesty.

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.

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

This is a movie squarely directed at adolescents in all their untamed desire, outsize emotion and near-bottomless self-obsession. The filmmakers have crafted a canny delivery system for their life lessons, by way of a movie that balances escapism, candor and ethics with admirable aplomb.

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.

What might have been just another anodyne promo piece or solipsistic valentine instead becomes a funny, eccentric and finally deeply poignant depiction of art, family, ­self-sabotage and the prickly intricacies of brotherly love.

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

In hewing so closely to life — in all its frailty and fellowship, its perseverance and mutual care — Jones has made something larger than life.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t always straddle its stories and time periods with the utmost grace. But the film — which John Lee Hancock directed from a script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith — more than makes up for its occasionally unwieldy structure in telling a fascinating and ultimately deeply affecting story.

Grounded in the direct, disarming truth of their experience, the movie has a straightforward lack of cheap sentiment that saves it from being either too maudlin or saccharine-sweet.

An absorbing, illuminating film.

Of Miyazaki’s many gifts as a filmmaker, perhaps the most subtle is the way he honors time and silence and stillness, values that are in lamentably short supply in most modern-day productions.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t just announce a promising new talent in Jackson. It serves as a shimmering, dreamlike reminder that movies are as good for poetry as for prose.

There is undeniable power in Magnolia, in which small moments of truth are given epic gravitas, not just by Anderson's adroit cinematic style (no one's camera is more restless or inquisitive), but by the wisdom and compassion of the characters he creates.

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.

Nostalgia trips are fun, but when they intersect with genius, virtuosity and genuine revelatory insight, they take viewers to a higher place.

A quietly resonant movie about the painful alliance between single mothers and their daughters, and the complicated drama of separation.

In a World . . . is a lot of fun, reflecting Bell’s own obvious love of piquant paradox and the music of the spoken word. But it also has a sharply observant streak that makes it as nourishing as it is endearingly nutty.

A soaring, sympathetic ode to the outlaws, subversives and insurgents who occupy the edges of popular culture, making them safe for everyone else's dreams.

Howl mixes a number of story lines and aesthetic approaches: We get glimpses of Ginsberg's early days as a poet, including his relationships with Kerouac and Neal Cassady, as well as a depiction of the trial, where a parade of critics and professors pronounced Ginsberg's creation either a work of genius or irredeemable filth.

If Reilly’s presence gives Kong: Skull Island its playful, gonzo edge, it’s the title character himself who gives it soul, morphing from a monster into a brooding symbol of the colossal folly of military belligerence and hegemonic hubris.

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

As an exercise in sincerity, fellowship and earnest inquiry, it might be the most subversive movie in circulation right now.

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.

The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged.

The weakest link in Unknown - okay, other than the utter preposterousness of its entire premise - is Jones, who as a modern-day version of Hitch's ice queens can't hold her own with the likes of Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint.

As provocative as the questions it raises are — questions about connoisseurship vs. populism, personal expression vs. the market, and the dark arts of press, publicity and shrewd self-invention — the film’s achievements stay on the surface of those themes rather than plunging deeper.

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

Although Knightley’s Gun often seems to be a passive figure, buffeted by the machinations of those around her, the film’s honesty about the enormous personal costs of whistleblowing is a welcome relief from more romanticized heroics.

A bracing, quietly exhilarating documentary.

An elegant romantic thriller adapted from a novel of the same name, is a terrific film.

Hang in there and Despicable Me turns into an improbably heartwarming, not to mention visually delightful, diversion.

If Slade doesn't necessarily advance the medium with this installment, he nonetheless advances the franchise, with enough lucidity and skill that he's persuaded at least one erstwhile agnostic to take a stand.

Shower makes for a lovely and poignant journey.

A clever slice of regional noir that carries a gale-force punch beneath its modest, soft-spoken trappings.

Equal parts celebration and self-congratulation.

With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.

So understatedly good.

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.

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.

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

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.

A whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.

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.”

As compelling as Warner’s story is, Crown Heights never quite takes hold cinematically. It’s a procedural whose central protagonist remains necessarily passive and something of a cipher, despite the wellsprings of emotion that Stanfield manages to tap simply by gazing balefully out a cell window.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Director Pedro Kos makes lively use of archival footage and animation in Rebel Hearts, but the stars are the women themselves.

Shot through with a bold, extravagant generosity of spirit, this journey behind the literal and figurative looking glass marks a gratifying return to form for Gilliam.

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

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.

Suffused with wry humor, vulnerability and radiant warmth, Huppert’s performance captures that delicate period in life during which resignation morphs into graceful, even grateful, acceptance.

Still, The Courier makes a smart, stylish stand for the kind of old-fashioned period spy thriller that is increasingly being turned into bingeable series for streaming services. Its modesty and carefully managed ambitions define its strong suit at a time when such films are scarcer every day.

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.

Dutifully covering the rise, fall and final triumph of Cohen’s career, Broomfield relegates Ihlen to the background of her own story, before bringing her back for the film’s touching final act and devastating epilogue. Achieving the kind of balance to which Cohen always aspired, Marianne & Leonard is heartbreaking and heartening in Zen-like equal measure.

The Last Duel is an entertaining movie, even an intriguing one. But audiences might be forgiven for thinking, upon leaving the theater, that they’ve just been very nobly and very honorably mansplained.

A wise, warm, funny and touching romantic drama.

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.

Baby Ruby makes a valuable contribution to the emerging cinematic literature on the unspoken realities of women’s lived experience — with style, disarming honesty, and a steady and intelligent hand.

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

The comedy is far more subtle and elusive than laugh-out-loud. It’s a reflective, even occasionally tedious slice of daily life that relies on Moore to sell its dullest interludes — sequences that aren’t made any livelier by Lelio’s parched, washed-out visual design.

Like summer movies themselves, it’s become so easy to be glib in dismissing Tom Cruise. “Edge of Tomorrow” provides welcome and hugely entertaining evidence that he’s still a star of considerable gifts, and savvy enough not to let them be squandered just yet.

In many ways, Jimmy’s Hall shows what the pursuit of happiness can look like, and why it’s worth a revolution to protect it.

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.

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.

It’s an exceptional film, not because of its protagonists’ impressive triumphs, but because it honors their struggle.

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

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.

Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.

Viewers may get the sense that The Imitation Game leaves Turing’s essential mysteries intact, but they will nonetheless find even the most public contours of his story ripe with drama, excitement and deeply affecting resonance.

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.

A movie as intensely subjective as Woman at War had better have an actress deserving of unwavering attention, and Erlingsson has found her in Geirharosdottir, who proves to be supremely at ease with both the physical demands of the film and its trickier internal journeys (not to mention a neat bit of visual legerdemain).

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 pleasantly seedy crime thriller.

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.

Burton finely balances excess and restraint to create an absorbing, visually rich world of his very own.

As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."

As a 30-something coming-of-age story, Colossal is as relatable as they come, its deadpan depiction of lost sheep recalling the Charlize Theron movie “Young Adult.” Vigalondo doesn’t evince the same cynicism and anger as that film reveled in so bitterly, but he’s also not one for easy allegorical equivalencies.

Sunny, slimy and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash and bluster that’s preceded it.

A murder caper that could have been written by Agatha Christie during a pub-crawl.

It's half of a really good movie, full of the enchantment, emotion and incident for which the Potter series has become so fanatically cherished.

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.

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.

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

On Stranger Tides feels as fresh and bracingly exhilarating as the day Jack Sparrow first swashed his buckle.

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.

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

When Layne and Theron are together, The Old Guard transcends its pulp provenance to become a soulful, emotionally grounded portrait of female mentorship and mutual respect.

The power of images — to distort, define, denigrate and celebrate — emerges with clarity and force in Through a Lens Darkly, a fascinating, visually stunning, emotionally devastating documentary by Thomas Allen Harris.

The filmmaker’s dedication to non-judgment occasionally militates against narrative drive: Beyond the Hills begins to sag in its middle sequences, when the repetitive monotony of Alina’s outbursts begins to yield diminishing returns. But he has made a film that’s worth even those wearying sequence.

For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, Bad Lieutenant scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.

If the family dynamics feel perfunctory and too-neatly resolved by the end of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal of stymied creativity, exacting taste and sensibilities too bold and well-judged for an uncaring world manages to be funny and uncompromising in equal measure.

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?

Somber and serious-minded, the live-action Mulan is a movie that has grown up alongside its original audience, which is presumably old enough to crave something heavier in its entertainment diet. Little girls might be better off sticking with the cartoon for now; but this opulent, ambitious production and Liu’s focused, intrepid performance at its center, gives them something to grow into.

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.

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 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.

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

Beauty Is Embarrassing stays true to White's own exacting standards: It's thoughtful, skillfully executed and pure pop pleasure, from start to finish.

The Switch, to its credit, really is about a boy, who with the help of a sensitive, sad-eyed kid, stands a chance of becoming a man.

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

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

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.

If de Wit’s idea of story is sometimes gratingly simplistic and sentimental, there’s no denying its primal classicism, or the seductive pull of sound and image at their most pure and unfussy.

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

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.

A kinetically charged gridiron drama that is enormous fun to watch.

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

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

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.

Writer, director and actor Cooper Raiff delivers an ingratiating turn as a cheerful lost soul in Cha Cha Real Smooth, a post-college coming-of-age story of intergenerational lust and the rocky road to adulthood.

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.

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

Almodovar has created an ecstatic homage to the women who have inspired him all his life.

In Babe: Pig in the City, the sunny mood of the Hoggett Farm has been supplanted by darker urban tones, suggesting the arrival of a new cinematic genre: Barnyard Noir.

With The Card Counter, Schrader has reverted to form, but he’s remade it anew at the same time. He’s done it again, with crafty, haunting power.

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

Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self-conscious artifice.

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.

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

An engaging yarn and a moving character study, but it's also a sweet, sad glimpse of everyone's future.

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.

There are times when French Exit beggars belief and tries the viewer’s patience. But as long as the camera stays on Pfeiffer, we’re all hers.

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.

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.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye gives viewers an absorbing, amusing and provocative chance to rethink yet another train wreck who turned out to be, of all things, human.

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

Thanks to the taste and shrewd judgment of director Julio Quintana, this funny, heartwarming movie provides just the right combination of adventure, character-driven humor, spiritual depth and inspirational uplift.

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.

True Grit has sweep and scope and entertainment value to burn, but it's Mattie who invests even the grandest aesthetic elements with meaning.

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.

It provides a sturdy, often exhilarating bridge between the present and a past that not only isn’t distant, but isn’t even really past.

Peppered with tense action sequences and propelled by a characteristically gorgeous musical score by Terence Blanchard, Harriet is the kind of instructional, no-nonsense biopic that may not take many artistic risks or sophisticated stylistic departures but manages to benefit from that lack of pretension.

Hacksaw Ridge winds up being a rousing piece of entertainment that also happens to be an affecting portrait of spiritual faith and simple human decency.

Beyond the music itself, The Sparks Brothers offers viewers a bracing example of musical curiosity and extraordinary resilience — not to mention the singular pleasure of working at your craft long enough to be accused of ripping off the acts who have been stealing from you for 50 years. The Maels live. And living Mael is the best revenge.

An intriguing speculative drama.

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.

One thousand points of light never looked so fetching.

As a lucid, emotionally involving portrait of the looming crisis surrounding water - supplies of which are dwindling as contamination rises - Jessica Yu's smartly constructed argument works less as a tutorial than as an infectiously impassioned call to arms.

It's tough to guess who will enjoy Secretariat more -- filmgoers who remember the extraordinary events of 1973, when the chestnut 3-year-old won the first Triple Crown in 25 years, or those for whom the story is brand-new.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

Even within the confines of its generic plot and sometimes stilted dialogue, Concrete Cowboy winds up being an engaging and moving family drama. Its sincerity, accomplished cast and proud Philadelphia roots manage to keep it real.

This meditation on violence explores the toxic knock-on effect of powerlessness and overcompensation, delivering a potent essay on the roots of society's most primal evils.

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.

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.

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

Kokomo City, D. Smith’s impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer.

The raunchy, guy-centric comedy Hot Tub Time Machine makes a vertiginously high-concept bid to be this year's version of "The Hangover" and darned if it doesn't succeed.

Harrison plays Rickey with a jutting jaw, squinting eye and hoarse bark straight out of the Irascible Old Coot playbook, his character constantly invoking God and the almighty dollar to justify what became known as Rickey’s “noble experiment.”

A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.

Viewers may not agree about what they’ve seen when they come out of Noah. But there’s no doubt that Aronofsky has made an ambitious, serious, even visionary motion picture, whose super-sized popcorn-movie vernacular may occasionally submerge the story’s more reflective implications, but never drowns them entirely.

Winterbottom ("Welcome to Sarajevo," "Go Now") has filmed Wonderland with a hand-held 16 millimeter camera, lending the production an air of scrappy immediacy that is often arrestingly at odds with Michael Nyman's overheated musical score.

A quirky and satisfying love story.

"Don't tell, show" has been the writer's imperative for generations; Coppola takes that edict to its most visual and satisfying extremes.

I, Daniel Blake is about human value: disposable and abstract in one context; eternal, inviolable and sacred in another. They might underline the point a bit too thickly, but Loach and Laverty count on their audience to discern the difference, and to act accordingly.

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.

This is a sequel that wears its well-worn formula, mocking inside jokes and gleeful taste for overkill proudly, flying the high-lowbrow flag for audiences that like their comedy just smart enough to be not-too-dumb.

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

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.

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.

Each and every detail accrues to create a vivid, unforgettable portrait, and all are absorbed and reflected by Anna, portrayed by Trzebuchowska with the transparency and wonder of a woman for whom not just history but secular life itself is almost totally abstract.

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

Sets up a mood of tensile suspense from the beginning and never lets it go.

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

Despite its familiar, come-from-behind contours, the story brims with redemptive optimism that it comes by honestly, thanks to its extraordinary main character and the equally remarkable actor who plays him.

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

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.

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

The French actor Alex Descas is mesmerizing in 35 Shots of Rum, where he plays a metro conductor.

This is a movie that imbues even the hoariest quest-peril-life lesson tropes of family animated films and imbues them with new life and rhythm.

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.

There’s no doubt that Killers of the Flower Moon reflects a shift in energy that is defensible — even necessary — from an ethical point of view. Narratively, that pivot results in a film that, it must be said, feels leeched of the energy and vigor viewers associate with Scorsese at his most exhilarating.

Like The Father last year, The Humans makes the set a character in itself: Karam has concocted a diabolically creaky duplex whose wonky corners and jury-rigged improvements take on an increasingly sinister patina as the meal progresses.

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.

Despite its over-credulous willingness to go along on what through one lens amounts to a massive ego trip, Nyad manages to be a celebration of perseverance, self-belief and learning how to be loved.

The result is a relatively straightforward slice-of-life biopic, bogged down with flashbacks and backstage histrionics, that nonetheless offers an utterly transfixing glimpse at the art of screen performance writ gloriously, glamorously large.

Fans of Fassbender's yummy performances in this year's "Jane Eyre" and "X-Men: First Class" should be forewarned that, although we see the handsome Irish actor in the altogether, Shame is strangely un-sexy.

As a full-on celebration of beauty in all its forms, this gem of a contemporary melodrama invites viewers to plunge into a world of unerring taste and luxury, where even tragedy comes softly when it inevitably arrives.

Regardless of how they feel about the main character, most viewers are likely to leave the theater reminded of Stone’s instinctive brilliance as a filmmaker — his grasp of visual language not just to tell a story but to expose its essential emotional core.

Although the jokey anecdotes and animated sequences give “My Old School” buoyancy and momentum, that tone sometimes fights with content that isn’t nearly as larky as the film portrays it. Still, there’s no denying that Brandon and his exploits make for an engrossing, often witty meditation on what it means to grow and evolve.

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

If The Eyes of Tammy Faye is skimpy, it's still an important correction to the record about this fascinating and misunderstood woman, who turns out to be much more than just her makeup.

Its virtuosity, wit, fleet performances and cool self-awareness notwithstanding, T2 doesn’t feel like a necessary film as much as a respectful and respectable exercise in fan service.

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.

The Avengers has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.

The casting coup here is Benedict Cumberbatch, who exudes steely resolve and silken savagery as a villain on the cusp of becoming a legendary nemesis.

Suffragette is an absorbing, ultimately moving portrait of thwarted ideals that rings all too true today.

Enola Holmes offers brisk and exuberant escape from the heaviness of modern times, with its leading actress lending her own appealing touches to the journey. When the game is afoot, she's more than capable, not just of keeping up, but winning the day.

Smith shows the grasp of character and offbeat humor that really registered in "Clerks," and a subtler mastery of film fluidity and professionalism than anything in the cheesy, amateurish "Mallrats."

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.

One of the unique virtues of the cinema is its ability to bring history to life with engrossing detail and gripping immediacy; East-West does this.

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.

Patti Cake$ winds up being a celebration of art, enterprise and self-invention that’s as tough as it is touching. At the risk of mixing metaphors, not to mention musical genres, it rocks.

In an era beset with dizzying setbacks in the ideals it celebrates, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round feels particularly necessary right now.

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.

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

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

Florence Foster Jenkins brims with love for its characters and forbearance for even their most blinkered self-deception.

For Sama is a before-and-after portrait, both literally and figuratively. What begins as a brash, bold, giddily optimistic love story devolves into something far darker, as viewers begin to question why al-Khateab is willing to endanger her child in the name of doomed principles.

West of Memphis makes a lucid, absorbing contribution to an epic saga that Berlinger and Sinofsky first wrestled into an 18-year-long narrative that changed two lives and saved one. And it gives that epic an ending that's happy, sad, inspiring, infuriating, right and terribly wrong, all at the same time.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn't overplay the film's hear-me-roar subversions.

Most vividly, The Swell Season captures the insistent, borderline-disturbing energy of fandom at its most rabid and psychically intrusive.