Ann Hornaday

Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.

With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.

Stanley Kubrick's wicked sendup of the then-burgeoning military-industrial complex is still lacerating today. Which is better, George C. Scott's bull-like portrayal of Gen. Buck Turgidson ("Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed") or the Peter Sellers trifecta of Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, Dr. Strangelove and President Merkin Muffley? You'll watch it and weep -- from laughter and maybe just a hint of despair. [13 June 2004, p.N03]

Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.

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.

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

See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better.

The result is something akin to cinematic hypertext, and thanks to Thompson’s steady hand, the brief but deep dives are richly rewarding.

Intense, unflinching, bold in its simplicity and radical in its use of image, sound and staging, 12 Years a Slave in many ways is the defining epic so many have longed for to examine — if not cauterize — America’s primal wound.

Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

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

The dopest thing about The Wackness is Thirlby, who, after supporting turns in "Juno" and "Snow Angels," is quickly becoming reason enough to see any film she's in.

Thanks to Cuarón’s prodigious gifts, Gravity succeeds simultaneously as a simple classic shipwreck narrative (albeit at zero-gravity), and as an utterly breathtaking restoration of size and occasion to the movies themselves.

McQueen’s vocabulary is on particularly glorious display in this lambent gem of a film.

The Social Network has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will.

True to its title, Portrait of a Lady on Fire generates more than its share of heat, even if it never truly becomes an engulfing flame.

A brilliant piece of filmic writing, one that bursts with fierce urgency, not just for the long-unresolved history it seeks to confront, but also in its attempt to understand what is happening here, right now.

Amour is a must-see film that not everyone must see, at least right now.

When viewers are ultimately released from The Hurt Locker's exhilarating vice grip, they'll find themselves shaken, energized and, more than likely, eager to see it again.

By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.

Directed by Alexander Nanau with an alert eye for character and detail, this alternately illuminating and infuriating portrait of everyday bureaucratic corruption becomes a much larger, and more disturbing, portrayal of structural incompetence, indifference and moral rot.

It’s possible to watch Carol simply for its velvety beauty, but chances are that, by that stunning final moment, filmgoers will realize with a start that they care far more about the problems of these two people than they might have realized.

Amazing Grace can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory. And even more gratifyingly, it is as simple and unaffected as Aretha Franklin herself is in the film.

Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.

Through it all, Spall is equally enigmatic and transfixing: With his guttural croaks and barks, his Turner is often difficult to understand, but, thanks to Spall’s amazing physical performance and Leigh’s sensitive, information-laden direction, he’s never incomprehensible.

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

A big, fat old-fashioned gush of passion as drawn through a post-modernist prism that makes it less easily comprehensible but more beguiling.

As visually stunning as it is, though, the film's most enduring gift is the simplicity and sensitivity with which it was made by Truffaut. [19 Dec 2008, p.WE29]

This is that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions.

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

Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.

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

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

The real star in La La Land is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the “Singin’ in the Rain” era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave...while commenting on them from the sidelines.

Lady Bird is a triumph of style, sensibility and spirit. The girl at its center may not be a heavyweight, but her movie is epic.

In American Utopia, Lee brings the same insight and sensitivity to Byrne’s stage show, which bursts forth with an exuberant mixture of optimistic joy and wistful nostalgia.

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.

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

This soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

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

Tár, the film that wraps around its mesmerizing antiheroine like a fawn-colored cashmere wrap, is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into an unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.

Could be filed under "wacky misfire."

A searing, apocalyptic and finally breathtaking drama.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.

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

Crammed, cheek to jowl, with bleak moments, high hopes, sweetness and naked emotion.

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

In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance and human dignity, Sissako has created a film that’s a privilege to watch.

The Act of Killing is a must-see.

With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.

On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.

Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.

Preserves and resuscitates the hard-boiled genre.

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.

A glamorous, alluring entertainment that revels in the artifice of Hollywood while exposing its corrupt heart, L.A. Confidential pays stylish homage to some of the great film noirs of the distant and recent past.

A lyrical, mysterious and provocative meditation on the power of memory and narrative, After Life is a fascinating speculation on life and death -- until its plot takes a turn so melodramatic that the spell is broken. [20 Aug 1999, p.3E]

Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.

What’s surprising is that Jonze has taken what could easily have been a glib screwball comedy and infused it instead with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling.

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

Chomet's vision is singularly strange and somber, and one of enormous originality and promise.

Thanks to his courage and Rasmussen’s compassion and creativity, “Flee” morphs from a tale of dispossession to a testament to the power of narrative — to overtake a life, and to liberate it.

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

With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.

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.

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

Gracefully moving between the infinite and the practical, the celestial and the implacably grounded, Guzman has created a sensitive, richly textured portrait of time and place that transcends both those conceits.

Anything that inspires that many whoops, gasps and groans with only two actors and a few choice words has earned its place at the summertime box office trough.

Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss.

Licorice Pizza is at its best — and is genuinely charming — when it’s simply focused on Gary and Alana — two mixed-up kids trying to make their way in a world that feels promising and perilous in equal measure.

We might go into a Kelly Reichardt movie thinking we’ll be told a story, but we emerge with our consciousness subtly and radically altered.

It's all too zany and madcap and Woody Allen-redux to be remotely credible, but Ira & Abby turns out to be witty and winning, in large part because of its cast.

A tough movie to love.

Its elegiac themes might make All of Us Strangers sound like a bummer, when it’s anything but. This is an intriguing, increasingly mystifying rabbit hole disguised as a romantic drama, with all the sensuous pleasures the genre suggests (not to mention some superfun synth-pop cuts from Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys).

Hours, even days later, they may find themselves thinking of Adèle and wondering how she’s doing — only then realizing how completely this fictional but very real creation has winnowed her way into their hearts and minds. That’s great acting. It’s great art. And that’s why Blue Is the Warmest Color is a great movie.

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

The Souvenir Part II may bring an end to the introduction of a marvelous filmmaker to a wider world. But far more promisingly, it suggests what, with luck, will be an exhilarating next chapter.

The great joy of watching a Pixar production is how it rewards not only younger viewers but their older companions as well.

It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.

This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

Audiard delivers on and exceeds the promise he evinced in that earlier film, drawing viewers into the densely layered, ruthless ecology of a French prison and, against all odds, making them not mind staying there awhile.

Has the sentiment and sweetness of a good coming-of-age movie but lacks the drive and pulse that makes for a great rock and roll movie.

As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills, not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.

A near-perfect film, an artfully crafted, flawlessly acted meditation on love, memory and invented history that’s both deeply personal and politically attuned.

Even the uninitiated will be hard-pressed to resist the movie's charms, from its likable leading players and its charming Dublin setting to its wistful take on modern love.

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

What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by the tidal pull of place and history.

In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.

United 93 unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a modern-day "Battle of Algiers," with Greengrass exerting superb control of tone, structure and pace...United 93 may be the best movie I ever hated.

Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.

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

Ingenious, exhilarating, funny and profound.

The dynamic between Fletcher and Andrew makes for highly pitched drama, which strains for credibility during two climactic scenes.

As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.

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.

Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer.

Part travelogue, part road picture, part meditation on class, mortality and intimacy, this extraordinary little movie might be the perfect harbinger of summer, as astute as it is steamy.