Ann Hornaday

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]