Ann Hornaday

Telling an old story in a new way and infusing what might have been a dry political polemic with poetry, passion and unlikely warmth.

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

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 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.

In a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that Ad Astra feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.

With City Hall, Wiseman brings his quiet observational skills to the day-to-day operations of local government, which is why the film is so well-timed for this particular moment.

Citizenfour isn’t just a useful primer in the civil liberties and consent issues his disclosures raised. It humanizes a man who almost immediately became controversialized as a naive, self-important desk jockey or, worse, a handmaiden to terrorists everywhere.

Well worth the wait.

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

Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.

As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.

As a sly chamber piece, it re­assures and unsettles in equal, exquisitely calibrated measure.

Thanks to Lewin's light but assured touch, The Sessions never wears its theological preoccupations heavily, instead allowing transcendence to creep up on the audience quietly.

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.

Rather than probe Giacometti and Lord’s curiously arms-length relationship, Final Portrait is at its best simply watching the artist work — the “artist,” in this case, meaning both Giacometti and Rush.

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.

A must-see for any student of history, political rhetoric and film poetics at their most vagrant and revelatory.

The result is a classic on a par with “Winesburg, Ohio” and “Our Town,” a narrow slice of contemporary American life that manages to be both admiring, yet capable of polite skepticism.

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.

Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

He (Herzog) emerged with a breathtaking tour of art that, in its formal sophistication, dynamism and rhythmic lines, looks as bold and new as Cezanne's work must have looked in the 1860s.

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.

The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

(Penn)'s is a lovely, soulful performance in a movie that manages to imbue tragedy with just the right grace note of insouciance -- a movie worthy of Woody Allen himself.

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.

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.

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