Ann Hornaday

Holofcener has accrued a rabid, loyal following for her singular brand of observant wit and aching tenderness. Both pour forth in abundance in Please Give, a wry, wistful portrait of contemporary urban manners.

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.

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

A delicious slow-burn of a movie, the kind of coming-of-age tale that looks familiar on the surface only to reveal hidden depths of beauty and meaning.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

Coogan and Brydon might scoff at such sentimentality, but over the course of the Trip films, they’ve shown us that world, at its most aspirationally easeful and epicurean. Even more brilliantly — and affectingly — they’ve constructed a world between them, an airy, reality-adjacent universe conjured in billowing clouds of witticisms, idle observations, passive-aggressive feints and silent, solitary reflections. Did they ever really live there? Maybe not. But it’s been a delightful place to visit.

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.

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.

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.

James White gets up close and personal in often discomfiting ways, but it’s never exploitative or glib. It hits the highs, and the rock bottoms, and all the damnable stuff in between.

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.

The pure athletics of Free Solo, which chronicles Honnold’s months-long training regimen as well as his subsequent attempts, would be spectacle enough to create an entertaining film.

What’s being marketed as a sober, straightforward sci-fi drama (the words “Bring him home” superimposed on an unsmiling Matt Damon inside a space helmet) is instead a smart, exhilarating, often disarmingly funny return to classic adventures of yore.

Absorbing, artfully executed.

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.

Like its protagonist, First Man doesn’t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively.

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

In Myers’s capable hands, and with a powerful, vanity-free performance by Monaghan, Fort Bliss joins “Coming Home” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” as a movie deeply in sync, not just with the military characters it depicts, but also with the civilian world that awaits them with such confoundingly mixed messages.

New Order recalls 2019’s Oscar-winning Parasite, but unlike that film’s superficial rich-people-bad/Quentin-Tarantino-good message, this one is far more grounded, both in reality and genuinely original thinking.

Say this much for Fennell: She is incapable of pulling punches. Even when they’re swaddled in the puffiest, fuzziest of gloves, her blows land with gut-wrenching force.

For every misgiving The Eagle Huntress invites, it offers inspiration in equal measure, taking the audience on a beautiful, thrilling journey to a part of the world that is still largely inaccessible. And it introduces them to a young woman who gives bravery a bracing, unforgettable face.

A compelling, complex, confounding film.

The Fabelmans does it all, with an expansive spirit and that quintessential Spielbergian combination of honesty and sentiment. It tells the truth, at a honeyed, ameliorating slant.

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

With Les Misérables, Ly delivers a passionate protest on behalf of an entire generation, whose future has largely been foreclosed. His, on the other hand, is astonishingly bright.

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 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.

Absorbing, inspiring and terrifically entertaining, Undefeated earns its title: It's a winner all the way.