Ann Hornaday

There’s no doubt that Audiard has invested a story of grief, dispossession and desire with immediate, almost tactile, urgency. Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.

Intriguing, marvelously inventive documentary.

Written and directed with tart intelligence by Alice Wu, and featuring some dazzling breakout performances, this breezy, self-aware and utterly adorable coming-of-age tale keeps one eye on literary and cinematic classics, and the other firmly on a future full of exploration, self-expression and buoyant expectation.

Emerges as the summer's first true must-see film, required viewing for everyone, but especially audiences in Washington.

Set to an anachronistic pop soundtrack and an eye-poppingly attractive production design that would be right at home in a Wes Anderson movie, this is a film that dares you not to enjoy its material pleasures, even as you wonder if you should be laughing quite so hard at the jokes.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

Sometimes a movie comes along that, devoid of a noisy publicity push or festival buzz, quietly ambushes the unsuspecting viewer with an absorbing, skillfully executed, meaningful and thoroughly entertaining experience. Ladies and gentlemen, Borg vs. McEnroe is just that kind of film.

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.

Late Night turns out to be an enormously pleasing fable about liberating oneself from the need to please. Like all comedians worth their salt, Kaling sets out to kill — but with kindness.

Accomplishes a delicate balancing act, that of entertaining the audience with the thrills and adventure of the Andrea Gail's final journey.

Brad’s Status contains moments of delicate humor.

A near-masterpiece of a film set in the hothouse world of New York ballet.

A grand, sweeping nostalgia trip that evokes the sickness of an era even as it tries to find its essential humanity.

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a quietly astonishing directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter,” a crafty treatise on maternal ambivalence that delivers an unsettling emotional wallop.

It's the kind of absorbing, attractive, unfailingly tasteful enterprise that a critic can recommend without caveat.

Iris serves as a spirited, often dazzling primer in how to fight the dying of the light and feel fabulous while doing it.

As a winsome glance back, and as a piece of artistic preservation, Stan & Ollie would be enjoyable enough. But it becomes truly transcendent in the hands of John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, who play Ollie and Stan with intelligence and spirit that go beyond their own uncanny physical performances.

A Bigger Splash manages to infuse even the most straightforward questions with vicariously alluring ambiguity.

This is a handsome, hugely enjoyable movie that invites the spectators to reflect on precisely what they value, both on screen and off. “Is it good?” is a question repeatedly asked throughout Non-Fiction. When it comes to the myriad subjects at hand, the debate rages on. As for the movie itself, the answer is a resounding yes.

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.

Like all great movies, Get Out faithfully obeys the conventions of its genre — in this case horror films shot through with brutal wit and sharp-eyed allegory — while getting at profound psychic and political realities. The shocks and the laughs are thoroughly entertaining, but it’s the truth of Get Out that’s so real.

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

Accompanied by an expressively lush jazz-blues score by Lee’s regular composer Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman announces from the jump that viewers are in for a lush, sensory treat as Lee plays with the film vernacular he’s manipulated so adroitly and expressively for three decades.

Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.

The movie's best moments belong to Bill Murray,

The movie is, to borrow Rob's phrase, unassailably cool.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

In the judicious hands of director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton, it feels not new exactly, but fresh and urgent and more timely than ever.