Ann Hornaday

It's a love story as unruly, passionate and expansive as the flawed and fascinating people at its center. Bravi.

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.

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.

If you can survive the F-bombs and the near-constant ethnic invective, Gran Torino is not to be missed, if only as the gutsy, thoroughly unexpected valedictory of an icon fully willing to spend every bit of his considerable capital.

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.

Captain Fantastic leaves viewers with the cheering, deeply affecting image of a dad whose superpowers lie in simply doing the best that he can.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

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.

Only someone with intimate knowledge of the Midwest’s singular cadences, social codes and confounding emotional stew (er, covered hot dish) of aggression and politesse could pull off something as masterful, meaningful and poetic as Nebraska.

If it sometimes feels a bit contrived, and if its conclusion will leave some viewers unsatisfied, Triet has made a film that succeeds brilliantly — on terms that are as exacting, rigorous and precise as her unflappable heroine.

The narrative is lean, the supporting performances are solid, and, perhaps most crucially, the emotional tone of the piece is spot-on.

The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form.

The power of the film is cumulative, as the filmmaker spins a mesmerizing morality tale from the dross of daily life. In his skillful hands, the ordinary turns out to be anything but.

A mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.

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.

At its core, Mass exerts the power of ritual at its most reflective and galvanizing, reveling in human connection at its most arduous, persistent and sublime.

In this vibrant, lyrical, graphic, sobering and finally soaring testament to aesthetic and political expression, Noujaim consistently provides light where once there was heat.

A smart, alert, supremely entertaining movie.

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.

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

Waves is as exhilarating and terrifying as the roller-coaster ride of adolescence itself, plunging viewers into a world brimming with music and color and movement and hair-trigger reflexes that feels exterior and interior at the same time.

Qualifies as the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year.

This audacious hybrid of cinematic styles is pure entertainment.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande turns out to be a wise, amusing, unexpectedly touching exploration of human psyches, the bodies that house them and radical self-acceptance — by way of a literate two-hander executed by actors at supreme ease with each other and, by extension, their audience.

The title represents size and power, speed and hubris -- the very things the ship has come to stand for and the things that Cameron has restored to the cinema with grand, generous style.

Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece that refuses to follow the strictures of conventional cinematic structure, instead leading the audience on a circuitous journey down the myriad rabbit holes that comprise modern-day Manhattan.

A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

Feisty, funny, fizzy and deeply wise, Enough Said sparkles within and without, just like the rare gem that it is.