Ann Hornaday

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.

Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable.

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

This is an example of a writer and director working in perfect harness, with Reed smoothly ratcheting up the story's suspense and Greene speculating on his cardinal theme of moral ambiguity. They don't make movies like The Fallen Idol anymore, all the more reason to see it now while you can.

The Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

Graced by superb performances, especially from Ashkenazi and Adler, this gentle but devastating portrait bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments.

Can be recommended even if just for the presence of Elaine May, who turns in her most charmingly ditzy performance since "A New Leaf."

If you think you've absorbed all you could about subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the arcana of elaborate derivatives, think again. Inside Job traces the history of the crisis and its implications with exceptional lucidity, rigor and righteous indignation.

That rare kids' movie that may be even more entertaining for its intended audience's adult companions.

If Kelly felt it necessary to add the new material, that's all to the good. It just means there's more to love.

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

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.

In a word, Hell or High Water is terrific.

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

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

Right up to its somewhat perfunctory but sneakily satisfying conclusion, Aquarius makes a compelling case for looking up from our ubiquitous distractions to take in the world around us — the one that we live in and, whether we’re aware of it or not, lives in us.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

Prove(s) once again how ingenious, artful and flat-out entertaining animation can be.

A film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.

Soaring, swooning and gently nostalgic, Brooklyn takes melodrama to a new level of reassuring simplicity and emotional transparency.

The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.

Harrowing, controlled and diabolically self-assured, Joshua leaves filmgoers teetering on their own emotional precipice, wondering just where pathos ends and pathology begins.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society. But the film concludes on an optimistic note, at least for the Dardennes. It's still the worst of times, the filmmakers seem to suggest, but we're still capable of humanity, if not hope.

Deliberately paced, unapologetically mannered and contemplatively attuned, If Beale Street Could Talk invites audiences to venture beyond the screen in front of them to connect with the characters and their world on a deeper, more mystical plane.

The bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humor, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

Hard to take in its particulars.

You’ve never seen Melissa McCarthy like this. And she’s not even the best thing about her new movie.

Hypnotically absorbing film.