Ann Hornaday

This endearing, thoroughly entertaining movie might be what we all need right now: An invitation to stop and smell the roses — or, if you’re lucky, their far less showy fungal cousins.

As nervy and well-made as it is, Cherry feels less personal than pageant-like, especially in a rushed and glibly perfunctory final sequence. It unfolds like an American dream that becomes a nightmare, before switching back again — just before we wake up and shake the whole thing off.

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.

It’s not great cinema. It’s good at what it sets out to do. Which makes it great fun.

Full of incident, heartbreak, secrets and betrayal, The Affair and its choppy formal structure don’t do justice to an enormously appealing cast.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow.

This is a throwback movie in the best sense of the term, asking the audience to consider the not-too-distant past of anti-Black racism as prologue to its similarly murderous present. It’s also a return to a brand of muscular, serious-minded filmmaking that has been virtually forgotten in recent years.

It’s a good movie, executed with affectionate humor, wistful honesty and tender care.

Viggo Mortensen makes a sensitive and assured directing debut with Falling, a meditation on aging, mortality and slow-drip loss that will resonate deeply with anyone going through the agonies it depicts.

In this absorbing and rigorously disciplined account, Konchalovsky proves that a healthy embrace of nuance doesn't need to result in muddled thinking. Indeed, it can lead to something sharp, bright and dazzlingly precise.

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

Written and directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond with superb control and insight, My Little Sister never goes precisely where the audience expects, as the filmmakers dole out crucial information at well-timed intervals, illuminating the pieces of Lisa and Sven’s past that have brought them to this life-or-death point.

The result is a film that does more than impart facts, or even tell a story: It builds a world, and once we’re in it, takes us on a potent and unforgettable emotional journey.

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

As trite as Herself is in plot and emotional beats, what makes it worthwhile are the performances, which are all stellar.

As a filmed version of a play, One Night in Miami has the same talky, slightly claustrophobic contours one might expect. But that pent-up quality is an advantage for a movie in which the room where it might have happened is a character in itself.

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.

This dazzling, if ultimately frustrating, movie seems to pick up where the far superior “Inside Out” ended, leaving behind the inner workings of young people’s emotional lives for an exploration of metaphysical realms that are fuzzier, more speculative and, to put it bluntly, not nearly as involving.

For the first hour and a half, WW84 is a delightful flight of escapist fancy, with Diana and Steve's love story ensconcing itself comfortably, if a bit talkily, within the confines of an action adventure. Then, at the 90 minute mark, it’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.

So many of our problems remain, but 40 Years a Prisoner presents a valuable primer on what mistakes not to repeat.

Wolfe keeps the production simple, albeit with attractively rich visual values and gorgeous costumes, allowing the performances to exert their mesmerizing force. And nowhere is that magnetism more palpable than when Davis and Boseman are going toe to toe, their energies repelling one another one moment and fusing the next.

What Mayor lacks in terms of wiki-esque biography it more than makes up for in immediacy and exquisite timing.

Devoid of muckraking sensationalism, it instead evolves into something more tactful, and compassionate, as teams of exhausted medical professionals do anything to save their patients’ lives, or at least grace their final moments with gestures of caring and connection.

McQueen’s vocabulary is on particularly glorious display in this lambent gem of a film.

Zappa gives its subject his well-earned due within the rock firmament. But even more valuable, Winter gives Zappa pride of place among the most important composers of the 20th century, sharing some extraordinary performances of his little-known classical work.

Luckily, Morris caught up with Harcourt-Smith before she left for the next stop: She’s the best thing about My Psychedelic Love Story, and a far more sympathetic and compelling character than the man she almost risked her life for.

A movie made for critics, cinephiles and deep-dive film historians.