Ann Hornaday

Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful.

If the conceit feels obvious and strained, it still gives Farhadi and his actors ample room to explore the ambiguities of commitment, ethics and revenge in a society where mistrust in public servants runs deep.

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.

Spielberg and Kaminski have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration for decades, but their work on West Side Story brings the partnership to breathtakingly poetic expressive heights.

[A] sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary.

Oropelled by memorable performances by mostly unknown actors. The most famous of the ensemble, Hanna Schygulla, delivers a by turns serene and shattering performance as a mother struggling with loss, conscience and the first glimmers of unexpected connection. She's only one essential and unforgettable part of a flawless whole.

Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light.

Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.

Thanks to Burnham’s exuberant, alert writing and Fisher’s masterful command of vulnerability, anxiety, resilience and steadfast self-belief, Kayla emerges as an icon of her own — just by being herself.

Builds slowly but passionately, not dancing to some Hollywood tune, but finding its characters where they are and letting them be who they are.

Girlhood is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.

Along with such colleagues as Abbas Kiarostami and Moshen Makhmalbaf, Panahi has perfected the art of realist filmmaking,

Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!

All of the actors in Turtles Can Fly are nonprofessionals, and all bring electrifying authenticity and presence to their roles.

Crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence. Those brawls feel a bit rote, but what's different here is a newfound playful humor.

A delirious piece of pop ephemera.

As a stylistic and narrative throwback, Alfredson's adamantly un-thrilling procedural reminds viewers of an era when viewers allowed themselves to be entertained by a good yarn about a few colorful or at least colorlessly compelling characters.

Nearly every scene rings with its own ragged truth, which becomes increasingly painful as Dan's addiction becomes more unmanageable and as he refuses to confront the untenable politics of his own behavior.

Tells an important story about a story that might never have been told at all.

Dworkin, having led viewers so deeply into her subjects' lives, resists coercing them into any pat conclusions. We're left to wonder about Love and Diane -– and root for them -– on our own.

Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma, and “The Taste of Things” provides the ideal showcase for those ineffable gifts.

This is a big movie, about big emotions and ideas, which Rees evokes and explores through an extraordinarily rich tapestry of atmosphere, physical setting, visual detail and sensitive, subtle performances.

An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.

As small and specific as it is, Everybody Wants Some!! feels improbably expansive, even universal.

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

At its best, The Tree of Life makes the viewer lean forward, eager to enter Malick's own dreamy, poetic consciousness. At worst, it leads to the vague feeling that we're listening to the meanderings of someone who's not sure we're smart enough to keep up.

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.

It’s not often one can have a genuinely spiritual experience watching a movie. But that’s precisely what’s on offer with The Departure, Lana Wilson’s quietly galvanizing portrait of life, death and the thin places in between in modern-day Japan.