Ann Hornaday

A bittersweet, elegiac tone can’t help but suffuse a film animated by so many anarchic spirits who have since left the planet, but it leaves viewers with the exhilarating, inspiring reassurance that we still have Iggy. To adopt his own highest praise: That’s cool.

Hacksaw Ridge winds up being a rousing piece of entertainment that also happens to be an affecting portrait of spiritual faith and simple human decency.

Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.

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.

American Pastoral may tell the heartbreaking story of Swede Levov, but a firm grasp of who he is and what he means remains maddeningly elusive.

You know a filmmaker is in supreme command of her medium when what she creates feels less like a movie than a candid glimpse of ongoing lives that will continue to play out long after the lights have come on.

In a mesmerizing series of images, encounters and delicate juxtapositions, Cameraperson testifies to a world in which it would be clear to see that we’re all connected, if only we took the time to look at one another with reverence and simply listen.

True to the profession it sets out to glamorize, The Accountant takes advantage of its share of creative loopholes — and manages to break even in the process.

The Birth of a Nation is a flawed but fairly compelling chapter of the American story that powerfully resonates with how that story is playing out today.

Even viewers who are mildly diverted by the whodunit angle are unlikely to find themselves emotionally engaged in the outcome.

When disaster strikes, about an hour into the movie, we’re put in the uncomfortable position of admiring the fiery spectacle that Berg has created with sophisticated visual effects, cinematography and editing, while being aware that unspeakable real-life suffering has been packaged for mass entertainment. Berg does a good job of maintaining a thoughtful balance between those somewhat uneasy stances.

Overplotted, undercooked and extremely well-dressed, The Dressmaker has style to burn, but it has a mean streak as wide as the Outback.

The Magnificent Seven is fine as far as it goes, but — especially when the familiar strains of the 1960 theme song begin wafting over the final scenes — one can’t help feeling that it should have gone much further.

Even considering its optimistic, open-ended conclusion, Bridget Jones’s Baby feels like an affectionate, slightly overdue goodbye to characters whose time has inevitably passed.

Regardless of how they feel about the main character, most viewers are likely to leave the theater reminded of Stone’s instinctive brilliance as a filmmaker — his grasp of visual language not just to tell a story but to expose its essential emotional core.

Sully is a classy, enormously satisfying ode to simple competence. To paraphrase the title character, it’s just a movie doing its job. And amen to that.

The Hollars drives inexorably to a conclusion that feels as manipulatively mawkish as it is impossibly tidy, typical of a genre that too often tries to have it both ways. It turns out that happy families are all alike, even when they’re a little bit sad.

Nominally, The Light Between Oceans refers to the beacon’s location at the geographic point where the Indian and Pacific meet, but it could just as easily be a hint at the salty tears it’s been so carefully manufactured to induce. Ladies and gentlemen, let your hankies unfurl.

If the film’s pace is sometimes as awkward as its hero, and the story a little thin, it still brims with authentic life and affection for the characters (even the dubiously attentive Katrin).

Like the warm summer day it chronicles, Southside With You possesses a mellow, languorous vibe, an infectious easygoing charm that insinuates itself gently, then seductively, as the couple at its center experiences the stirrings of what might be true love.

Thoughtful, searching and wonderfully moving in its wistful final moments, Lo and Behold may not be Herzog’s most artistically ambitious film, but it’s an intriguing, even important one nonetheless.

War Dogs stays at arm’s length from the subjects, afraid to implicate us in the pleasures and prosperity of their rise, thus making their fall seem distant, puny and unaffecting.

Equity isn’t perfect — far from it — but it’s an intriguing attempt at rebalancing a system that’s been dreadfully out of whack for far too long.

Florence Foster Jenkins brims with love for its characters and forbearance for even their most blinkered self-deception.

In a word, Hell or High Water is terrific.

The beauty of Indignation can be found in how it builds, growing from a garden-variety coming-of-age story into a poetic, even prayerful, meditation on the pitiless vagaries of character and regret. Thoughtful and reserved, perhaps even to a fault, Indignation winds up packing a wallop far greater than its modest parts might suggest.

Ewing and Grady insert vignettes featuring a young actor playing Lear as a 9-year-old, wandering an empty theater and trying on his analog’s signature white hat. The conceit might have sounded artful on paper, but it doesn’t work on film.

Its arresting visual design aside, Cafe Society is upper-middle-late-period Allen, a modestly diverting ditty that will never go down as one of his greats. (But, as most can agree, Allen at his most middling is still better than many hacks at their best.)

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

Sunny, slimy and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash and bluster that’s preceded it.

Life, Animated makes fascinating points, about the power of cinema, about meeting our loved ones where they are and, as Ron says, about who gets to decide what constitutes a meaningful life.

Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.

Even when it dispenses with realism altogether, Hunt for the Wilderpeople conveys important truths about the will and sheer endurance it takes to make a family.

Nuts!”is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.

The story is so nasty, so depraved and troubling, that viewers may well wonder at its value beyond prurient interest.

Roald Dahl’s beloved ad­ven­ture tale about a brave little girl who befriends the titular Big Friendly Giant, finds Steven Spielberg in his natural element of childlike enchantment, yet also strangely out of step, his trusted sense of narrative propulsion and pacing occasionally failing him in a saggy, draggy second act.

As gratifying as it is to see forgotten history brought to light, it’s disappointing, too: There’s an epic story to be told within Free State of Jones, but this white-knight tale isn’t it.

In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.

A documentary in which one of the most voyeuristic directors in American cinema delivers an engaging, if maddeningly unresolved, tutorial in film production and appreciation.

In deciding not to stray far from the first film in plot or tone, it makes for a pleasant, familiar, cheerfully unassuming fish-in-her-water tale.

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.

Genius may be a bit stodgy and safe, but it tells a story of beauty — as it plays out in an improbably fruitful friendship, and as it’s discovered within vast expanses of raw language by a craftsman who was arguably an artist in his own right.

Like its protagonist, The Idol finds a sense of identity, hope and pride within a landscape of grim dispossession and fatalism.

Clever, amiable and eager to please, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is the comedy equivalent of the pop-rap star it satirizes, a bit of stupid-smart silliness that offers plenty of pleasure in the moment, even if its amusements last about as long as a snow cone in the sun.

Maggie’s Plan exerts unmistakable charm, and once it hits its stride and the titular scheme kicks into gear, the movie takes on its own weird, giddy rhythms and really soars.

Hubris, narcissism, tabloid spectacle and massive self-deception collide with the mesmerizing inevitability of a slow-motion train wreck in Weiner, an engrossing, almost shamefully entertaining documentary.

Love & Friendship is such a thoroughgoing delight that it’s tempting to riffle through Austen’s other works to find something else for Stillman to make into a film. As adaptations go, this is a match made in heaven.

The characters in The Nice Guys often ask each other if they’re good or bad, a choice the movie doesn’t want to force the audience to make. Instead it settles for making good on the title, occupying the nice, mushy middle — perhaps unfocused and off-balance at times, but conveying a sense of buoyancy that’s as cheerfully contagious as it is freewheeling.

The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo Garcia’s thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.

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

Money Monster, which is at its best when it’s at its most crisply realistic and timely, suffers from the kind of only-in-Hollywood plot twists and eye-rolling exaggeration that results in smarter than average pulp, but pulp nonetheless.

Jensen positions Men & Chicken as a fablelike ode to humanism and tolerance, but his obsession with brutish sexuality and mean, slapstick humor makes that claim feel unearned and glib.

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully acted and often refreshingly amusing, “Civil War” injects doses of much-needed fun into a genre of filmmaking that’s become mired in dour pretentiousness, when it’s not ridiculing its own excesses in such meta-snark exercises as “Deadpool.”

The Meddler is a movie of modest charms.

Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, Fireworks Wednesday gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work — before he was acknowledged as a master.

Warm, ingratiating, with a beat you can dance to, Sing Street is a feel-good movie that never demands to be liked. Instead it asks, politely and irresistibly.

It’s that rare fish-out-of-water story in which the fish miraculously manages to stop needing water, and learns to crave air instead.

Elvis & Nixon makes for a diverting, often absurdly funny double portrait of two men engulfed by changes they can’t fathom, much less accept.

Despite its familiar, come-from-behind contours, the story brims with redemptive optimism that it comes by honestly, thanks to its extraordinary main character and the equally remarkable actor who plays him.

Filmed with dynamism and propulsive, energetic flair, The Jungle Book allows viewers the vicarious pleasure of sidling up to magnificent (sometimes mangy) beasts as if they were household pets.

The oddball grief drama Demolition proves that an actor who could easily be dismissed as just another watchable face is actually possessed of subtle, fascinatingly protean chops.

Although her charisma is still undeniable, there’s also no denying that McCarthy is capable of much more than she’s allowing herself to do here. There comes a point when every force of nature starts to look just plain forced.

Nichols establishes such a grounded sense of atmosphere and such superb control of mood and pacing, that the odd hiccup barely matters.

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

On one level, The Clan is an accomplished but not terribly original genre exercise — another story about amorality run amok, given an extra jolt from its real-life roots and heightened political context. What sets the film apart are the performances.

Strip away the trite character beats, rote plot points, random dream sequences and other narrative padding, and “Batman v Superman” comes down to the actors, their characters and whether they can sustain interest over the long haul. The answer is yes, if they wind up in the hands of filmmakers blessed with authentic imagination rather than serviceable technical chops.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time

Knight of Cups may want to be understood as the portrait of a man plunging beneath the veneer of modern life, but it can just as easily be perceived as the self-portrait of a filmmaker in his own Versailles, letting himself eat cake and having it, too.

Like "After Tiller" a few years ago, Trapped is lucid and illuminating about the issue of abortion as a constitutional right. But in addition to being instructive, it brims with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women we never even got to see in the first place.

True to its title, as well as its flawed but sympathetic protagonist, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is more confused than cynical or opportunistic. Its bewilderment is contagious, and ultimately endearing.

Eddie the Eagle leaves viewers buoyed by satisfactions unique to classic come-from-behind stories. Even when it’s as ungainly and cravenly audience-pleasing as its protagonist, it soars.

Triple 9 feels more like a collection of good scenes than a novel, propulsive whole. Viewers are apt to be entertained by the film’s visceral pulp pleasures, but left apathetic when it comes to its instantly forgettable genre cliches.

For fans of horror at its most sinister, The Witch is not to be missed. It casts a spell that lingers long after its most disquieting mists have cleared.

Risen turns out to be an intriguing, if ultimately frustrating, retelling of the familiar story, here reconfigured as a detective procedural.

Lazily written by Stiller and three collaborators (including Justin Theroux), this is the kind of lame, warmed-over movie that gives sequels a bad name. For “Zoolander” fans, however, it resembles a betrayal of public trust.

Ultimately, How to Be Single feels reverse-engineered to justify its ending, which while admittedly gratifying, can’t accurately be described as happy. For that, it would have to be worth the contrivances, cliches and tedium that have gone before.

Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalized industrial practice.

There’s no denying the humor and pathos of The Lady in the Van, just as there’s no use fending off the force of nature that is Smith.

Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.

For all of the outrage that Mustang inspires by its depiction of sexist oppression, it’s still enormously pleasurable to watch, in part because of its enchanting setting (it was filmed in the northern Turkish town of Inebolu) and Warren Ellis’s thoughtful score, but mostly because of Sensoy and her four equally beguiling co-stars.

Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.

Despite the literal and figurative pains it takes to persuade viewers of its own importance, The Revenant can’t escape the clutches of crippling self-regard.

Whether or not Kaufman’s meticulously accumulated details add up to a grand unified conclusion, there’s no doubt he’s getting at something painfully familiar beneath his movie’s self-conscious artifice.

It’s possible to watch Carol simply for its velvety beauty, but chances are that, by that stunning final moment, filmgoers will realize with a start that they care far more about the problems of these two people than they might have realized.

The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

It takes superior artistry to take the rude, crude and socially unmentionable and make it feel upliftingly wholesome. Such is the magic of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the dynamic duo at the playful, prurient, occasionally perverse heart of Sisters.

The Force Awakens strikes all the right chords, emotional and narrative, to feel both familiar and exhilaratingly new. Filled with incident, movement and speed, dusted with light layers of tarnished “used future” grime, it captures the kinetic energy that made the first film, from 1977, such a revelation to filmgoers who marveled at Lucas’s mashup of B movies, Saturday-morning serials, Japanese historical epics and mythic heft.

For all of the virtuosity of Redmayne and Vikander’s performances, and for all its sensitivity and aesthetic appeal, The Danish Girl is content simply to present the ambiguities and contradictions of Lili and Gerda’s story, rather than delve into their gnarlier corners.

James White gets up close and personal in often discomfiting ways, but it’s never exploitative or glib. It hits the highs, and the rock bottoms, and all the damnable stuff in between.

The through-line of Chi-Raq is a sense of crisis that Lee refuses to reduce to binary causes, but interprets in terms of history, economics and psychology, as well as the personal, political and spiritual.

As the quiet, compact vessel for roiling fears and ambivalence, Al-Hwietat’s Theeb winds up being a strikingly memorable character, whose deceptively simple tale possesses both haunting power and a whiff of prescient pessimism.

Structurally, The Wonders suffers from awkward bulges and sags, especially toward the end. Still, it’s a beautiful, richly imagined ride that doesn’t end as much as evaporate into a dreamlike puff of smoke.

As a family-approved document, In Her Own Words is celebratory rather than probing, critical or comprehensive.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

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

We don’t expect a James Bond film to be deep, but at least we should be dazzled by the seductive gloss of its surfaces. Aside from that stunning opening sequence, this installment feels overcompensating and dutiful.

Although the plot is painfully familiar — and not particularly edifying, compared with similar narratives that have gone before — the novelty here is Silverman, who doesn’t exactly erase her comic persona so much as bring to the surface an inherent darkness that has always lurked in the shadows.

Suffragette is an absorbing, ultimately moving portrait of thwarted ideals that rings all too true today.

Truth would have been more compelling with less sanctimony and tougher self-examination.

As wrenching as Room is, especially during its grim first hour, it contains an expansive sense of compassion and humanism thanks to the sensitive direction of Abrahamson.

Fukunaga imbues this study of ma­nipu­la­tion and manufactured loyalty with an unsettling degree of visual richness and lush natural detail.

Propelled by an ingenious script by Aaron Sorkin, given vibrance and buoyancy by director Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs is a galvanizing viewing experience.

Bridge of Spies expands from being a smart, engrossing procedural to a carefully observed character study of Donovan, a particularly intriguing, heretofore overlooked American figure.

A lugubrious cloud of mediocrity sets in early in Freeheld, a dreary dramatization of a pivotal gay rights case that paved the way for marriage equality.

Mississippi Grind winds up being an improbably satisfying, even heartwarming character study.

What’s being marketed as a sober, straightforward sci-fi drama (the words “Bring him home” superimposed on an unsmiling Matt Damon inside a space helmet) is instead a smart, exhilarating, often disarmingly funny return to classic adventures of yore.

Gracefully moving between the infinite and the practical, the celestial and the implacably grounded, Guzman has created a sensitive, richly textured portrait of time and place that transcends both those conceits.

The Walk satisfies as an absorbing yarn of authority-flouting ad­ven­ture and as an example of stomach-flipping you-are-there-ness. The journey it offers viewers doesn’t just span 140 feet, but also an ethereal, now-vanished, world.

It’s a shame that the beginning of a movement that has come so far, so fast has been reduced to a trite, calculatingly manipulative reenactment.

Meyers seems content to make a nice movie about nice people doing their best to be nice to each other despite one or two not-nice things that happen along the way. That’s all very nice, but not particularly the stuff of potent or rousing entertainment.

If “The Black Panthers” has been designed to leave viewers outraged and energized in equal measure, it succeeds with admirable style. It counts both as essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now.

Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven’t managed to solve one of cinema’s most enduring challenges — making criminals interesting without exalting them.

Learning to Drive would be an entirely inert expedition were it not for Clarkson, who plays against Kingsley’s sentinel of propriety with her signature radiance and birdlike gracefulness.

Digging for Fire is a pleasant escape — an attractively shot, gracefully edited and, finally, emotionally satisfying mystery about the nature of marriage itself.

Like all of her greatest creations, Tomlin brings Elle to life with compassion and candid, sometimes withering knowingness.

Even at its most daft and infectiously ditzy, Mistress America is a sharp, aware and surpassingly kind portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.

One needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.

Straight Outta Compton reminds viewers not only who N.W.A. were and what they meant, but also why they mattered — and still do.

Improbably, The End of the Tour doesn’t just sustain the audience’s interest in Wallace and Lipsky’s exchanges, arguments and moments of bonding, but invites us to care deeply about the men.

Although sweet and likable, Ricki and the Flash pulls too many punches to qualify as cathartic or even memorable. Instead, it’s a crowd-pleaser every bit as calculated and earnestly defanged as a Golden Oldies bus-and-truck tour.

The film can be appreciated, if only as a showcase for its assured, emotional attuned performances, as a convincing time capsule and period piece, and as a chance to reconsider one of the more well-known and still-influential studies of its era.

The great strength of McQuarrie is that, even when he’s leaning into the laughs, he plays it straight — he doesn’t sacrifice inviolable core values in the name of escapism, whether in the form of smart writing or superb production aesthetics.

If it’s a bit dull, and too dependent on a what-I-learned voice-over to make its points, it can still be applauded for resisting the temptation to overreach.

Unexpected would have been enriched by a more generous balance between the two characters’ worlds. But Swanberg shows a sure, sensitive hand in limning the upshots and downsides of life’s most blessed events.

Irrational Man isn’t a comedy. There are, however, moments that invite rueful chuckles of recognition, especially when Posey’s character is giving Abe the business. She strikes a welcome madcap note in what is otherwise a series of bland medium shots of people talking.

Southpaw may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he’s in.

As one character observes in Tangerine, Los Angeles is “a beautifully wrapped lie.” Baker has created a fitting homage to artifice and the often tawdry, tender realities that lie beneath.

Amy Schumer proves her cinematic bona fides in Trainwreck, a strikingly assured feature film debut in which she proves herself as authentic an actress as she is deft as a writer.

What makes The Tribe unforgettable is the filmmaker’s attention to composition and staging, with camera work by cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych that goes from implacable stasis to poetic fluidity with seamless, expressive ease.

In many ways, Jimmy’s Hall shows what the pursuit of happiness can look like, and why it’s worth a revolution to protect it.

Self/less bears not a trace of Singh’s signature visual richness, quickly devolving into a tiresome game of cat and mouse, padded with cliched fight scenes, car chases and shootouts.

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

A deep core of emotion gives 3  1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets its ballast, but Silver, who also serves as cinematographer, infuses the production with simple, elegant sophistication.

Magic Mike XXL tries mightily — if unsuccessfully — to match its predecessor’s stature as a camp classic, the epitome of trashy summer fun for the whole pansexual, polymorphously perverse, omni-libidinous family.

As he proved with his misbegotten A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane is essentially a guy who’s gotten appallingly lucky on television. He exhibits zero proficiency in cinematic staging and no sense of pace.

In a way, The Overnight ends just as it’s beginning. But for a brief time, even in the midst of preposterous digressions and full (and not so full) Montys, it offers a compassionate glimpse of people at their most naked, honest and undefended.

Famuyiwa reminds viewers not to believe — or worse, internalize — the hype, and he provides a great deal of cheeky, infectious fun in the process. Put another way, Dope is the bomb.

This is that rare movie that transcends its role as pure entertainment to become something genuinely cathartic, even therapeutic, giving children a symbolic language with which to manage their unruliest emotions.

What elevates Heaven Knows What above other run-of-the-mill wallows in aimlessness and self-destructive compulsion is Arielle Holmes.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl succumbs to the same cloying too-cuteness and solipsism that often plague its glib and sentimental genre. But those limitations are leavened by the film’s lively, ultimately affecting flourishes and sprightly voice.

The most enjoyable moments of an otherwise oddly joyless film actually belong to Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus, who steal the show in an especially amusing scene during a panicked evacuation.

It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness.

As cinema, Spy is content to cater to its own conventions, hit the required marks and earn a few laughs along the way. As a cultural bellwether, it does something bigger and more important, without ever italicizing that fact.

Piven is so in the pocket as the smarmy, aggressive, inappropriate Ari that, when the movie he’s in does little more than double down on the bro-ing out, the whiffed opportunities become all the more obvious.

Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched.

Whimsical, fantastical and self-consciously charming, it slinks around viewers’ ankles like an affectionate cat, purring ever more loudly until the audience can’t help but succumb.

Admittedly, Niccol succumbs to the temptation to make mini-billboards out of his dialogue, in which arguments follow neat “on the one hand” trajectories. But for the most part, Good Kill asks pertinent, enduring questions, not by way of polemic, but through the study of a character.

A film that manages to avoid the dreary, Wikipediaesque literalism that plagues so many biopics while obliquely evoking the man and his era with textures, atmosphere, mood and tone.

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

The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged.

A modestly funny, little bit dark, occasionally knowing, not entirely cynical comedy that, to the extent that it succeeds at all, does so thanks to James Marsden.

There isn’t one joke, sight gag or piece of slapstick tomfoolery that lands with any success or originality in Hot Pursuit.

Through some astonishing archival footage and perceptive commentary from Who guitarist Pete ­Townshend, the filmmaker puts the band in its complicated context as both reflector and creator of the postwar British teenage gestalt.

As he did in the first “Avengers,” writer-director Joss Whedon avoids the fatal trap of comic-book ­self-seriousness, leavening a baggy, busy, overpopulated story with zippy one-liners, quippy asides and an overarching tone of jaunty good fun.

This calculatingly adorable coming-of-age tale has its delights — chiefly in a modest, endearing lead performance from Anton Yelchin and an amusing two-handed turn by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as his parents — but feels more constructed than lived.

Crowe clearly seeks to return to classic storytelling values with this sweeping-yet-intimate, serious-yet-swashbuckling, hither-yet-thither picaresque; that he succeeds only part of the time shouldn’t detract from the worthiness of his mission.

At times, Unfriended really clicks — but ultimately, it’s a drag.

With Ex Machina, Garland makes an impressive debut as a director, spinning an unsettling futuristic thriller with the expertise and exquisite taste of a seasoned veteran.

Writer-director Rupert Goold, here making his feature debut, fails to capture the chemistry and tonal complexity necessary to make this grim, often grisly tale anything more than a tragically lurid anecdote.

The gently perfumed air of impending doom suffuses 3 Hearts, a tasteful, mildly intriguing romantic drama from writer-director Benoît Jacquot.

Even those who don’t buy in completely to Mundruczo’s parable will be impressed by his canine crowd scenes, staged with ambition, skill and genuinely original vision.

The Salt of the Earth remains worshipful when it should be more probing, especially around questions of ethics, privacy and consent.

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

Nostalgia trips are fun, but when they intersect with genius, virtuosity and genuine revelatory insight, they take viewers to a higher place.

Seymour: An Introduction gives viewers a soaring, sublime and enduringly meaningful glimpse of a man who is undoubtedly the real thing.

Ferrell and Hart have a genial, easygoing chemistry and Get Hard manages to score more than a few good points about facile assumptions and toxic hypocrisy.

The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.

The Gunman may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.

With its unflinching portrayal of cynical school officials and their corrupt symbiosis with the sports teams and Greek systems to which they’re beholden, The Hunting Ground is, at its most basic, a damning indictment of entitlement and impunity.

When Merchants of Doubt isn’t making you mad, it makes you very simply, and overwhelmingly, sad.

For all its gossamer, gauze, filigree and refinement, Cinderella drags when it should skip as lightly as its title character when she’s late getting home from the ball.

Thanks to its funny, attractive, emotionally on-point cast, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel puts the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement about life having no second acts. In fact, it goes one step further to question why on Earth anyone would stop at just two.

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.

Human Capital is a well made but ultimately rather facile tragedy for the globalized age of vertiginous wealth disparities. It’s suffused with beauty, guilt, regret and impunity that only the most obscenely overprivileged and dimly self-aware can hope to attain.

Will Smith and Margot Robbie bring low-key erotic chemistry to an easy simmer in Focus, a smooth, sophisticated, often amusing little caper flick.

Between its grating heroine, strident speechifying, derivative plot and draggy tone and tempo, it’s like the redheaded stepchild of “Mean Girls” and “Freaky Friday.”

Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.

With its awkward reenactments and other stylistic clunkers, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry doesn’t break much formal ground. But it serves as a moving reminder of how crucial citizen action is in fomenting social change.

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.

In this swift, smart, often very funny film, Polsky takes an unprecedented look at the legendary Soviet-era hockey program and its life after glasnost, exposing an athletic system that became a crucial symbol of Communist history and politics, but also discipline, grace and brooding, melancholy soul.

As a meticulously composed piece of contemporary gothic, The Duke of Burgundy is exquisite to look at, but it succeeds best as a human drama, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want — and maybe even getting it in the end.

The film serves not only as a mesmerizing escape into another world, but also a compelling, compassionate deep dive into human frailty and self-deception.

The volatile, unbridled emotion of Mommy — its sheer life force — makes up for its structural weaknesses, giving viewers an often breathtaking glimpse of a director who, like his own adamantly unconventional protagonists, is fairly bursting at the seams with spiky, headstrong brio.

Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.

There’s no doubt that Aniston deserves more roles like this one but, with luck, in less maudlin, more surprising movies.

If A Most Violent Year has a weakness, it’s in that structural looseness.... Still, A Most Violent Year is an engrossing, often beautiful film, and a breakout opportunity for Isaac.

As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.

Inherent Vice unfolds so organically, so gracefully and with such humanistic grace notes that even at its most preposterous, viewers will find themselves nodding along, sharing the buzz the filmmaker has so skillfully created.

As provocative as the questions it raises are — questions about connoisseurship vs. populism, personal expression vs. the market, and the dark arts of press, publicity and shrewd self-invention — the film’s achievements stay on the surface of those themes rather than plunging deeper.

Through it all, Spall is equally enigmatic and transfixing: With his guttural croaks and barks, his Turner is often difficult to understand, but, thanks to Spall’s amazing physical performance and Leigh’s sensitive, information-laden direction, he’s never incomprehensible.

There are several reasons to see Selma — for its virtuosity and scale, scope and sheer beauty. But then there are its lessons, which have to do with history, but also today: Selma invites viewers to heed its story, meditate on its implications and allow those images once again to change our hearts and minds.

The power of images — to distort, define, denigrate and celebrate — emerges with clarity and force in Through a Lens Darkly, a fascinating, visually stunning, emotionally devastating documentary by Thomas Allen Harris.

Viewers may get the sense that The Imitation Game leaves Turing’s essential mysteries intact, but they will nonetheless find even the most public contours of his story ripe with drama, excitement and deeply affecting resonance.

Admittedly, Top Five suffers from its share of too-convenient contrivances and clunky passages... But Top Five is also buoyantly self- sustaining, thanks in part to Rock and Dawson’s easy, convincingly seductive chemistry and some genuinely hilarious surprises.

Wild is an accomplished movie, and often a beautiful and moving one, but the woman at its center remains warily at arm’s length.

VanDyke might have set out to give himself a crash course in manhood, but Point and Shoot gives us a crash course in the myriad and contradictory things the word has come to mean.

Even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together.

Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerizing pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it so steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.

It’s a joyless, surpassingly dour enterprise, but one that fulfills its mission with Katniss’s own eagle-eyed efficiency and unsentimental somberness.

It’s an exceptional film, not because of its protagonists’ impressive triumphs, but because it honors their struggle.

The fact that Beyond the Lights is so effective at both celebrating and critiquing extravagance and artifice can be credited to Prince-Bythewood’s shrewd understanding of the highly pitched cinematic vernacular she’s working with. Even more crucially, when it came time to cast the transformational figure at her fable’s center, she found the real thing.

Force Majeure leaves the audience squirming — in all the very best ways.

I’ll Be Me is an elevating experience, inviting the audience to bear witness to Campbell’s courage, humor and spiritual strength. His story may make for a tough movie, but it’s an important and triumphant one, as well.

Interstellar tries so hard to be so many things that it winds up shrinking into itself, much like one of the collapsed stars Coop hurtles past on his way to new worlds. For a movie about transcending all manner of dimensions, “Interstellar” ultimately falls surprisingly flat.

Laggies possesses irrepressible cheer, optimism and an innate sense of ease that often go missing in angstier productions loosely organized under “Aging, fear of.” Unlike its sometimes annoyingly wishy-washy heroine, this is a movie that knows just where it’s going, and finds joy in the journey.

The film has a sulfuric, Dostoyevskian quality — and sick sense of humor — that captures the muted aquarium that Los Angeles becomes at night, a spell that’s broken once plot overtakes mood.

Exciting, absorbing and stubbornly optimistic in the face of overwhelming devastation, E-Team will, with any luck, shed deserved light on the routine sacrifices these activists and professionals make for the sake of human values.

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.

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.

The dynamic between Fletcher and Andrew makes for highly pitched drama, which strains for credibility during two climactic scenes.

As a showcase for Murray’s proven rapport with his audience, St. Vincent occasionally threatens to become a self-congratulatory victory lap. But as a celebration, it’s a chance to revel in the Murray personae — wiseacre, hipster, humble man of the street and hell of a nice guy — that has allowed him somehow to reach mass-media stardom while retaining his own idiosyncratic niche.

It’s true that satire is the perfect weapon of reason, and Justin Simien deploys it with resourcefulness, cool assurance and eagle-eyed aim.

Even when it skates recklessly close to shopworn cliches, Pride manages to navigate around them with vigor, as well as disarming, even wholesome, open-heartedness.

To its credit, Men, Women & Children seems to allow for a rational middle ground between technophobic Luddites and the lamentably over-wired. It never turns down the moral panic entirely, but neither does it let it completely boil over.

In a bait-and-switch worthy of its title, The Good Lie may lure in viewers eager to see a Reese Witherspoon movie, but they’ll fall in love with something else entirely.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

In Myers’s capable hands, and with a powerful, vanity-free performance by Monaghan, Fort Bliss joins “Coming Home” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” as a movie deeply in sync, not just with the military characters it depicts, but also with the civilian world that awaits them with such confoundingly mixed messages.

Liberated from playing the hits, Benjamin eloquently captures Hendrix’s emerging style without having to succumb to jukebox-musical opportunism.

For all of The Equalizer’s overkill, Washington retains an admirable air of seriousness, embodying McCall as a believable figure of purity and protection, even when he’s going after his opponents with methodical, thoughtfully choreographed sadism.

For all its savagery and hopelessness, Starred Up manages to be sympathetic, not only because of O’Connell’s galvanizing turn, but also Asser and director David Mackenzie’s unwavering commitment to portraying his character with as much compassion as brutal honesty.

The Zero Theorem doesn’t fully earn the elaborately conceived scaffolding on which its relatively tame ideas are hoisted.

With a bench this deep, This Is Where I Leave You should have been a comedy of contemporary manners as wickedly funny as it is poignant. In the hands of Levy, it’s become just another forgettable example of low-stakes Hollywood hackwork at its most bland, banal and snipingly belligerent.

The look, style and smarts of A Walk Among the Tombstones seem like such a refreshingly toned-down departure from the outlandishness of Neeson’s “Taken” franchise that it’s all the more dismaying when the film shifts radically into a sadistic tableau of blood and gore.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.

It’s a credit to Lehane’s screenplay, director Michael R. Roskam’s restraint and a superb cast led by the masterful Tom Hardy that “The Drop” earns every sad-eyed glance and heart-tugging whimper.

A Letter to Momo is unquestionably lovely to look at, but viewers may not be able to shake the feeling that they’ve seen much of it before, and done better.

Attention is duly paid in this tender and touching film; the strangest thing about Love Is Strange is how completely un-strange it is, from its familiar family dynamics to its exquisite honesty and compassion.

The wine Coogan and Brydon are opening this time may lack some of the novel fizz of the first one, but The Trip to Italy is like most vacations: a few bumps here and there, but over all too quickly.

The November Man turns out to be the classic August movie: a triumph of competence over imagination and schlock over taste. Its highest value lies in reminding filmgoers that fall can’t come too soon.

The promise of its premise is squandered all too soon in what becomes yet another tiresome exercise in the way-overworked zombie genre.

Beneath those puppet-headed antics, and true to its title, Frank is improbably, disarmingly honest.

Even at its most wrenchingly painful, the film readily delivers generous dollops of pleasure.

In the taut, emotionally gripping documentary Dinosaur 13, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller meticulously re-creates seven eventful, tense and finally heartbreaking years.

Johnson and Wayans are both gifted comic performers but are given way too little to do in a film that wends its way from set piece to set piece, not with antic glee but desultory and-then-this-happens randomness.

In its own way, the movie version — handsomely directed by Phillip Noyce and featuring an appealing, sure-footed cast of emerging and veteran actors — aptly reflects The Giver’s pride of place as the one that started it all, or at least the latest wave.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

A film that reduces everything and everyone in its well-worn path to a pretentious trope and, in its final Grand Guignol moments, high camp.

Reiner assembles a square meal of rom-com pleasure points, but it’s bland, by-the-numbers and not particularly memorable.

As a film that dares to honor small moments and the life they add up to, Boyhood isn’t just a masterpiece. It’s a miracle.

You may not have agreed with Ebert’s reviews — you may not have thought he was such a nice guy. But if you aren’t moved by Life Itself, you ought to have your heart examined.

Subtlety may not be the film’s strong suit, but it creates a richly imagined world, as glitteringly arresting as it is savagely merciless.

Begin Again may not always swing, but it makes up for that in sincerity and a welcome willingness to ambush expectations.

Tammy is a bummer, not least because McCarthy’s fans know she’s better than this.

As is true with so much of Haggis’s work, Third Person suffers from an airless, too-neat lack of connection with organic life.

Larky, witty and sometimes even wise, this spoof on every rom-com ever made is less a fully realized film than an extended skit, a series of set pieces that poke gentle and sometimes transgressively crude fun at the tropes of girl-meets-boy that have enchanted and addled audiences for generations.

What makes The Rover more watchable than the average self-conscious genre exercise is Pearce, who exudes such weary authority and palpable vulnerability that he’s sympathetic even in the film’s most brutalizing moments.

Think Like a Man Too, the derivative, intermittently amusing follow-up to the surprise hit rom-com from 2012, is so frenetically paced and hysterically pitched that it makes almost no room for simple enjoyment.

There are as many awkward, discomfiting sequences in Obvious Child as there are interludes of genuine fun and romance. The result is a movie that feels risky and forgiving and, despite its traditional rom-com contours, refreshingly new.

Even with the odd misgiving or two, The Grand Seduction will effortlessly charm anyone susceptible to an endearing story told with modesty, wit and unprepossessing sweetness.

This is a sequel that wears its well-worn formula, mocking inside jokes and gleeful taste for overkill proudly, flying the high-lowbrow flag for audiences that like their comedy just smart enough to be not-too-dumb.

Ping Pong Summer may not be an instant classic, but it knows its time and place. There’s a humble honor in that.

Like summer movies themselves, it’s become so easy to be glib in dismissing Tom Cruise. “Edge of Tomorrow” provides welcome and hugely entertaining evidence that he’s still a star of considerable gifts, and savvy enough not to let them be squandered just yet.

A wise, warm, funny and touching romantic drama.

For all its limitations, Maleficent manages to be improbably entertaining to watch, due solely to its title character. As befits a star of her regal standing and superb self-awareness, Angelina Jolie has managed to bend even the Brothers Grimm to her indomitable will.

Each and every detail accrues to create a vivid, unforgettable portrait, and all are absorbed and reflected by Anna, portrayed by Trzebuchowska with the transparency and wonder of a woman for whom not just history but secular life itself is almost totally abstract.

Million Dollar Arm doesn’t break the familiar mold of come-from-behind sports movies — indeed, it obeys every convention of the genre. But it does so with understatement, style and an exceptional group of actors who bring just the right balance of humor and restraint to their roles.

Through vivid archival material and voice-overs, the filmmakers create moving vignettes that, taken together, form a fascinating primer on nonviolence as a political force and discipline.

[A] strained, clunkily orchestrated and dismally retrograde film.

Locke is so distilled, such a pure example of cinematic storytelling, that it almost feels abstract.

A shaggy, baggy collegiate comedy that is less a coherent movie than a loosely assembled series of lewd jokes and punishing slapstick routines.

Despite all the swooping and spinning and swinging in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield looks less like a kid having fun than like an actor entangled in a corporate web that, at least for now, he can’t escape.

One of the great strengths of Finding Vivian Maier is the filmmakers’ willingness to gently thread ethical inquiry in and out of the film.

Hateship Loveship sneaks up on the viewer, not only in the way the story takes its unlikely turns, but in Wiig’s own portrayal of a woman discovering desire and, in the most subtle way possible, acting on it.

Although The Other Woman nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted cliches about zip-less marriages, upper class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes.

Partridge is such a fatuous, superficial figure that the trick is to make him palatable enough to sustain interest for more than an hour. The filmmakers meet with uneven success.