Christopher Gray

How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.

The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.

By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.

The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.

A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.

A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.

Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.

Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.

Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism.

The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.

Feras Fayyad's film is broadly concerned with portraying the titular Syrian city as a community of neighbors and colleagues.

Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.

Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.

The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.

After the film's early optimism and speculative midsection, Western struggles to manage all the rich dramatic irony of its final half hour, perched uneasily between plot and stasis.

The film's rough-hewn naturalism belies an exquisite sense of pace and a sneaky breed of gallows humor.

Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.

Much like its subject, Avi Belkin’s documentary knows how to start an argument.

The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.

Logan Lucky is both a Robin Hood fantasy and a uniquely Soderberghian lark, an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.

Devos's impressive debut bores into the mourning process and its piquant combination of emotional numbness and sensory vulnerability, rigorously avoiding finding an easy way out of this quagmire.

Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.

The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.

Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.

It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.

As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.

We come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect that allows the complex, funny, and indomitable personalities to shine through.

It can't resist winking at how this franchise manages to defy the limits of both human endurance and its superstar's rickety public status.

The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes.

Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait that asserts its subject's sense of purpose even as it seems to slip out of his grasp.

Though J.P. Sniadecki doesn't elucidate any broad structural motive, his film gradually adopts an engrossing rhythm among its clatter of steel and ambient chatter.

The film questions the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting.

Director Michal Marczak's film finds a unique vitality in its densely constructed environment.

Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage and low humor with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.

Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland's film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.

Though some of Spettacolo's tension is superficial, the stuff of any let’s-put-on-a-show narrative, its latent anxieties are myriad and profoundly resonant.

Miguel Gomes combats austerity with expansiveness, leavened by doses of frivolity and scatology.

The director’s apparently frank and intimate relationships with the RBSS’s heroic journalists help sustain City of Ghosts‘s undeniable urgency, which culminates in a final image of appropriate, irresolvable anguish.

The film circumvents bleakness with a thoroughgoing commitment to understanding and intimacy.

The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.

Hale County dwells on the beauty of the everyday as it recognizes the fragility of individual lives.

David Leveaux's film cannily incorporates elements of spycraft and sheer trash into a familiar formula.

The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.

The film is an offbeat epic informed by a reverence for the past and a delicate wariness toward the future.

Director Jonathan Demme grasps the well of feeling of Diablo Cody's script and eventually harnesses it in his own image.

The film is an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.

The film confirms that the ruthless knack of the wealthy and powerful to remain so is a universal impulse.

Azazel Jacobs’s film takes some shrewd steps to update the comedy of remarriage for the age of the smartphone.

It starts off as a dynamic parable about faith before wilting into a glum and rather disingenuous paean to the family.

The documentary shrewdly illustrates how media savvy can turn a fledgling protest into an international cause célèbre.

Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.

A stunning work of war reportage nestled within a creaky study of ideological purity.

The film never really digs into its suggested themes of gentrification, domestic turmoil, or backwoods folklore, but most of its effectiveness stems from a kitchen-sink approach to genre clichés.

It does astounding work animating the mind of its young soldier, but it runs into technical difficulties whenever it tries to grasp the bigger picture.

In its philosophical and criminal investigations (largely imported from Kathryn Bigelow's original), the film moves in dozens of illogical directions, but not without achieving a patina of earnest credibility.

The portrait it paints of its Marines is appropriately discordant, redolent of the twitchy frustration caused by a long stint in a sparse landscape with a hazy mission.

James Foley’s film suggests that any semblance of capitulation on Christian’s part is a win for Ana and women at large, even if that momentary triumph leads to a further sacrifice of Ana’s independence.

The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.

What's most stirring about Céline Sciamma's film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne's feelings for one another.

The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.

The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.

As Zac Efront's Cole tiptoes away from his past, the film keenly observes a character who doesn't know how to secure his future, or his identity.

If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.

Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.

Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.

Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.

In Brad Bird's film, the way forward is backward, on a path that stumbles into misplaced nostalgia and dicey humanism.

No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.

Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.

The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.

It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.

The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.

The film has a streamlined efficiency, but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe.

The Thomas Vinterberg film's sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.

Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.

As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.

The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.

Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.

By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.

It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.

Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.

A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.

The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.

Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.

Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.

It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.

Even after the film (quite entertainingly) explains itself, it never feels like more than a howl of frustration and cynicism.

Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.

Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.

Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.

Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.

Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.

If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.

It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.

It's too busy skipping through subplots to do much more than gloss over such heady issues as the fundamental subjectivity of truth and self-identity.