Christopher Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

As Mati Diop mourns Senegal’s lost men, she honors their grief and affords them tremendous power all at once.

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

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

Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.

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

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

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.

Unfortunately, the film's occasionally thrilling visual sleight-of-hand comes at the ultimate service of a boilerplate early-mid-life-crisis drama.

Writer-director Andrew Renzi treats unfettered wealth as a hyperbolic playground through which to explore masculine insecurity.

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

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

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

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

Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Fifty Shades Darker takes the Dark Knight approach to franchise maintenance, taking pains to assure you that its protagonists are serious about their passions.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.

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.

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

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.

When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.

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.

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

The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.

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

The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.

By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.

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

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.

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

The documentary isn't advancing an argument so much as simply restating a European socialistic breed of fact.

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

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

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

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

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

It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.

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