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.