Dana Stevens

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

For all its borrowing and bricolage, La La Land never feels like a backward-looking or unoriginal work. Even when not every one of its risks pays off the way that first song does, this movie is bold, vital, funny, and alive.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest cameo by Lonergan himself — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

For people who enjoy coming out of movies unsettled, a little riled up, bursting with questions, and spoiling for a debate, see Elle.

One thing that Loving gets right in a way that few civil rights dramas do: It insists on racial discrimination as a systemic problem, not merely an interpersonal one.

Moonlight is one of those movies that showers its audience with blessings: raw yet accomplished performances from a uniformly fine cast, casually lyrical camerawork, and a frankly romantic soundtrack that runs the gamut from ’70s Jamaican pop to a Mexican folk song crooned by the Brazilian Caetano Veloso. But the film’s greatest gift may be that flood of cleansing tears—which, by the time this spare but affecting film was over, I was also shedding in copious volume.

Her (Reichardt's) juxtaposition of imponderably vast landscapes and regular-scale individual lives is what gives Certain Women its mood at once of delicate restraint and of moral gravity.

The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos.

Sumpter nails the first lady’s air of warm but reserved composure and the slow, careful way she enunciates her words, as if putting an extra measure of thought into choosing each phrase.

I wish there were more films every year like Morris From America, the kind that surprise you by revealing a hidden side of something—an actor, a genre, a situation—you thought you had figured out.

Streep, who has long enjoyed playing women endowed with more than the average supply of gusto, makes the character’s delusional faith in her own talent so infectious that we ache at the thought of Florence’s impending humiliation even as we prepare ourselves to laugh at it.

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

Star Trek Beyond may not go where no Trek has gone before, but it’s that very fidelity to the show’s original values that will keep fans trekking to the box office.

The real reason to see it — as was the case with the original, and with the past two Feig/McCarthy collaborations, "Bridesmaids" and "Spy" —has to do with the universally excellent cast who establish an easy tone of camaraderie and loopy banter.

In short, The BFG seems perfectly self-sufficient in its bookness, in no need of the lavishly cinematic bear hug Steven Spielberg bestows upon it here.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.

What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum — even more than Nemo, Finding Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases, bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion — this new movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

Whatever combination of practical effects and digital wizardry went into the technique that gave rise to Anomalisa’s otherworldly yet very human narrative universe, I hope it will be used to tell more stories, perhaps by this same storyteller.

45 Years is about the relationship of the present to the past and of our past loves to our present lives—a relationship that, like any good marriage, remains a total mystery.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

It plays the whole absurd shell game for laughs, even as it acknowledges that the last and bitterest laugh is on the rest of us.

In the early days of Einar's transformation, Redmayne conveys the degree to which gender is, for all of us, a skill acquired through observation and imitation.

The director Todd Haynes and the novelist Patricia Highsmith fit together like a hand and glove - a beautifully manicured hand and a sleek gray-green leather glove, two images that figure prominently in Carol.

As an intimate chamber piece with pitch-dark subject matter, James White could only avoid bathos by featuring two actors at the top of their game, alive not only to the inner worlds of their own characters but to the shared world they both know they’re on the brink of losing.

Spotlight provides a wealth of exceptional performances.

Spielberg has an effortless-seeming knack for creating compositions that are not just lovely to look at but integral to the idea or emotion he’s trying to express.

Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.

For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

It's all too neatly staged to make for dynamic cinema, even if the dialogue does crackle with a delicious nastiness.

Taxi is a subversive piece of underground filmmaking; for all its lighthearted banter and formal playfulness, the film maintains an undercurrent of anxiety and danger.

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

Rather than a birds’-eye procedural about a complex international mission, it’s a close-up of that mission from the point of view of the participant who understands it the least.

Depp's performance as Bulger is as strong, and as energized, as anything he's done on screen for years.

The Second Mother has the texture of lived experience, with characters who aren’t political symbols or social archetypes but struggling, flawed people trying their best to lead decent lives and pave a path to happiness for their children.

The screenplay doesn't lack for memorable zingers, and thanks to Cody's script and Streep's performance, Ricki emerges as a complex, self-contradictory person (even if most of the supporting characters don't).

Perhaps more than any of the M:I directors so far, McQuarrie understands the unique properties of this singular movie star — his ascetic intensity, his sometimes-scary moral certainty, his always-scary drive to excel. The result of their collaboration is a briskly paced and witty reminder of why we go see summer action movies in the first place.

I say give The End of the Tour a try. Ponsoldt’s gentle, talky road movie is a sort of Gen-X update of "My Dinner With André": A movie of ideas that, far from being the pompous screed that category might imply, actually contains interesting ideas — and what’s more, allows its characters’ perspectives on those ideas to remain in productive tension with one another.

[It] isn't quite documentary filmmaking, but it certainly (and sickeningly) isn't fiction either.

A sneaky slice-of-life indie that comes on all casual and cinéma-verité in the early scenes, then slowly coalesces into a romantic comedy as intricately constructed as any door-slamming stage farce.

The rocky but loving relationships Amy has with her father and sister are every bit as important to the story as the connection she shares with her (would-be) boyfriend, and all three parts of her life affect and change one another, just like in—imagine that!—real life.

Amy Winehouse’s story is a tragic one — as with Kurt Cobain, who also died at 27, her potential as a singer and songwriter was only just beginning to be realized. Yet the prevailing mood of this documentary is joy. Kapadia captures what was irreplaceable about this unique performer, and in the process gives her the opportunity to do what she was made to do, the only thing she ever really wanted: to sing.

Thanks to a witty, fast-moving script (also by Famuyiwa) and a sensitive performance from the newcomer Moore, Dope helps us see how a young black man coming of age in America faces complications unforeseen by the smugly entitled high schooler played by Tom Cruise all those years ago in "Risky Business."

Only in the medium of animation could a conceit as elaborate as Inside Out’s be dramatized, and only animation this well-designed and executed could bring such a story so vibrantly to life.

A whomping good time, if you don’t — and who has time to think when there’s a genetically engineered megadinosaur on the loose?

Spy lampoons sexism without abandoning sex — a tough tone for a comedy to strike but one that Feig and McCarthy manage to accomplish with both a sense of justice and a sense of humor.

Tomorrowland is a highly original, occasionally even visionary piece of sci-fi filmmaking, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good movie.

The majority of Fury Road’s effects were done without using CGI, but even so, the onslaught of action is so fast-paced and overpowering there’s little time to appreciate Miller’s analog artistry, and the feeling of being inside a video game—a sinking sensation familiar from less carefully orchestrated action movies—sometimes takes over.

Age of Ultron, then, shows what happens when an unstoppable force (Joss Whedon’s imagination) meets an immovable object (the Disney/Marvel behemoth). And the result is, indeed, paradoxical: a crashy, overlong, FX-driven blockbuster that’s capable of morphing, Hulk-to-Banner style, into a loose-limbed ensemble comedy about collaboration, flirtation, and friendship.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

American Sniper is by no stretch a critique of the U.S. involvement in Iraq; Eastwood leaves larger questions of politics and policy entirely outside the frame of his story, an approach not uncommon in modern war films of any political stripe.

A most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City) and Coppola’s Godfather series.

The tedium of Into the Woods’ second half has less to do with the downbeat subject matter than Marshall’s clumsy direction.

By focusing on the power of cannily staged collective action to turn the tide of public opinion, Selma achieves a contemporary relevance that few historical dramas can — especially those built around real-life figures as encrusted in layers of hagiography as MLK.

Mr. Turner does resemble "Topsy-Turvy" in its meticulous yet vibrant recreation of the past and its ever-expanding thematic amplitude. This is a movie not only about one particular artist, but about art as both a field of human endeavor and an object of shifting cultural and economic value.

It boasts (nearly) all the elements of a perfectly fine, even very good, movie, without ever quite becoming a movie at all.

What ultimately brings down The Boxtrolls isn’t the film’s willingness to wade into grimmer, more gruesome waters than your average kids’ animated adventure. It’s the failure to anchor its often misanthropic story in a character or relationship strong enough to offer a glimpse of redemption—a place of respite in an ugly, cheese-obsessed world.

Especially when Baymax is onscreen doing his adorable-puffy-robot thing, Big Hero 6 qualifies as a better-than-average kids’ movie with enough cross-generational appeal to make it a fine choice for a family weekend matinee. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this film was designed to function as a starter kit for future Marvel aficionados.

Even when Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) tries to pack too much around the edges (including critiques of record-industry sexism and the mechanisms of black political fundraising), the romance at the movie’s center remains credible and vibrant.

Glatzer and Westmoreland don’t need to stack the emotional deck on Alice’s behalf or wring tears from the irony of a brilliant linguist’s cognitive decline. They just leave the camera on Moore’s beautiful but increasingly faraway face, and our tears come on their own.

Snowpiercer is its own strange, special thing, a movie that seems to have been sent back to us from some distant alternate future where grandiose summer action movies can also be lovingly crafted, thematically ambitious works of art.

The heart of Life Itself, and the part of the film that’s most instructive even for those familiar with Ebert’s story, is the long middle section dealing with his stormy, never-resolved relationship with Gene Siskel.

It’s well worth seeing, both for its merciless anatomization of the country’s post-Ceausescu social order and for Gheorghiu’s stupendous central performance as a mother so monstrous she makes Medea look like a pushover.

The movie is at its best when Moodysson... lets his three rebellious heroines simply exist and interact as the overgrown children the actresses still are, collapsing in laughter during a cafeteria food fight or negotiating their first stiff flirtations with a like-minded group of punk-rock-loving boys.

A clever, vividly imagined, consistently funny, eye-poppingly pretty and oddly profound movie … about Legos.

As the couple’s widening rift exposes the gender and class assumptions that underlie their marriage... Force Majeure morphs into a biting critique of modern masculinity, of traditional parenting roles, and possibly of the institution of marriage itself.