Dana Stevens

Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.

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.

Metropolis retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage cable.

Parasite, maybe the best film Bong has yet made, begins as a social-realist drama about a poor family struggling to find work in modern-day Seoul. By the end of its brisk two hours and 11 minutes, it will have cycled through black comedy, social satire, suspense, and slapstick.

Roma is hypnotic and transporting and sublime, everything a movie seen on the big screen ought to be.

Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" or De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" for the first time. Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series "The Wire."

It’s the unhappiest happy ending I’ve ever seen, a moment that makes you weep not just for this one man who found his way back to freedom, but for all those men and women who never knew it in the first place.

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.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

This is not to say that Gravity is a masterpiece: Unlike Cuarón’s extraordinary "Children of Men", it doesn’t quite pull off its ambitious effort to combine formal inventiveness, heart-pounding action, and intimate human storytelling. But it succeeds thrillingly at the first two of those categories, and only misses the mark on the last because it tries a little too hard — which is certainly a welcome respite from the countless sci-fi thrillers that privilege the human story not at all.

The magnificent One Battle After Another stays true to the spirit of the reclusive author’s best books: It’s a brainy meditation on our dystopian present that’s also a whacked-out roller coaster ride.

The Social Network wants to be a social satire, a miniaturist comedy of manners, and a Greek tragedy; it bites off a lot, at times more than it can chew. But even the unmasticated morsels are pretty tasty.

Just like the short time the lovers have together, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is minimal but perfect, without an image, a glance, or a brushstroke to spare.

In the quietly devastating Amour, Haneke's cool, dispassionate gaze feels, for the first time, something like love.

After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Renner's name.

It's only at the very beginning and the very end that Zero Dark Thirty functions (brilliantly) as a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller. Much of the rest of the time, it's a workplace drama about a woman so good at her job that most of her colleagues think she's crazy.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.

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.

Linklater may not have set out to make a decade-spanning triptych of poetic meditations on youth, young adulthood, and middle age, but he, Hawke, and Delpy have accomplished exactly that. The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love.

The swift-moving, pulse-pounding Dunkirk reveals its filmmaker at his most nimble, supple, and simple.

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.

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.

Between the burnished sheen of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, a soundtrack full of perfectly chosen period pop music, and countless sharply observed details of place, time, and character, The Irishman establishes a world that, for all its violence and tragedy, is hard to leave behind when the last shot...finally comes.

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.

This is the kind of movie you live in as much as watch. Some of its images—Hammer’s Oliver dancing with unselfconscious abandon, Chalamet’s face in extended close-up in the stunning final shot—stay with you afterward like memories of your own half-remembered romance.

It’s Noah Baumbach’s most mature and generous work to date.

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.

It’s not clear how autobiographical Lady Bird is — Gerwig is from Sacramento and graduated from high school around the time the film is set — but the little slice of universe she shows us feels deeply and lovingly observed.

There’s something to admire in the pedal-to-the-metal commitment of their project, and certainly Uncut Gems is the product of an uncompromising vision. But I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground.

Despite its atmosphere of failure and melancholy, Inside Llewyn Davis is ultimately a dark valentine to both its hero and his milieu.

Cate Blanchett’s titanic, almost fanatically well-researched performance—she switches effortlessly between English and German with a soupçon of French thrown in, does her own piano playing, and conducts a real orchestra with utter verisimilitude—thrillingly embodies both Tár’s intense charisma and her monstrous skill at manipulation.

For a story that's all about the harnessing of fateful chthonic forces, Paul Thomas Anderson has dug deeper than ever before, and struck black gold.

Spotlight provides a wealth of exceptional performances.

Maybe part of the problem is that black comedy is a tough genre in which to create a masterpiece.

The film’s structure at first seems loose and episodic, but each scene serves a purpose.

Among the most profound, formally complex, and emotionally overpowering documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s also, by turns and sometimes at once, luridly seductive and darkly comic and physically revolting — a movie that makes you want to laugh and cry and retch and run out of the theater, both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it, too.

The lovely clarity of this story, which seems to have been drawn from the literature of an earlier age, is well served by the artful subtlety of the telling. Mr. Majidi prefers imagery to exposition, and his shots are as dense with meaning, and as readily accessible, as Dutch paintings.

Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.

A near-perfect piece of popular entertainment, a children's classic.

Ambiguous, finely shaded autobiographical dramas like this one don’t generally form the cornerstone of an expanded universe. But Honor Swinton Byrne, making her feature film debut, has created a character who’s complex (and at times maddening) enough to deserve further exploration.

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

To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.

Not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece.

It’s a wistful portrait of our current love affair with technology in all its promise and disappointment, a post-human "Annie Hall."

A big step up in scale for a writer-director who got her start in the freewheeling world of low-budget indies. Seeing her pull off a grand period drama with such confidence, humor, and style leaves you with a sensation not unlike what Jo March must be feeling in the film’s final scene, as she watches while her first book is printed, sewn, and bound, a tiny smile playing on her lips. I can’t believe it’s all finally happening, her face seems to say. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

May be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

Qualifies as one of my favorite movies of all time. This 1932 masterpiece, now digitally restored with retranslated subtitles and a newly recorded score, is a silent film that doesn't feel silent at all.

The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists.

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.

There’s an urgency to Ida’s simple, elemental story that makes it seem timely, or maybe just timeless.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

Though I found plenty in this film to admire, most notably a towering lead performance from Olivia Colman as the appetite-driven queen, I also confess to finding The Favourite, which runs only one minute over two hours, something of a long sit.

It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate."

The magisterial (yet also often funny) performances from virtually every member of the cast, the rigor which with it explores complex characters and ideas, and the sheer painterly beauty of its compositions make this one of the few movies this year I almost immediately went back to see for a second time.

The script of Before Sunset is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling.

In large part thanks to its fresh-faced stars, the charming Hoffman and the wildly charismatic Haim, I’m hard pressed to think of a recent movie whose world I would have liked to stay in longer.

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

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.

Helen Mirren is a goddess of an actress, and her Queen Elizabeth is maddening, hilarious, and deeply human, galumphing around the Balmoral estate in a tartan raincoat and waders as the Britain she thought she knew crumbles around her.

Poetry is perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Anderson's suave, exuberant balance of free-form inspiration and formal control.

What makes this melancholy relationship drama play out as more than a hot lesbian remake of Annie Hall is the vibrant connection between the two gifted actresses at its center.

This devilishly funny and luxuriantly sensuous film is so successful as entertainment that it’s hard to stop and notice the extreme degree of craft that went into its construction.

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.

Because it is so visually splendid and ethically serious, the movie raises hopes it cannot quite satisfy. It comes tantalizingly close to greatness, but seems content, in the end, to fight mediocrity to a draw.

What Mr. Crowe has done is nonetheless remarkable. He has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see.

Despite its three-hour run time and the epic scale of its widescreen IMAX image, Oppenheimer is the most intimate movie the emotionally chilly Nolan has yet made.

United 93, as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful.

Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.

This is a small movie about a small world, but its modesty is part of what makes it durable and satisfying.

Even if you couldn’t care less about jazz drumming, though, Whiplash is a thrill to watch. Underneath that taut, stylish surface, it’s really a movie about the perils of pedagogy, about the relationship between a passionate (perhaps too passionate) student and a demanding (perhaps too demanding) teacher. Which is to say, a movie about a uniquely powerful and potentially destructive form of love.

A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.

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

The Power of the Dog is one of those films that, on first viewing, seems to have a story too thin to support the epic sweep of its setting. But watch it a second time through, and the tightly coiled thriller plot comes into focus, with no detail wasted as the movie hurtles toward a violent, psychically shattering, but narratively satisfying ending.

This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet.

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.

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.

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.

A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin.

Just 97 minutes long, Hard Truths is a deceptively slight movie that can barely contain its titanic central performance.

Though Mildred makes many choices that are reprehensible or downright dangerous, McDormand never fails to convince us of the fundamental decency of this woman, a tragic heroine struggling to find even the tiniest scrap of meaning in a comically awful world.

Like its hero, who is brave without a trace of bravado, Overlord is unusually quiet and thoughtful. The scale and ambition of combat movies has usually been epic, but this one is disarmingly lyrical and subjective.

As played with a melancholy rakishness by the handsomer-than-ever Fiennes, M. Gustave is one of Anderson’s more memorable creations—but he’s stranded in a movie that, for all its gorgeous frills and furbelows... never seemed to me to be quite sure what it was about.

It’s such a welcome sensation to walk out of a movie feeling properly walloped, reminded of the potential power of the big screen to seduce us, entertain us, and break our hearts.

The chance to see the 83-year-old Hopkins in a role that forces him to confront the tragic fact of human mortality, and his own eventual demise, with such rigor, curiosity, and vulnerability would have been reason enough to send audiences to see The Father, even if we weren’t also witnessing the birth of a major film director in Florian Zeller.

Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

Not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy.

Stripped to its bones, Faces is the elegantly simple story of two equal and opposite betrayals.

This is no tale told by an idiot — on the contrary, it’s a funny, fast-moving parable about fame and ambition, laid out for us with care and craft by a gifted filmmaker, a long-missed actor, and a world-class cinematographer. But I’m left with the suspicion the whole thing may signify — well, if not nothing, at least a good deal less than the filmmakers would have us believe.

The Spirit of the Beehive, like "Cinema Paradiso," also takes place at the particular intersection of reality and fantasy defined by youthful moviegoing.

One of the things I loved about Can You Ever Forgive Me?—aside from the radiantly perfect casting of McCarthy and Grant, a Withnail and I–esque pair of drinking buddies, except this time they’re both asocial, hilarious Withnails—was Heller’s quiet confidence in establishing the milieu where all this typing and lying took place.

The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly.

Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.

The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.

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.

Fern’s need for constant movement, McDormand implies in a performance of extraordinary depth and ambiguity, is both a search for something and an escape from something else, and not even she seems completely sure what either something is.