Dana Stevens

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.

The Babadook creates tension not with jump scares or chase sequences but with judicious editing and slow-burn suspense—that is, until it descends into a final half-hour of harrowing emotional and physical intensity, an extended climax that made me gasp aloud, hide my eyes, and weep at least twice.

Inherent Vice’s spiraling, wordplay-happy script never quite resolves the difficulty of adapting this particularly confounding philosophical whodunit, but the film’s groovy sprawl is a fine place to hang out for 2½ hours, as long as, like Doc and his weed-toking cohort, you don’t mind spending a day in a pleasantly disoriented daze.

For most of Wild, we’re alone with Cheryl’s stark aloneness with herself. That’s a fine place to be.

Throughout The Imitation Game, there’s a sense the filmmaker is trying to shield viewers from the story’s most difficult parts — whether it’s the horrors of war, the technical complexity of the Enigma code and its solution, or the bleakness of Alan Turing’s final fate. I wish Tyldum had trusted the audience enough to let us in on the worst. It would have made his movie so much better.

If Mockingjay’s placeholder status is a little too evident in its choppy, shapeless structure, this dark third chapter does have stretches of somber beauty.

As powerful as Foxcatcher can be scene to scene, there’s something maddeningly indistinct about it at times, as if the details that would make it all make sense remain somehow inaccessible to us.

Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Jones and Redmayne are both superb as a devoted but imperfect pair of headstrong people trying, and sometimes failing, to treat each other with care and respect.

Nightcrawler, like its entrepreneurial-to-a-fault protagonist, is ambitious but ultimately hollow, eager to dazzle and shock us but reluctant to let us inside.

A movie I snickered at more than once but never stopped staring at in wonder. This isn’t Nolan’s best film by any stretch, but it abounds in the qualities that are among his strengths.

While it’s a character portrait of a morally small man, Listen Up Philip doesn’t feel like a morally small movie.

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.

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.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

The Guest isn’t here to deliver an earnest social message about the state of veterans’ affairs. Instead, the way good horror movies do, it channels our collective fear, guilt, and rage by creating a monster.

I found The Skeleton Twins merely entertaining, but I’d love to see these two actors team up again, Tracy-and-Hepburn style, and make a string of movies together — maybe some that would venture further into the post–rom-com territory this one begins to explore.

Lithgow and Molina play Ben and George with such depth, tenderness, and history that their affection for one another’s bodies (there’s no sex, but loads of snuggling) seems like a natural extension of their pleasure in being together.

Fassbender spending nearly an entire movie obscured by a giant fake head is such a had-me-at-hello idea that it’s disappointing that Frank never plumbs the fascinating questions it raises about performance, group dynamics, and mental health.

Calvary gives Gleeson ample opportunity to explore his talent for anchoring a movie, making it deeper and richer than the script and direction might otherwise allow.

An entertainment choice I wouldn’t recommend, but one you might not regret if you dial your expectations down (or your drug intake up).

Sex Tape, conversely, is as timid, bland, and predictable as romantic comedies come — though it’s a hard movie to hate entirely.

Boyhood reimagines the coming-of-age film as family album, longitudinal character study, and collaborative artistic experiment — a mad risk that paid off in a movie that’s as transcendent as it is ordinary, just like life.

This rough-edged parody feels both distinctive and handmade, and for those reasons alone it’s a hard movie to hate, even when it temporarily loses its comic footing. Anyway, as romantic comedies down the ages have taught us, hatred is just a latent form of love.

Above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.

For all the film’s best intentions — and a finely tuned performance from the ever-better Woodley — for me The Fault in Our Stars never entirely found its way out of Sparks territory.