David Rooney

This beautifully acted, expertly modulated film is a work of such enveloping gentleness that even the worst crises are simply absorbed into the fabric of life and work. While the ending might have been corny in a less subtle director’s hands, here it’s quietly restorative. We don’t deserve Kelly Reichardt.

It’s a Gothic horror nightmare heaving with sumptuous visual detail, groaning under the weight of portentous dread, writhing with both convulsive violence and sweaty eroticism and leavened by sly hints of fiendish camp.

This is a beautifully crafted work and an acute evocation of its period both in look and attitude, and it’s no less deeply absorbing for being somewhat muted in tone.

Crisply shot and edited, with effective use of Ashutosh Phatak’s graceful music, this is a powerful documentary that demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American first lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband's death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote.

Blending fiction with documentary and exquisite film craft with playful improvisational freedom, Andrei Konchalovsky delivers what might be the most captivating screen work of his post-Hollywood career with The Postman's White Nights.

A drama of such searing human empathy and quotidian heartbreak that its powerful climactic scenes actually impede your breathing.

This meticulously crafted jewel is del Toro's most satisfying work since Pan's Labyrinth.

The mesmerizing performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the celebrated writer dominates every scene, while director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's penetrating study enthralls in every aspect.

While it unfolds in a hazy dream state rooted in Adam’s loneliness and the emotional suspension that has blocked him from moving forward, it’s by no means a downer. It’s a thing of beauty, heartfelt and unforgettable.

The film is inspiring.

This is an exquisitely crafted film, its unhurried rhythms continually shifting as plangent notes of melancholy, solitude, torment, jealousy and resentment surface. Campion is in full control of her material, digging deep into the turbulent inner life of each of her characters with unerring subtlety.

For a three-part piece, it gains a gorgeous fluidity from the gossamer ribbon of melancholy threaded through it. Like Paterson, it’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.

Gloria is a work of maturity, depth and emotional insight. There’s not a single false note here.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

There’s never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it’s simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created.

Deliberately detached in its observational style, yet as probing, subtle and affecting as any psychological drama could wish to be, this is an elliptical film that trusts its audience enough to peel away exposition and unnecessary dialogue, uncovering rich layers of ambiguity.

While not a lot happens in First Cow by the standards of most two-hour narrative films, and some may wish for a less open-ended conclusion, the drama's rough-edged lyricism kept me rapt the entire time.

An ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.

Midnight Special confirms Nichols' uncommon knack for breathing dramatic integrity and emotional depth into genre material.

This is compelling storytelling by any standard, its supple rhythms hypnotic, its atmosphere potent and its prevailing hushed tone and intimate camerawork affording us the closest possible access to three characters who in turn are constantly studying one another. The actors playing those three points of a complicated triangle could not be better.

The distinctive British filmmaker is at the height of her powers in this semiautobiographical work.

Gray and his superb cast are in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.

Alive with the magic of pictures and the mysteries of silence, this is an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory.

It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.

Confidently dovetailing three strands that depict present and past reality, as well as a dark fictional detour that functions as a blunt real-life rebuke, the film once again demonstrates that Ford is both an intoxicating sensualist and an accomplished storyteller, with as fine an eye for character detail as he has for color and composition.