James Rocchi

Ponsoldt, Paul and Winstead make a remarkably effective team for this film's points and purposes, and Smashed burns long after it goes down smoothly.

Drive works as a great demonstration of how, when there's true talent behind the camera, entertainment and art are not enemies but allies.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

Selma is one of the best American films of the year — and indeed perhaps the best — precisely because it does not simply show what Dr. King did for America in his day; it also wonders explicitly what we have left undone for America in ours.

Calling Love Is Strange a great gay love story is both precise and inaccurate; I doubt I’ll see a more finely performed and beautifully crafted love story, with or without any mere modifiers, up on the big screen this year.

Nothing here feels cheap or hasty, which is why the horror, when it comes, is all the more chilling and grim. Slick, sharp and legitimately terrifying, The Gift is a truly brilliant thriller — and, one hopes, the first of many features from Edgerton to come.

Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding.

It knows how to mock cliché big things, like jokes about set-dressing and music video montages; it’s also wise about small matters, right down to the font and the framing device.

The Raid 2 brings the noise, but length, repetition and too much space also make it a slightly reduced echo of its predecessor.

Warm and funny, real and raw, Hello I Must Be Going deserves a hearty welcome from moviegoers looking for an honest and frank comedy that never forgets to help us care about its characters.

The quest to be the best is a familiar film story, but if director-writer Chazelle has achieved anything here, it’s a deeply and richly different take on that journey—not only examining the cost of struggle but the reward of it, showing both what it takes to be great and what happens when you don’t have it.

Heartfelt and haunting, sympathetic while still aware of the limits of sympathy, Wild incorporates beautiful direction, smart writing and brave acting.

Perhaps the best thing about What If, the new romantic comedy from director Michael Dowse (“Goon”), is that for all of its banter and batted eyes, from its awkward introductions to its inevitable climactic declarations of love, everyone in it feels like a real human being.

Disturbing, honest and compelling, The Stanford Prison Experiment turns a well-known story into must-see storytelling, depicting the ugly truth through gorgeous filmmaking.

By taking the mob film back to its basics of land, family and death, Munzi’s film strips away artifice, cliche and gun-in-fist glamor to make a story of family and fury that burns cold and slow.

The Circle has a sincerity and an honesty that shames far more expensive but over-polished dramas. Plenty of movies have happy endings; The Circle shows you both the happy ending and the incredibly hard work it took to get there.

A feel-good movie that earns all those good feelings, McFarland, USA might be running on a predetermined track, but the heart it shows along the journey is what makes it a winner.

Cold in July never actually turns into the film you think it's going to, and even if that means there's a few unanswered questions ricocheting around your head as the credits roll, it also provides real, rich pleasures as it zigzags into the darkness.

The Lazarus Effect is a smart, unsubtle chiller that should leave even a dedicated horror fan shaken and spooked from its opening scene’s revelations to its final scene’s implications.

There's an extraordinarily tough and smart delicacy to Still Alice, and it stretches far beyond the writing or Moore's performance or even the sympathy of the circumstance.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a startlingly enjoyable and well-made action film leavened by humor and slicked along by style, made by, for, and about people who’ve seen far too many Bond films.

Willfully empty but wildly entertaining, The Equalizer stands out from its peers like a wolf among lapdogs, as Fuqua and Washington bring out the best in each other for the benefit of the audience.

Like a perfect cocktail mixes the sour with the sweet and the bright with the boozy, Focus combines seamless, superbly-crafted filmmaking with the fizz and fun created by its leads.

Made of equal parts mourning and melancholy, mystery, and possibly madness, the striking Tom at the Farm showcases Dolan’s abundant talents at turning seemingly simple material into a taut, tough film.

This isn't disposable popcorn entertainment, or a winking “war” film like “Inglourious Basterds.” Ayer's aim here is a film that will stick, and stick with you. And he achieves it.

While initially playing like a fish-out-of-water (or, more specifically, into-the-water) rom-com, Hunt’s Ride winds up being surprisingly satisfying, a film with the guts to talk about the things that really matter underneath what could have been a glib, shallow version of the same tale.

Strong, stirring, triumphant and tragic, The Imitation Game may be about a man who changed the world, but it’s also about the world that destroyed a man.

A closer, richer examination of a slice of time as specific as it is short.