Jessica Kiang

The Immigrant is contained, restrained, thoughtful filmmaking that satisfies on nearly every level, except for the desire for a little chaos.

Beautifully shot, touchingly performed and delivered with a thrillingly atmospheric sense of place, Heartstone lets us meditate on these themes during that long last summer, when childhood seems like it’s going to extend, agonizingly, forever, only for it to be snapped abruptly away like a shout on the wind.

It’s an offbeat, fun, and frequently very funny film, lifted out of disposability by some wonderfully rich production design, music cuts and photography, and by the cherishable performances of the leads.

While Felix von Groeningen's film, which centers around a couple whose child is diagnosed with cancer, could easily have strayed into maudlin territory, the deft, non-chronological structure and the constantly surprising, beautiful performances -- both acting and the musical -- elevate it well clear of any Movie of the Week associations.

By turns moving, absorbing and downright rage-inducing.

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role.

The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.

If it does suffer slightly from an overall lack of urgency that will mean those looking for a more directly emotive experience may find it hard to engage with, the more patient viewer has rewards in store that are rich and rare indeed.

It’s when Johnson strays from strict adherence to the concept that the most profound insights come.

There are wit and wisdom and a kind of “Before Sunrise” wistfulness in this slight little film, and it’s shot through with an unobtrusively lyrical affection for being young and aimless in even the less obviously lovely quarters of lovely Lisbon.

So much does not connect here and so much is designed to discomfit that there is unexpected resonance when Alverson lays aside the scabrousness and puts down oddball drollery to remind us that inside every lonely young man, there’s a shivering kid waiting to be picked up and brought in from the snow.

In amongst Joker’s fire and blood and chaos and its blackest of blackhearted laughter, there is the sense of a grotesque, green-haired genie being let out of a bottle, and whether it wreaks havoc or not, we’re not going to be able to put it back in.

Wonderstruck lives in the glory of its filmmaking — its photography, its costuming, its set design, its brilliantly variegated Carter Burwell score.

Though it is dense in allusion and rich in texture, there are choices he makes that ultimately pull The Salesman back from the greatness, and the engulfing universality of his best work. It is as compelling as anything Farhadi has ever made, but it’s also somehow smaller.

Heady, bold statements about humankind are both the film’s best aspect and its chief flaw: There are just so many of them.

This is a film that glories in juxtaposition, as exchanges of bestial ferocity hiss back and forth in an excruciatingly elegant destination restaurant, and as poisonously feral barbs are traded across a table laden with elaborately effete hors d’oeuvres.

After the Storm is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.

Mr. Holmes is not so much the story of Holmes' last case, as the story of his last choice: whether to go gentle, or whether to rage against the dying of the light.

In Jackson Heights serves to remind us that our worlds are full of living things, and that, being the social creatures we are, we need each other.

Structured as a low-key chase movie, unfolding with the dark urgency of a conspiracy thriller, living mostly not in your heart or even your mind but in the hairs on the back of your neck, "Midnight Special" actually emerges most resonantly as an almost mournful ode, or maybe a psalm, to the primal instincts of fatherhood.

While it doesn't reinvent the wheel, or revolutionize the genre, it achieves its modest ambitions affectingly well, in no small part due to a clutch of cherishable performances, especially from leads Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff.

You could dine on nothing but lard for twenty years and still not develop the hardness of heart necessary to avoid being won over by Roger Michell‘s The Duke, a ridiculously charming British comedy that dunks a gamely accented prestige cast into an appealingly milky true story like so many digestives into a warm, well-earned, early evening cuppa.

With all this evocative material available it’s unfortunate that Kent lavishes so much of the overgenerous runtime on repetitive and redundant plotting.

This affectionate portrait avoids the major pitfall of comparable docs like Asif Kapadia‘s “Amy” or Kevin Macdonald‘s recent “Whitney” in that it steadfastly refuses to make Williams’ death the defining aspect of his life.

The film is the most formally experimental, and probably the least approachable, of the director's titles to date. But it's further proof of Wheatley's singular sensibilities as a filmmaker.

“Bride” is remarkable for how honestly it earns every tiny tick of pleasure it gives — for it gives many.

Inside Out is not just fun and breezy, it's also truly weird and wicked smart in its thoroughly heartfelt conclusions.

Whatever flaws it has are ones of over-enthusiasm and over-ambition and are therefore easy to forgive, especially because when it works, it really works.