Kimberley Jones

I laughed, I cried, I longed for a pet dragon to call my own.

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

It's a period piece about the origins of psychoanalysis and the sexual confusions of its progenitors that is eloquent and handsomely made, if never quite revelatory.

Sweet-spirited and sometimes meandering but always working in the service of its young protagonists’ perspective, We Are the Best! might come off as slight if you aren’t paying attention, or you pay too much attention to the too-cute closing credits montage.

Pray maintains a steadfastly objective viewpoint, and it's a testament to his film's success that it can accommodate the audience's inevitably shifting allegiances from one family member to the next.

Secret Mall Apartment – a seriously fun film – commits in kind.

With "50/50," his last stint in the director's chair, Levine upended convention to make a feel-good cancer movie. He's still defying expectations: In animating the inner workings of the undead, he's made a movie that is both clever and heartfelt.

In fact, I liked wrestling with Nine Days, liked feeling the act of moviewatching as an active, not passive, one, and the way Antonio Pinto’s strings-forward score nudged my brain to stop churning long enough for pure emotion to kick in

Forget divining who’s predator and who’s prey. Everybody’s chum here.

Still, it takes a special someone to sell this larger-than-life character onscreen, and to make you forgive how the galloping script glosses over some crucial beats.

Terribly tender, good-hearted picture.

The material begs for a much longer consideration than the film’s trim 79 minutes, but it’s still a must-watch for serious film fans.

Why wait for 2012? If you're hankering for a taste of the apocalypse, the opening sequence of this eye-opening, stomach-queasing doc has plenty to go on – witness menacing superimpositions on a bleak, blighted landscape – and the hits just keep on coming.

In Passages, Sachs’ enthralling eighth feature, he and his regular co-screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias return to the more experimental bent of Keep the Lights On, echoing that film’s elliptical nature and naturalistic presentation of sex, its dizzyingly destructive relationships and Euro-arthouse affect.

This is a strange and beguiling film to the end.

Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.

Sollett’s first feature is a small, but indelible picture, one that approaches the most universal of themes -– first love, confused hormones, parental clashes -– with originality.

What a weird, winning little movie is Robot & Frank, which explores what happens to the essential self as the memory goes. Oh, and it's a heist picture. With robot butlers. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

As much a portrait of a community as of its brilliant, de facto mayor, Harmontown is a stirring tribute to the restorative power of finding your people.

A devastating and weighty picture.

That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.

Thoughtful and achingly empathetic – there is so much grace in these performances – We Grown Now occasionally tilts a touch too capital-A Arthouse Film.

Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.

What sets apart this eighth outing is its giggling bouts of male henpecking, all puffed feathers and nyah-nyah taunts.

Much has been made of the fact that Swanberg has cast for the first time bona fide movie stars and not just his mumblecore pals: In fact, it's the making of the movie. If you're going to build an entire film on microexpressions, then a certain innate magnetism is required. Swanberg gets it in spades from his top-shelf cast.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.

The plot isn’t sturdy enough to fill two hours. An honorable mention, but no best in show.

Mamet does a shrewdly skillful job with these Tinseltown terrors.

This documentary does boast some bowl-you-over reveals best experienced blind.

Ramsay is experimental, unconventional, and forever reaching at the gorgeousness in grief and despair. Her film moves slow as molasses, slow as paint drying -– and all the better to see the colors and the complexities.

It’s the funniest, friskiest date movie in a good long while.

This revisionist Western – intellectually, aesthetically, and narratively absorbing – rattles to the bone, but never quite rends the heart.

One wishes perhaps for a more thumping conclusion, but what we have instead is something perfectly in the spirit of the piece, reaffirming that life, big and little, happens in 10 minutes chunks.

The magnificence of the film's pieces does not quite add up to a satisfying whole.

As light on his feet as he is as a musical-comedy showman, Jackman is perversely even more pleasurable when he’s popping neck veins from the effort of heavy drama.

So much here is equally befuddling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.

This film is sweet and frequently very funny. It isn’t perfect. Some of those imperfections – or, more to the point, irritants, such as the twee chapter headings and college-essay framing device – are carryovers from the YA novel, written by Jesse Andrews, who also adapted the novel to screen.

Linklater has crafted an always genial and at times even joyful period charmer about that moment on the cusp: before a boy becomes a man and another man becomes a mythological figure.

The scoped camerawork is a shrewd tactic; only occasionally does its flat, proscenium effect make the action feel overly staged.

Screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and fanboys’ favorite whipping boy, Damon Lindelof, keep the film moving at a quippy clip; there’s really no fat here until the film feints a climax only to lurch the coaster-car back up the hill again.

The film moves so subtly, in fact, and so seamlessly between wry humor and the emotional wreckage of life-or-death, that it was with some shock that I found myself weeping halfway through the film.

Stoller and Segel don't shy away from rational, relatable adults, which may be an unsexy selling point for a romantic comedy, but that attention to authenticity elevates the likable, low-stakes The Five-Year Engagement.

Serenity evinces the kind of swashbuckling bonhomie that made so many of us fall in love with the original "Star Wars" films, a love that was mightily tested by George Lucas' humorless prequels.

There’s an undeniable thrill to watching something so experimental and yet totally accessible to those of us who speak only layman’s Dylanese, and it’s Haynes’ warmest film yet.

Nolan’s end-act pacing has always felt ponderous – but it’s not enough to ruin what is surely the most intellectually and viscerally engaging action film in years. The soul doesn’t stir, no, but everything else is wildly somersaulting.

Inspired by writer-director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ own experiences in the Army, including combat in Iraq, My Dead Friend Zoe tackles PTSD head-on with humor and empathy.

For all the pratfalls, this is a grim, dispiriting work. It dares not to be liked, and there’s a lot to like in that daringness.

After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter.

It’s only in the last quarter of the film, when Wang strays from her own family’s touchstones to explore a case of separated twins, that One Child Nation loses just a touch of its urgency.

It’s a fun watch, and familiarity with Los Angeles isn’t required to get a kick out of these toe-dips into Koreatown and Tehrangeles and all the other micro-communities that make the city a macro-paradise for eaters.

If there’s a complaint to be made about Look Back, it’s that there’s not enough of it: Adapted from Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga of the same name, the story it tells is purposefully contained.

It’s nowhere near as soulful or questing as "2001" or "Moon" – but as popcorn entertainment, it’s surprisingly provocative.

In a startling, last-reel freeze frame, the male ego pops like a balloon, and I wanted to pre-book for the next Trip right away.

It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.

The film’s third-act reach for a redemptive arc plays hollowly, and Harrelson teeters over the line into hillbilly affectation. Still, it’s not enough to erase the memory of Harrelson’s subtler moments, or to ruin what is an altogether worthy adaptation.

Civil War’s main battle sequence is so effective because it’s six-on-six, and we’ve spent the past decade getting to know the combatants.

And yet, it works, so much so that after two and a quarter hours, I was startled – and not a little disappointed – when the closing credits kicked in.

Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.

A spirited and eye-popping stealth charmer.

Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it.

What wicked good fun it is watching this bad girl do her worst.

Mostly this is a tense, portentous, and provocative piece.

Surely the most unconventional romantic comedy of the summer, Results isn't anti-plot; it just moves in weird ways.

Generous and warm and howling funny, there is such a light touch to Babes, you might not even clock the depth of its observations – its inspections – of body and heart both.

Cotillard doesn't look part Native American or sound like a Thirties Chicago moll, but damned if she isn't a sight and sound to behold. Whatever her technical limitations, she rises above them to breathe a flesh, blood, and battered verisimilitude into the part. You can't tear your eyes off her, any more than you can Mann's flawed but still engrossing picture.

In its third act, Life, Above All takes a bit of a dip into la-la land, in terms of believability – how precisely is an impoverished family supposed to have afforded an ambulance and hospice care? – but that doesn't diminish the emotional impact of Manyaka's performance and the idea that courage can be infectious, too.

Boden and Fleck's unabashedly warmhearted film is a sensitively wrought but also very funny portrait of the way we respond to pressure.

Funny, bewildering, giddy spectacle.