Kimberley Jones

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.

Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal, and Ahmed – a murderers’ row of outstanding character actors who all moonlight as leading men – take the script’s raw materials (daddy issues, the trauma of being bullied, the civilizing effect of a toothbrush) and forge new bonds with a few words, a light look. The film treats their growing intimacy, in all its permutations, like an objet d’art, to be turned over and examined, delicately, from every angle. When they’re together, the film is electric.

This Native American romantic comedy, which won the Audience Award at the 2001 Austin Film Festival, arrives in theatres four years late but seasonally right on time.

It’s always a pleasure to be in the company of Potter, and when looking back at the just-competent first outings – well, baby, you’ve come a long way – but still: Where’s the magic, huh?

Heartfelt felicitations to Soderbergh on his rebirth of the cool.

A riot of sight and sound that, however baffling, has an irresistible, elemental pull.

A Quiet Passion’s manneredness overwhelmed me at times, but it is very effective – chilling, even – in its charting of one woman’s disappointed journey to the rhetorical coda of her own life: “Why has the world become so ugly?”

It's not particularly fun, or funny, for starters.

There are good guys we don't care much about and bad guys that we do and even badder guys we're supposed to hate. But on the sliding scale of culpability, everybody's just a few clicks away from the next guy.

An inner-city tragedy that plays its story simply, sorrowfully, and beautifully.

Where "Finding Nemo" capitalized on the awesome splendor and danger of the ocean, this follow-up shifts much of its action to an aquatic park and becomes broader and sillier, or at least reality-busting, for it.

The Dogme pedigree rarely distracts; there is too much emotional investment to care much about dogmatic fidelity.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

Cue the footage of Cockettes in spangles and glitter, high-kicking and belting out show tunes at the top of their lungs. Damn, it looks grand.

We see the work, the figurative (and sometimes literal) sweat that went into crafting these characters. It’s capital-M Movie Acting, and I couldn’t love it more. It moved me.

The internet is infinite. So, too, are the ways it can breed creepy behavior and new opportunities to commodify human connection. People’s Republic of Desire explores only a tiny swath of the internet of grossness, but it’s a subject so epic it deserves much longer examining than a quick 95 minutes affords.

The Immigrant is two hours long, but I stayed even longer in my seat, through the credits, still in thrall to it all. The title is singular, but the scope is not so easily quantifiable.

I recognized a lot of my younger self in The Edge of Seventeen. It’s crummy that teenagers just shy of 17 won’t get the same chance.

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.

Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

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

Provides no revelations and left this viewer, at least, puzzling over whether the picture Cunningham has allowed to develop of him is completely transparent or utterly impenetrable.

As Lo and Behold anecdotally lays it out, in the blink of the eye of human history, this invention has become essential, and in another blink – a solar flare, or cyberwarfare – its failure could trigger a civilization’s collapse.

Maggie’s Plan is an ensemble piece, with Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel, and a magic, romantic New York rounding out the cast. They’re all great, but it’s Gerwig who’s just so damn gosh-wow.

Filmmakers nicely mix the historical and the tributary, honoring both Bennett's cultural landmark and the dancers who dream of joining its ranks.

It’s muddy, bloody, and studded with amputated limbs, yet still rather generic-feeling; it lacks the visceral impact of Joe Wright’s version of Western Front atrocities in "Atonement."

White couldn't stay away, and neither can the band's legions of fans, who bop up and down in sold-out arenas at the reunion tour that provides the film's hopeful coda.

The very best animation can excite the senses and inflame the imagination. But Chico & Rito's charmless line drawings just made me wish the film was live-action instead.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an outlier: a space opera in a largely earthbound movie cycle (excepting the occasional red-eye to another dimension in the Thor pictures), candy-colored and bopping where the other Marvel movies are muted and imposing, and the funniest one to date, without a doubt.

It isn't all the actors' faults, of course. You can't, ahem, turn straw into gold, and straw – dull, brittle, lousy to taste – is entirely what director Mark Rosman and first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap deliver.

What keeps Outside In interesting throughout is the nuanced work of its so very watchable leads – especially Duplass, who spent the first half of his career behind the camera writing, directing, and producing film and TV with his brother Mark.

The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.

Living in Emergency, then, is like a hard slap to the face: There is nothing remotely romantic about this grim depiction of two missions in Liberia and Congo in the mid-2000s.

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

The Last Station would have satisfied alone as a witty, manic lark, but as it moves toward the titular railway station, the film unfurls into so much more – a work of compassion, modulated mournfulness, and unchecked joy.

A funny, seductive, and surprisingly honest dramatization of the ways we snooker ourselves into incompatible love.

July sees the world in a most unexpected way, and it's a shame that Me and You's preciousness sometimes overwhelms that uniqueness of vision.

It all adds up to a portrait in decency, which isn’t nearly as sexy as the title would suggest.

Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion.

It’s an indie film about abortion that comes snuggled in the broad strokes of a quirky relationship comedy. A grump might wonder when indie films got so soft, but I’m more intrigued by the inverse: Why aren’t more studio films this clever and winning and conversant in the same language as their audience?

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

Shirley is probably too niche to attract the Academy’s interest in Moss – how has she never been nominated? – but it’s a big, messy, masterfully itchy performance and yet another notch in her belt.

Mostly it will just make you hungry to revisit Ashman’s work. That’s perhaps not the intended result of this fond tribute/merely serviceable survey of a too-short career – but it’s not necessarily a bad one.

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.

Astonishingly dull. The leads have zero chemistry, the supporting actors are even worse, and the script is a lifeless, draggy thing.

With American independent film teeming with so many shaky-cam snarksters, what an electric riposte to the status quo is Nichols, whose films are classically constructed and deadly serious. In his short but potent career, he’s mastered a wide-vistaed eye for the epic and the elemental.

Tilting surprisingly dark – I suspect the film is at least in part about how we process trauma – but also somewhat impenetrable on first watch, it was another startlement when I realized I was crying. I can’t wait to go back.

The Hunger Games franchise, both in print and onscreen, has been exceptionally clever about cozying away imaginative space for fans to fill in the blanks and cast themselves in the rich drama. That this latest film leaves us hungering for more only means that it’s working.

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.

Going dramatic, Stiller commits to the role completely; there's something rather admirable in his refusal to pander or soft-pedal the self-serious, frankly unlikable Greenberg.

Mamet does a shrewdly skillful job with these Tinseltown terrors.

Mistress America is maybe Baumbach’s most probing consideration of the writer’s process and development, a continuing point of interest in his filmography, from "Kicking and Screaming" to "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding."

Director Lenny Abrahamson establishes a twee tone early that renders tinny the transition into melancholy, and it’s a shame the film so clings to Jon’s perspective. The takeaway is as flat as Frank’s mask. Bemused smile, followed by deflated feeling.

While The Art of the Steal makes a very convincing – even bone-chilling – argument that the people and foundations that essentially hijacked the Barnes Foundation are primarily concerned with tourist dollars and not the preservation of Barnes' legacy, the film fails to even ponder why easier access to some of the world's greatest art treasures might not be an entirely bad thing.

I suppose when you make a movie, however tangentially, about Viagra, you're required to insert at least one scene of its side effects, but the broadness with which Zwick plays it out is like a stake to the heart of the film's hard-earned but fast-lost authenticity.

Sisley is a former stand-up comic, although you'd never guess it here: Finding himself in the eye of a colossal shit storm of his own making, his Vincent is brusque and action oriented, his face, a picture of ulceration in progress.

If Love Me wants us to consider the inner life of inanimate objects, that message gets muddled when we’re mostly looking at these two very alive actors.

Just as marriage does not banish aloneness, proximity to the characters onscreen doesn't unlock any special connection to them.

There are worse accusations to hurl at a filmmaker than that she has too much empathy for her characters, but in the case of Oh, Hi!, it stymies the potential in its provocative premise and holds a pretty good movie back from greatness.

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.

In his short career (The Station Agent, The Visitor), McCarthy has established himself as a craftsman of conventionally quirky pictures that are ENTIRELY about ingratiating themselves with the audience.

After the recent rash of superhero end-spectacles as long-winded and self-serious as a term paper, the limited ambition of The Dark World’s climax is a relief. It scuttles all term paper aspirations and instead humbly lobs a thesis statement-slash-open invitation: Let’s have some fun, shall we? And so we did.

Throughout, the documentary is fun and engaging, even whimsical when using (to good effect) illustrations and Gilliam’s own storyboards.

In an age of doggedly unambitious comedy, one marvels at the finesse these first-time screenwriters and director Feig bring to marrying raunch, romantic comedy, and the tested but ever-true bond between women.

It's a nice, friendly kind of love, but hardly an inspiring one.

Danner’s even better on her own, as she honestly, even angrily, wrangles with not a paradox, per se, just the raw rub of life: that it sucks to be alone, and it’s scary to try not being alone. She’s exquisite.

The camera may dive deep, but the content skims mere surface.

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.

There are no hard truths to be found in Finding Vivian Maier (really, how could there be?), but it’s an engrossing doc nevertheless – a portrait of an American artist hiding in plain sight, a mystery with too few clues, and a sincere inquiry into how best to divine the wishes of the dead.

The filmmakers no doubt had a hell of a time whittling the material down; unfortunately, what they came up with was something long on the mundaneness of GovWorks.com and short on the personalities behind it.

Appropriately belongs to Lopez. His mannequin glaze and never-wavering smile provide more creepy-crawlies than a thousand quivering violins or perfectly timed thunderclaps.

Capitalizes on the audience’s familiarity with the many players and their complex backstories, but never advances the ball down the field, tenders no new thought or wrinkle to the franchise. It’s the difference between a diverting entertainment, and a riveting one.

These women are marvelous, with ancient, creased faces and the kind of admirable f...-all attitude that comes with age. I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Trainwreck can be furiously funny. It just goes down too easy. It’s scared of its own sharp edges. The sly raging against the machine of Inside Amy Schumer has gone missing. Here, the rage, curiously, is turned inward.

By trying to give these women happy endings, or proposing fake reasons for how they came to produce indelible works, these alternative histories only achieve the opposite. They rob them of the truth of their lives.

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

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.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

With the documentary Ballet 422, Lipes’ first return to dance after notable narrative cinematography work (on TV’s Girls and the upcoming Trainwreck, among other projects), he’s somewhat boxed himself into a corner with the cinema verité directive to capture the moment and keep out of the way.

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

Owen’s story is unique, and deserving of singling out.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

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.

Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.

It gives the illusion of a conclusion and cuts to black before it has to answer for how many more questions have been raised.

As for that central question: Yep, it’s art, all right. One only wishes they’d gotten down to the business of it sooner.

Understandably, a filmmaker tackling the retelling of a national hero must do so with great delicacy, but The Sea Inside presents not so much a hero as a saint in Sampredo.

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.

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.

Rush, a film about two real-life titans of Formula One racing in the Seventies, splits its narrative between these oil-and-water personalities, which feels about right: It's only half of a good movie.

Like a kindler, gentler "Bully," Mean Creek hinges on the bullied fighting back against the aggressor, but offers a more expansive examination of aggression and, even more significantly, passivity.

Winnie the Pooh doesn't reinvent the wheel, just gives it an affectionate spin, and that is no more and no less than what one would hope from a family reunion.