Kimberley Jones

Undeniably gripping stuff.

Refn’s artful and energetic film never goes further than face value.

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

A Rorschach test of a movie that reveals more about the audience than the characters onscreen. The Drama doesn’t just invite judgment; it’s coded in its DNA.

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.

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.

The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.

Quite astonishingly, amidst all the chaos – and there's no better word for Tristram Shandy's inspired, breakneck madness – what emerges is a featherlight, moving meditation on new fatherhood.

At a silkily dispatched hour and a half, Black Bag is perfectly portioned and entertaining as all get-out.

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.

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

The fault does not lie with Hoffman (who doesn't so much act out Capote's distinctive mannerisms and high-pitched lisp as channel them); his performance is undeniably great. Everything else – solid, satisfying though it may be – falls short of that greatness.

This heartfelt portrait, which brings the artist tantalizingly close, will certainly bring greater renown to Dalton. But she remains, stubbornly, unknowable.

With a saga this sprawling and byzantine, it makes sense that the emphasis is not on Schiele, but rather on what the sorely wronged Bondi never stopped calling "my Schiele."

Blancanieves never lags, per se, it’s just awfully in love with itself: with its gorgeous black and white chiaroscuros and whirling-dervish first-person camera perspectives, the Spanish-guitar-scored dance sequences (that include the undeniable dance of the matador in action), and battering winds of emotional extremes. By the end of this sumptuous and sincerely felt melodrama, I was rather in love with it, too.

Maybe a dare to Desplechin, in fact: Next time, more Esther, less Paul. She’s still got stories to be told.

Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.

Carrey is a bit of a conundrum: He's the best and worst thing about Lemony Snicket.

Elgort’s performance is more mannered than Woodley’s open-faced, direct line to the heart, but it works.

These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company.

Goodhart’s film is a winner – sweet but not sentimental, tart without turning sour. The studio-produced romantic comedy may be flatlining, but who cares, so long as snappy indies like this one step up to fill the void?

The filmmakers’ decision to stay out of the way and shape the story largely in the editing room bears different returns – a less mediated, more immersive, and ultimately quite moving portrait of hopeful youths headed into a harder adulthood.

Much to cheer here, from its treasure trove of early and alternate versions of songs to the triumphant finale.

Keep the Lights On feels like a first-rate, late-Seventies experimental student film, or early Scorsese. But then the cycle of addiction takes over the film, and the plot about stagnancy ends up stagnating the film itself.

For a film about looking for a sign, looking for solace, Room quite brazenly offers neither. It isn't an easy film, but the world's already got plenty of easy and easily digestible films.

The film provides invaluable context in its detailing of institutional racism in the Sixties and Seventies and in its emphasis on Ellis as an advocate for equality and as a righteous shit-stirrer.

In the Aisles is a triumph of mood, aided by an eclectic soundtrack that skips from Delta blues to electro-pop to Strauss and Donizetti, and a worthy stage for Rogowski to continue introducing himself to an international audience.

As with "Sunshine," I'd call Juno a family film if only it didn't make teen pregnancy look so sporting. Instead, we'll settle for that rare bird, an indie comedy that uplifts – funny and smart, totally trying to be cool and succeeding, and heartfelt to boot.

Because Wendy and Lucy is so lean on plot and dialogue, there are long spaces to contemplate Wendy and her situation, and the logistics are mind-boggling.

Is nothing if not exquisitely detailed: It's like a blood orange that del Toro spends the film seductively unpeeling, revealing layer upon layer of meaning and pathos.

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.

The World’s End affectionately takes a page from our Fifties sci-fi films.

When Les Misérables is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it's usually because Russell Crowe has opened his mouth.

An outstanding cast have crafted a delicate, eloquent picture of believable humans in so many gradations of hurt, but it stops just shy of catharsis.

Out of a terrific ensemble cast, Pugh (Midsommar, TV’s The Little Drummer Girl) emerges as the star.

What is so surprising – even exhilarating – about The Names of Love is that it shucks off the desultory roadblocks that engine the modern romantic comedy – all that razzmatazz of missed connections and dunderheaded misunderstandings.

Frankly, I'm shocked that Disney, frequent purveyor of sleeping beauties and singing animated animals, is the studio behind this wonderfully black comedy/morality tale for children, but maybe Disney, too, saw past the material's deliciously macabre bent to find also a thrilling little essay on friendship, fate, and the restorative powers of onions.

Post-viewing, I was still coasting on the giddy high of kinetic cinema, only to have the astonishing callousness of its conclusion slowly settle in. It's a better film for it – one only wishes that Reprise on a whole had been of the same mind: a little less cool, a little more cruel. That's where the really good stuff is.

Ambitious, brutish, ruthlessly unromantic – has the right idea casting its heroine as a Joan of Arc-type crusader and its evil queen a dissertation (albeit first draft) on beauty as the most direct path to power for the disenfranchised female.

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.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

Part 2 is something else altogether. Such digital effects as the marauding giants that squash baby wizards like bugs or the inky terror that is the Death Eaters – acolytes to the mad, bad wizard Voldemort (Fiennes) – are magnificent and experienced in one long, clutched breath. But what's missing is what has been the chief pleasure of the series: the chemistry between its young leads.

Harper and Will both come off like good eggs, and the tears wept on both sides – about the decades of deep pain Harper felt denying her true identity, and the terrible realization for Will that he was blind to that pain – are liable to goose sincere tears of your own.

The film is studded with stirring moments of surprise.

The filmmakers have cast their underdogs well: Madhur Mittal plays the anxious, upright Dinesh; Suraj Sharma is the loose-limbed, pizza-loving Rinku; and they’re both funny and endearing, two words that apply to the whole of the supporting cast.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a dizzying product of our digital age. In its look and energy, which uses a desktop screen as an aesthetic and organizational device, the zigzagging film can have the feel of too many browser tabs open, emblematic of its wide-ranging but sometimes under-explored topics of interest.

All told, The Young Victoria is a very well-made if not especially memorable picture, moving with all the grace and steadfastness of a waltz Victoria and Albert share, but absent any urgency or anything particularly exclamatory.

Through the meat of the movie, I’m Still Here is unassailable: a gripping story, sensitively performed, with outstanding production and costume design effectively reproducing the era.

You don't just root for Harold and Kumar to get the girl, get the weed, and, above all, get the burger – you want to hang out with them while they' doing it, and see if they'e free next Friday night, too.

An entirely sympathetic portrait of the artist at an advancing age. That's right, artist – and to a generation that knows Rivers only as a screeching red-carpet provocateur or as an overknifed monstrosity, that revelation alone is worth the cost of admission.

There is, quite simply, a rather refreshing ordinariness to Remember Me in the unflashy, knuckle-down attention it gives to character development and the building of plausible and involving family and friend dynamics.

The only weak link here is Aniston's character – her Olivia, stuck in a holding pattern, feels like a holdover from Holofcener's previous, single-girl pictures, and Aniston underplays the role to the point of expressionlessness.

Spiritually, Official Competition’s closer point of comparison may be the films of Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), which similarly chronicle humans at their worst (gawwww, humans really are the worst) with visual wit and from a wry remove.

Thrillingly airborne and a riot of color, Migration’s many scenes of flying are an absolute joy.

Quite simply, Midnight in Paris is charming – très charmant, to ape the argot of the locals. I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as this is very much an outsider's valentine to the City of Lights.

Something that falls just shy of greatness.

Funny and fierce and deeply moving.

This is provocative stuff, to be sure, in which the stakes are so high that a pratfall concludes with exploding limbs and the anguished effect of its final minutes is a quiet shock to the system. A comedy of errors and terrors? Who woulda thunk it?

Unvarnished and often silent, she (Hayek) holds the camera’s gaze like a dare. She cuts such a striking figure, you’ll want to follow her anywhere … and where the film ultimately follows is utterly gutting.

Although Super Size Me benefits from a number of interviews with nutritionists, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, the film inevitably (but not unenjoyably) is dominated by Spurlock, who offers his sober-minded statistics and cheeky asides without ever devolving into an off-putting Michael Moore-like moralizing.

Hair is personal. It's also political.

It's easy enough to forget there are special effects involved, so convincing is Stu's rippling fur and big beamy eyes filling up with tears.

There’s gore, all right, although the real terror lies in the tease, and the often dark, herky-jerky DV format ratchets up the tension to an almost unbearable degree.

Despite the notable camp value of Blanchett channeling Gloria Swanson, Cruella de Vil, and an extraterrestrial succulent plant, the doomy villain thing is rote.

To a one, they nail the humor, all right, but they also, quite crucially, humanize the high concept.

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.

The issue of late-term abortions tends to inspire polemics from both sides of the debate; Shane and Wilson’s approach – sensitive, measured, workmanlike – is a welcome one.

Dissent – or a remotely critical eye – doesn’t have any place in RBG; this is an entirely admiring doc.

Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.

With all its emphasis on beat, Brown Sugar can't maintain a steady one, yet when it finds it, the film surely soars.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau (Oscar nominee for Monsieur Lazhar) films these early, subtitled scenes mostly with a documentarian’s observational remove and slightly shaky camera – an effective way to dramatize the horror of war without exploiting it, tarting it up with Hollywood techniques.

With this kind of competition doc, a filmmaker has to be incredibly savvy and soothsaying in selecting his subjects early on: They have to be both charismatic enough to hold the camera’s gaze and competitive enough to advance to the final rounds. In both respects, Baijnauth struck gold with his five baristas.

Is nothing if not foreign, but not in the sense of national demarcations of language and custom. It speaks a different cinematic language, one that tosses off the usual rules of camerawork and narrative structure.

Director Catherine Hardwicke doesn’t need that easily-cut path through long grass; she already has a willing cast and story to get to the guts-splaying.

What's in a name? Lately, less and less. With Daniel Craig's third go at 007, I'm not sure there's much left that distinguishes Bond from Bourne from Batman. They're all slurping from the same soup – think: death-haunted, self-righteous, tight-lipped and -quipped, parkour enthusiast.

Blue Is the Warmest Color has its wobbles, but Exarchopoulos will knock you sideways.

(It should also be noted that Page One wears its pro-Times bias on its sleeve, right up to the rankling but now-common inclusion of a "get involved" Web address at film's end.)

The senseless violence of a Jean-Claude Van Dammer, no point to that, but this, this has purpose. This is an ass-kicking a girl can get into. So why do I feel like crying mea culpa?

Best yet, there’s a mid-film bedtime story, made to look like stop-motion, that’ll take your breath away.

For truly affecting, there is Margherita’s teen daughter, Livia (Mancini). I don’t know if Moretti cares about catharsis, but Livia’s silent sob broke me, in the best way.

It neither embarrasses the original, nor is superior to it in any way.

Me Before You isn’t going to win any awards for sophistication in storytelling or direction, but it tenderly reproduces the book’s most iconic scenes, and their tearjerking effect.

There are significant stretches of talky tedium, more than a few “huh” moments for neophytes – especially whenever anyone starts nattering on about Dust with a capital D – and the ending plays abruptly, but there’s plenty here to hang a franchise on.

Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow’s maturation as an artist.

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

Has very little soul to speak of, but it's got swagger to burn.

Somewhere in that chirpy half-pint frame dwell some meaty comic chops. Goldie Hawn may have found her successor.

Is this latest outing as bold or bracing or funny as the original film? Certainly not. We’re well settled into our seats now, but there’s some comfort in how the cushion already knows a body’s grooves.

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?”

What we get is more of the same from Ferrell – funny faces, goofy accents, pratfalls aplenty – and that ain't bad. It just could have been a lot better.

The middle of a movie is often where filmmakers lose their way, but Friends With Benefits nails this stretch, in which nothing very remarkable happens as two people talk, in bed and out of bed. There's a fine line between fun-dirty and ick-dirty – sometimes you can't identify the line until it's been crossed – and this film keeps its toes on the right side of raunch.

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

Other People is gentle, heartfelt, and of a delicate build. Kelly’s best observations are small but true: the touching banality of a bad pop song, and that “other people” is in fact most people, if you’re paying attention.

Isn't quite a home run: The visually flat film leans on a pop culture crutch that probably won't age very well, and the finale – while terrifically funny – feels piped in from another, far sillier movie.

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.

Square peg, round hole. That's what the twentysomethings who drift through Margarita Happy Hour are like.

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough.

Giamatti is masterful.