Kimberley Jones

It’s a movie made of moments, the antithesis of "plot-driven," but the sum of these moments is magnificent, the culmination of so many elements: acting, scripting, score (by locals Michael Linnen and David Wingo), and cinematography.

It’s almost criminal to have to stay in your seat when the contact high of La La Land is goosing you to grand jeté in the aisle. The heart, at least, is at liberty to swell to bursting.

Did I imagine a gloaming quality to this film, or was that just the influence of my own trudge toward middle age? That, of course, has been the steady brilliance of this series: No matter your own pace on life’s arc, you can always catch your reflection in the fishbowl glass.

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 film gets its biggest laughs – and there truly are some grandly bleak belly-shakers here – by upsetting the apple cart on traditional gender roles.

The film literalizes the damage done by the ruling class in ways that are shocking, but they land.

The real surprise is in how earnestly the director of some of the finest, spikiest romantic comedies ever made is willing to step off the gas and let heartfelt romance win the day. And it so very winning.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment.

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth narrative feature – a soft kiss of magical realism here, a Keystone Cops caper there – is dreamily disorienting.

It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.

The film is so soaring, sometimes literally, I hardly missed the feeling of hard ground underfoot.

What sets Phantom Thread apart is that it isn’t an apologia, or an exorcism. It’s a Valentine. The heart, after all, is our strongest muscle.

Kurosawa's international breakthrough is a masterstroke in unreliable narration.

Do we ever get the whole truth? Only this: The past is never the past. In Farhadi’s wounding worldview, the past is the present and, most certainly, the future, too.

As for words? The script gives Stuhlbarg – a character actor who elevates everything he’s in – the monologue of a lifetime, which he delivers sotto voce, all kindness. And that is perhaps the prevailing note of Call Me by Your Name – of kindness, of tenderness.

“Subtle” is the watchword for this kind of arthouse film. That can be a backhanded compliment, a buyer-beware to attention-deficit audiences, but Haigh is really quite plain with his preoccupations: the constant tick-tock of time, and the illusion that in marriage two are melded into one.

Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.

Funny and touching, Frances Ha may very well be the most eloquent take yet on a generation in flux – a cinematic talk-back to so many Atlantic articles, minus the scolding and the statistics, and uncharacteristically (for Baumbach) uncynical.

Out of a tight, terrific cast, it’s Collias’ performance – so alert and contained, its potency comes on later, like a time-release pill – that gets under your skin. It’s a star-making turn: not just a good one, a great one.

It’s not quite as brutalizing as McEwan’s brilliant source novel – it bears too much of a Great Art buff – but it ravishes nonetheless in its grand exploration of the sins of the daughter and a lifetime spent making reparations.

That spiky aunt is played by Estelle Parsons (Bonnie & Clyde); one of the pleasures of Diane is the rare platform it gives older actresses, including Andrea Martin, Phyllis Somerville, and Deirdre O’Connell.

A thriller wants to entertain you. Little Woods wants you to think, and feel. I did both.

A Most Violent Year is its own thing, hypnotic and exacting and as subtly savage as mellow-voiced Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler),” which opens the film and sets the tone. I was fully in thrall to it all.

It's a mistake to confuse Zero Dark Thirty for "truth" – that would be a disservice to the high level of craftsmanship, from first-billed actors to below-the-line production crew, at work in this movie fiction – but there is admirably little fat on its bones.

This modest French-language film follows the time-honored cinematic tradition of plot as spearheaded by a simple twist of fate.

Truly, it is elucidating for folks who’ve never seen dementia up close, and guttingly familiar to those who have. But even more profound is the film’s record of a remarkable love.

Bahrani's small marvel of a film.

This material is so rich probably any halfway decent filmmaker could assemble a competent doc tallying the two men’s extraordinary accomplishments. But only Lizzie Gottlieb could make a film where she does that plus needles her pop about wearing sweatpants for his sit-down interview.

A rare achievement.

This is a quest movie, with a lot of ground covered, and just as our heroes never stay long in one place or feel safe in their surroundings, neither does the audience.

God Help the Girl is not so perfectly crafted, but the promise – oh, the promise is irresistible.

The Big Sick is as personal as it gets, but Gordon and Nanjiani pull no punches and steer well clear of preciousness. I laughed plenty at their film, cried my guts out, too, and went home elated.

In the House, from the eclectic French filmmaker François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Women), is an almost perverse delight, an egghead thriller that slyly shell-games its truer purpose as an inquiry into the construction – and deconstruction – of fiction. Scratch deconstruction: Make that tear-the-house-down demolition.

Wu quite simply is a stunner. Best known for playing the tough-love matriarch from ABC’s "Fresh off the Boat," she betters the book version of Rachel by making her earthier, steelier, and more playful.

Smart, uncanny, resistant to the short cuts of pop psychology, and shocking in the best since of the word, Steers' debut is a stunner.

Looper makes a full-meal entertainment out of piecemealing genres: It boasts the kicky mental gymnastics that come with time-travel terrain, the relentless rapid heart rate of a crackerjack thriller, and the bursts of extreme violence, buttressed with black humor, of a modern actioner.

Screamingly funny. Like I said, terrific stuff.

The actors, as a powerful and convincing ensemble, are equally understated and just as devastating.

Sharing some of the same talent behind last year’s microindie critic’s darling Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Eephus is suffused with a sincere love for baseball but not overburdened with holiness about the game.

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.

This drama-horror hybrid, set within a New York ballet company, strikes a tone more along the lines of the terrifying hallucinatories of Aronofsky's breakout film, "Requiem for a Dream," revisiting, too, favorite themes of monster mommies and female hysteria.

Anderson and his co-writer Roman Coppola have crafted an elegant and emphatic metaphor for adolescence, that tumultuous province of firsts and lasts.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

The Vuillards, however fractured, know one another's rhythms and rituals, and Desplechin knows just how to convey them in the subtlest of ways.

The tension is enough to make you slightly sick, and the overall mood of the thing is deeply dispiriting, but then, nobody ever said that war isn't hell.

Kazan appears in every scene of The Exploding Girl’s perfectly paced 80 minutes, and you’d miss her if she ducked out for even a moment.

Nothing short of majestic.

It's all so goddamn realistic and reminiscent of real-life love (and how often does that happen onscreen?) that The Puffy Chair would be hell to watch if it weren't so funny.

Equally harrowing and heartrending, Shame is a film that feels akin to going into battle, and I for one didn't emerge unscathed.

It leaves a lot of room for interpretation – depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer – but the takeaway is all tenderness.

The script, and Theron, matter-of-factly illustrate the old adage about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Astaire did, only backwards and in heels. That the film actually gives her credit for it? That’s the best kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.

So yeah, Booksmart is a different kind of teen comedy – clever and buoyant, proudly feminist and wonderfully reassuring that, yeah, the kids are alright.

Snowpiercer holds its own; it’s an unruly but rattling – and ravishing – work of art. On first watch, I wondered if there was anything to scratch beneath the surface – it seemed so straightforward, I worried there wasn’t enough there there – so I rewatched it almost right away and was surprised to find it still left me panting.

If in previous films "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" Jonze seemed a little squirmy about sex, his treatment here is fully adult and keenly sensitive to the complexities of sexual intimacy – how it relates to emotional intimacy, whether or not a flesh-and-blood body is required to achieve it.

Filmed in magnificent monochrome with the kind of richness that reminds you black and white are colors too, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus will put you in a contemplative place.

Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other.

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

Nobody’s a monster here, and that’s the subtle, aching rub of Little Men: Everyone is right in their claim, depending on the right angle, be it economic, sentimental, moral, or fraternal.

The characters in The Claim suffer under the weight of very big things -- betrayal, abandonment, disease, death -- but they do so quietly, stoically, until, by God, they just can't take it anymore.

A manic, lithesome thing, 2 Days in New York flexes between broad comedy and a beautifully observed portrait of family life – especially life after death.

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?

Delicious.

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.

It’s perfectly delightful.

Excepting the occasional shot that forces the eye on a particular dancer, Wenders largely films the action in a way that re-creates the effect of attending a performance in a proscenium theatre – only without having to scrabble for the best seat in the house. No matter where you are, you're already in it.

Rana’s voice comes roaring back in the film’s held-breath third act, in which these amateur actors return to their old apartment to enact a drama with life-or-death stakes. This final 30 minutes are the film’s pièce de résistance.

I don't want to oversell the thing. It is, quite simply, something very special indeed.

Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

Its audacity is entirely matched by its artistry.

It packs a hefty emotional wallop.

You think you’re watching a breezy-seeming comedy, then you’re seduced by two expert flirts, and then suddenly you’re genuinely stirred by a carpe diem monologue on the malleability of identity. I mean, what even is this? An absolute gas.

Admirers of Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her English-language debut Bergman Island, may be surprised at how straightforward One Fine Morning is, how resistant it is to delivering a capital-letter Cinematic Moment.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

For his part, director Stephen Daldry synthesizes the predominant beats of his film work, which has vacillated between feel-good awards bait (Billy Elliot) and feel-bad awards bait (The Hours, The Reader). Feel-good/feel-bad is Together to a T. It feels wonderful.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

It's all about the little things, and the way in which the little things can steal into your heart in big ways.

Picture scenes of excess followed by degradation, shame, teary promises of “never again,” resolve to start anew. Then the record skips and we’re right back to the beginning of the song, and it doesn’t sound any better on repeat listen. The Outrun hits similar beats, yet manages to do so in ways that feel novel at first, and ultimately transcendent.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

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.

McKay makes moral outrage wickedly entertaining.

For all the fierceness of the elements, co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, who previously collaborated on the well-regarded 2015 indie film The Fits, are in no rush here.

Shot in winter grays with no warming ambers and the whiff of tuberculosis hanging around all the players, Inside Llewyn Davis is a chilly thing – a nominal comedy in brisk shivers.

Scripted by Samy Burch, based on a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik, and citing head-spinning references from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to Mike Nichols’ The Graduate to Hard Copy, May December moves a little like a dream, disorienting as the shimmering heat captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.

The film opens with a camera slowly swirling around a skull. Red droplets splash on the cranium. In Michael Nyman’s score, a brass section booms rhythmically like blood in your ears. The effect is brooding and provocative. It’s pure drama. It’s perfectly Alexander McQueen.

Even more extraordinary than the concept or its conceptualization is how intensely moving an experience it all amounts to.

Barbie, the toy, see-saws in the culture between extremes: Is she an aspirational figure, or the fastest way to f*ck up a kid’s relationship to her body? A gateway to the imagination, or a slammed door? Barbie, the movie – an exhilarating, generous, deeply handmade comedy about a mass-market product – revels in these extremes.

The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.

Moon doesn't belabor anything, really, so confidently measured and philosophically nuanced it all plays out (aided by a striking, under-the-skin original score by Clint Mansell).

I suspect where the plot goes will be polarizing; I’m not sure they landed the plane was my first thought when the credits rolled. But days later, Between the Temples has stuck with me. On the zoom out, I think it’s simply marvelous.

Mostly it's just terribly funny and sad and beautifully acted and terrifically feel-good for being, you know, a cancer comedy.

A lovely, quietly thrilling thing.

What struck me more was the film’s interpretation of Bailey’s coming of age not as something to be mourned or that comes on too soon. Instead, it’s an activation.

Neville’s film isn’t making a case for canonization. But it is a call to action.

Grief doesn't exactly sound like a promising starting point for a love story, but, really, what a bounty Mills presents to us of beauty and buoyancy and possibility.

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

And yet that is what is so very remarkable about the film: In a slim 72 minutes, it heart-tethers us to these teenagers, paying tribute to their unique and private selves while allowing the audience to see its own reflection in them.

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