Kimberley Jones

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.