Kimberley Jones

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.

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

Twenty-four years ago, the original Toy Story broke ground as the first-ever entirely computer animated feature film. What’s more astonishing now is how all those ones and zeroes are harnessed to produce something so utterly lifelike.

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

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.

The Descendants is beautifully shot (by Phedon Papamichael) and compellingly performed, especially by its young stars, and it has moments of startling tenderness. If only it didn't feel phony to its bones.

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.

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.

It's hard, as a viewer, not to shudder in tandem with Lisa – this isn't a love match, it's two would-be motivational coaches swapping slogans.

Far more engrossing are the long, dialogue-free stretches that fix on, say, bobbing feet or curled fists on a speed bag. The soundscape, too, is endlessly fascinating, a layer cake of squeaks, grunts, gasps, and rattling chains that, combined, catches a rhythm that sounds an awful lot like song.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

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

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.

This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre.

The title, with its built-in weightiness ... well, it’s a tall order, one this latest Pixar animated feature falls just short of. The dominant mood here is not so much soulful as spirited, which is still better than most – and a most welcome gift.

It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.

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

It’s perfectly delightful.

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.

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

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.

The middle is terrific, especially in a lengthy, unassuming scene in which the three leads sit, sip drinks, and have a good chat: It marks one of the great celluloid pleasures of the year, so virtuosically written, performed, and filmed is it.

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.

It's all pretty goofy, which I assume is the point, but it's also pretty dull.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.

A restless, nervy actor, Hardy seems to get a kick out of tying one hand behind his back. He dominated "The Dark Knight Rises" even with a modified ball gag obscuring most of his face. Here, locked behind a steeling wheel and a conceptual gimmick, he only has the upper half of his body to work with. No surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention: Half a Hardy adds up to a hell of a lot.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.