Kimberley Jones

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.

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.

Leaves you scratching your head a bit, wondering what just happened, and worrying if maybe it could happen to you too.

Writer/director Seth Worley is clearly having fun with the Amber-inspired monsters made real: They bear googly eyes and vomit sparkles before incrementally scaling up to more malevolent creatures that may test younger viewers’ mettle. But Worley is just as invested in the emotional nuance of the story, which meets each of its grieving characters at their own speed and shows them a lot of grace.

Bruckheimer -– always eager to egg on the public’s thirst for bigger, louder, stupider –- has done a scandalous amount of damage to contemporary cinema, but for once, his dubious talent for big-buck bombast is exploited for good rather than evil.

The pictures are gorgeous, and the words, well, if you listen hard enough, the words say exactly what one needs to hear: that is, to wake up and live.

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.

It's a shame if the controversy surrounding Bubble Boy distracts people from what a smart, subversive, and genuinely good-hearted film it is.

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

A surprisingly warmhearted examination of hypocrisy and social insecurity, unlikely camaraderie and stutter-stepped formation of adult identity.

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.

The film, a distinctly secular take on Waugh's religiosity, is far more interested in the battle of blind faith vs. rigid unbelief and its devastating effects. Herein, everyone is complicated – by their station, their philosophy, their God – and everyone is complicit.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

Bardem injects a shaggy, compassionate humor throughout, aided by a wry and moving ensemble cast and co-writer/director Fernando León de Aranda's eye for the offbeat.

It isn't about where you get, but how you get there -- and the getting there is a chewy delight.

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.

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

A lauded Shakespearean actor and adapter who won an Oscar last year for his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on "Bridge of Spies," Rylance portrays the body (via motion-capture) and certainly soul of this gentle giant. In his mournful, lyrical cadence, he makes poetry out of the BFG’s gobbledygook command of English.

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.

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.

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

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

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.

Sweet-spirited and sometimes meandering but always working in the service of its young protagonists’ perspective, We Are the Best! might come off as slight if you aren’t paying attention, or you pay too much attention to the too-cute closing credits montage.

Pray maintains a steadfastly objective viewpoint, and it's a testament to his film's success that it can accommodate the audience's inevitably shifting allegiances from one family member to the next.

Secret Mall Apartment – a seriously fun film – commits in kind.

With "50/50," his last stint in the director's chair, Levine upended convention to make a feel-good cancer movie. He's still defying expectations: In animating the inner workings of the undead, he's made a movie that is both clever and heartfelt.

In fact, I liked wrestling with Nine Days, liked feeling the act of moviewatching as an active, not passive, one, and the way Antonio Pinto’s strings-forward score nudged my brain to stop churning long enough for pure emotion to kick in