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.