Leah Greenblatt

Worst has no shortage of gorgeous-people problems — more than enough, in fact, to fill 12 cinematic "chapters" — but it vibrates with real life, a film so fresh and untethered to rom-com cliché it might actually reshape the idea of what movies like this can be.

It’s not a movie for admiring in freeze frame; it’s the kind you fall into with your whole heart and emerge from feeling, for two hours at least, what it is to fully be transported by the magic of film.

Cary Fukunaga’s stark, beautifully shot drama was likely never meant to be a blockbuster; its brutal account of a child soldier in an unnamed African country is far too discomfiting for wider audiences. It absolutely does belong on a big screen, though, and more important, it just deserves to be seen.

The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession.

It's hard, too, to picture any actress other than McDormand (who also has a producer credit) in the part. She doesn't just become Fern, she creates her: melding Zhao's screenplay to her own fierce character in a way that feels almost uncannily real. Together, they've managed to make that rare thing: a film that feels both necessary and sublime.

If the movie's entire axis spins on the kind of extreme discomfort comedy you almost need a pillow to chew on and a pile of Xanax to get through, that's also the particular genius of Baron Cohen, an artist who instinctively knows how to hold up a mirror — and that a cracked one can show us, maybe better than anything, exactly what we need to see.

There’s a raw, tangible humanity to nearly every scene that sets the film gratifyingly apart.

At just under 90 minutes, the movie is as short and sweet as its stamp-size muse, but an uncommon loveliness lingers; Marcel might just be the most purely joyful, stealthily profound movie experience of the year.

Even as the story's inevitable reckoning descends, Farhadi allows his modest morality tale to take on a note of battered, ambiguous hope: a cautionary fable whose purest notes ring poignantly, painfully true.

It feels like a rare achievement to even attempt to scale the unscalable and still, after more than half a century, be able to make it sing.

Shot in alternating French and Flemish, it's also quintessentially European, but the language of his storytelling is the most universal kind: a moving and often sublime piece of small-scale filmmaking, told with uncommon empathy.

Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.

Kore-eda is working up to something else, steering the story he’s built so carefully toward an utterly unexpected detour. As much of what we think we know unravels, the film becomes not just an enjoyable, intermittently poignant portrait of imperfect people but a profound meditation on the meaning of family.

[Taylor] deftly translates the bleak, raw-boned menace and tricky time signatures of Train’s intertwined plotlines, and draws remarkably vivid performances from his cast, particularly his two female leads.

Kimberly Reed’s taut documentary is also damning, clear-eyed, and as gripping as any John Grisham thriller.

The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.

The movie’s darker allegory of persecution and internment isn’t hard to miss, though, and the dogs themselves, with their tactile tufts of fur and Buster Keaton eyes, have an endearing, complicated humanity.

Though it may not be an easy movie to watch, or even a particularly original one — there’s still Kramer vs. Kramer, after all — Marriage still feels like something special on the screen: a movie that somehow makes its intimacy seem like a radical act, one messy, heart-wrecking moment at a time.

It’s shaggy and self-indulgent and almost scandalously long; and in nearly every moment, pretty glorious. Once also has the good luck of being anchored by what might be two of the last true movie stars: Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a boozy, anxious actor staring down the bell curve of a never-quite-stellar career, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his taciturn stuntman turned trusty sidekick and consigliere.

What keeps the film from feeling like period-piece amber, all whispered alliances and wiggery, is the keenly feminist sensibility of first-time director Josie Rourke (her background is largely in theater) and the fierce charisma and complicated humanity of its two leads, sovereigns till the end.

Officially, Knock follows four progressive female candidates, though the one who inevitably dominates is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-bred waitress–turned–congressional unicorn. It’s a lot of fun to ride along on her wildly improbable rise, from slinging margaritas and scooping out ice buckets to taking down one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

There’s something uniquely, transcendently beautiful in Campillo’s particular vision and the unhurried way he unfurls it.

A quintessentially American tale; profane, profound, and beautiful.

It’s real life, heartbreaking and sublime.

Licorice (the title, never once mentioned or explained, remains a happy non sequitur) is a love letter to an era, and more than that a feeling: a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, one wild poly-blend rumpus at a time.

But here they’re all still young and flannel-y and full of hope—and nobody needs an app for that.

A measured if still-maddening look into the 2016 USA Gymnastics scandal.

It’s heartbreaking, illuminating, and yes, fantastic, just to watch her (Marina) live.

It's shocking, and it should be. But Welcome finds tender, funny moments too — and even, in the end, some kind of hope.

This sprawling German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic WWI novel is a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that transcends the bombast of propaganda mostly just because it's so artfully and indelibly made.

Even when its emotions risk running as cool as its palette, 2049 reaches for, and finds, something remarkable: the elevation of mainstream moviemaking to high art.

That’s the movie’s greatest feint, though: Ultimately, it’s far less interested in galactic destiny than the infinite, uncharted landscape of the human heart.

Like a sturdier Mr. Rogers who just happens to prefer red anoraks to cardigans, Dick comes off as both a kind of holy sage and an extremely good sport — a man whose gentle, pure-hearted exuberance swells to fill nearly every frame.

The portrait that emerges is one of a brash, talented girl who grew up an outcast in her small Texas town.

Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.

As unsettling as Marielle Heller’s feature-film debut can be — there are moments you’ll ache for Minnie and other ones where you’ll want to lock her away — it rings much truer than most coming-of-age stories.

Gerwig doesn’t trap her protagonist in the oblivious underage bubble that most coming-of-age dramedies inhabit; Lady Bird’s parents, played by Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, are fully formed humans with their own deep flaws and vulnerabilities.

If Tillman ties it all together a little neatly, he’s already served up a message that feels too fresh and important to dismiss — not of hate but of hope, and faith that even if sharing these stories can’t magically fix what’s broken, telling them still matters.

Whitney feels like the kind of film anyone who cared at all about her should see: the fullest portrait yet — if one that will always, inevitably fall short — of a singular artist and human being who may have eluded understanding in the end, but still gave the world far more than she ever got back.

It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year.

There's an intimately lived-in quality to the film that feels almost documentary.

In its audacious strangeness, the movie manages to do something history hardly ever gets to: surprise us.

Like the fretful violins that stagger raggedly over the soundtrack, the skin-pricking pleasures of Midsommar aren’t rational, they’re instinctive: a thrilling, seasick freefall into the light.

A visually stunning, richly imagined oasis in a sea of candy-colored safety, and one of the first truly original movies of the year so far.

The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.

To be corny, which the film is decidedly not, it's about life: the brevity of it, the risks we do or don't take, who in the end we choose to share it with. And for all the pettiness, absurdity, and outright threats of violence, it's pretty feckin' wonderful.

Havana’s crumbling trapped-in-time beauty also plays a starring role, but it’s Medina who provides the movie’s raw, tender heart.

There’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light.

Waititi ... finds such strange, sweet humor in his storytelling that the movie somehow maintains its ballast, even when the tone inevitably (and it feels, necessarily) shifts.

A kind of popcorn movie that doesn't just let wit and storytelling serve as the garnish for big-bang action, but makes that its actual priority.

For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.

Aaron Paul has key scenes as the drone pilot who actually has to pull the trigger, but it’s the late Alan Rickman, as Mirren’s superior, who steals the film.

For all its rich tapestry and radiant ingenues, it's that casual centering of so many marginalized voices that makes the movie feel, in its own way, revolutionary: a Technicolor marvel as heady as Old Hollywood, and as modern as this moment.

The thing that truly makes the movie, though, is Bell.

Like the best moments in Up or Wall-E or Inside Out, the alchemy of Soul's final scenes find Pixar at its most stirring and enduring, a marshmallow puff of surreal whimsy that somehow lightly touches the profound.

A bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life.

It delivers something more and better, too: a moving, beautifully humanistic story whose inevitable hardships are laced with real hope and levity.

[Coogler] infuses nearly every frame with soul and style, and makes the radical case that a comic-book movie can actually have something meaningful — beyond boom or kapow or America — to say. In that context, Panther’s nuanced celebration of pride and identity and personal responsibility doesn’t just feel like a fresh direction for the genre, it’s the movie’s own true superpower.

It’s the kind of film that leaves you dazzled and a little shell-shocked — and not entirely sure whether your own moviegoing DNA hasn’t been altered a little in the process.

A serrating, brilliantly stylized portrait of class and fate and family in modern-day Korea.

Roadrunner, steeped in the jittery punk-rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document­, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived

Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.

It’s like a lost John Hughes movie with Irish brogues and cars that just happen to drive on the other side of the road. It’s also, sadly, exactly the kind of sweet little film that too often gets buried in a box office ruled by broader comedies and bloated superhero epics

The movie settles into the blackest kind of buddy comedy — a lacerating slice of nihilism rooted in real despair, and real I-love-you-man tenderness too.

He (Hill) makes Mid90s resonate with universal poignancy and electric energy; his kids are the best, messiest kind of real, and they’re alright.

You wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago. But that’s the point of the whole movie, maybe: She was always there; it just took her 30 years to get to here.

Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.

Despite a few too-cute moments (and many fantastically graphic vagina jokes), the movie is both smarter and more sympathetic than that glib shorthand.

It’s not hard to see why Mustang has been dubbed the “Turkish Virgin Suicides.” Like Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, unsettling 1999 debut, it’s another first film by a young female director that focuses in feverish close-up on the adolescent awakening of five restless, radiant sisters — and the ruin that follows when their family tries to contain it.

The movie's overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it.

Copy celebrates a brilliant storyteller and her lacerating wit...but also recalls a woman who could be bossy, presumptuous, and sometimes mean. To the end, though, she was adored.

Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya — alternately raw, tender, and incendiary — duly electrifies every scene he's in. Righteous as the road may be, his Fred hasn't been flattened to fit the broad Wikipedia-worn contours of a martyr or a hero; he lives and breathes, down to the last indelible frame.

There's an austerity to the film — long shots of stone and candlelight, clipped dialogue — that can feel rigorous, almost grim. But Lee (God's Own Country) is only building a richer kind of mood, and priming the canvas for his actresses, who reward that faith with remarkable performances.

The film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.

Unless you're one of the few who's read Thomas Savage's 1967 book of the same name, on which the script is based, there's rarely a moment that doesn't feel racked with the queasy, thrilling promise of sudden violence or epiphany.

There’s almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn’t be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. That’s how visually ravishing it is to experience writer-director Céline Sciamma’s arthouse swoon of movie — winner of both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

If the subject ultimately proves to be more slippery and diffuse than in the duo’s previous films (The Invisible War addressed sexual assault in the military, The Hunting Ground, campus rape), it also never feels like less than required viewing: brutal, heartbreaking, and — with or without Oprah’s co-sign — utterly necessary.

Plotwise, Women is a wisp; as a mood piece, though, it’s almost irresistibly rich.

An excellently clear-eyed primer on the woman whose talent carried her from an impoverished childhood in Tryon, N.C., to the world’s most rarefied stages—and whose political defiance nearly ended her career.

Blue's raw portrayal of infatuation and heartbreak is both devastating and sublime. It's unforgettable.

Courtenay is a gruff and gratifyingly knotty presence, but in the end it’s Rampling’s movie. In a quiet, beautifully calibrated performance completely stripped of actressy tricks, she’s a revelation.

If Gerwig’s woke Women-hood verges on anachronism, though, it also feels fully loyal to the spirit of Alcott, a woman always well ahead of her time. And like a sort of balm too, for an era when the novel’s long-held values — courage, kindness, strength in vulnerability — still feel a lot further away than they should.

Mostly though, State tells a story both heartbreaking and hopeful: part C-Span, part Lord of the Flies, and wholly unforgettable.

Thelma doesn’t play with pig’s blood and jump scares; its dreamlike dread is subtler and stranger, and much harder to shake.

The story casts a spell, and Swinton Byrne is a milky, beguiling presence; it’s almost as if you’re watching her become a person in real time.

RBG is an unapologetic valentine to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but a sharp and spiky one too.

Moore — vulnerable but undauntable — lives every moment in her skin, fantastic to the last glorious frame.

A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own.

The movie's stark Nordic mood and obscure mystery are as coolly immersive as nearly anything on screen this year — and in the hammy world of supernatural horror, that ambiguity alone feels like a small, spooky gift.

In an era when nearly everything that can be done on film already has been, Titane forges something sensational from nerve and pure metal, and makes it new.

Donald Trump was less kind, essentially abandoning him after his then still-secret diagnosis. Tyrnauer smartly doesn’t overplay the symbolism of their relationship, or work too hard to connect the dots; it’s all there to take or leave in the film’s shrewd, illuminating exploration of a man whose influence, for better or worse, may have far outdone even his wildest dreams.

Trolls doesn’t reach for the emotional resonance of DreamWorks’ more ambitious efforts; its lessons of loyalty and kindness are standard-issue, and tear ducts remain untapped. Still, the movie’s serotonin pumps like a fire hose. It’s almost impossible not to surrender to the bliss.

Nothing in Souvenir Part II is obvious; one could argue it's even obtuse to the point of excluding most casual moviegoers. But surrendering to Hogg's slow alchemy still feels like a rare treat: a beguilingly meta portrait of the artist as a young woman learning to find herself not just in the mirror of others, but in her own hand behind the camera.

The result is a dadaist swirl of satire, pie-eyed whimsy, and speculative futurism — like "Gulliver’s Travels" through the wrong end of a telescope.

The symbolic power of what happened there — one small step, one giant leap for womankind — is still the movie’s truest ace.

The movie largely delivers, splashing its ambitious three-hour narrative across a sprawling canvas of characters, eras, and not-quite-insurmountable challenges.