Leah Greenblatt

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.

In the tricky world of tween-dom, it captures something sweetly universal: Growing up is messy, no matter how you bear it.

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

The mannered aye-matey dialogue often gives Lighthouse the performative feeling of a play, but Eggers (The Witch) is also a masterful stylist; judging by several cues, the story is set in some version of the 19th century, though it tends to treat time less as a set fact than a sort of metaphysical condition.

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

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

For all its eerie scene-setting and squishy entrails, Antlers never really exposes the emotional guts of its narrative beyond the scope of midnight-movie horror; without that, it's just another nightmare fairytale leaning hard on heavy vibes and jump scares, and losing the forest for the trees.

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.

At its core, the movie is too in love with love — or at least its messy, time-jumping ideal of it — for that kind of true discomfort comedy. That makes it less brave, maybe, but in this moment we're living in, who could begrudge a happy ending?

A gentle, almost willfully recessive story about love and loss and all the ways that people find to share the burden of them both, one unhurried day at a time.

It's all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.

With [Crawford's] proud, wounded performance at the center, the film's raw vérité style and unforced naturalism do more than set a mood; in its best moments, it breaks your heart.

First-time feature filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre brings a gorgeous, wide-open sparseness to her visual storytelling (it makes sense that Robert Redford, the original Sundance Kid, is listed as an executive producer), but it’s largely Schoenaerts’ movie to carry.

Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces.

When A Quiet Place has one finger on the panic button and the other on mute, it’s a nervy, terrifying thrill.

Another rich creation in Mills' bittersweet, gently profound collisions of art and life.

A silly, stabby, supremely clever whodunnit that only really suffers from having too little room for each of its talented players to fully register in the film’s limited run time.

Lively looks fantastic in every era’s fashion as it passes, and she does a nice job of conveying Adaline’s old-world diction and reserve; there’s no Gossip in this girl.

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

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.

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.

Navalny has a bracing, heart-racing story to tell, even as the improbable facts rush past. But it never fails to focus on the human man: funny, prickly, and unimaginably brave, down to the last defiant frame.

Madeline is the kind of movie that won’t come anywhere near the mainstream, and clearly wasn’t meant to. But for the dozens of viewers it will almost certainly baffle or exasperate, there will be one or two completely captured by its peculiar magic.

And for all the absurdist laughs (and not a few cringes) both men wring from it, their interplay feels both inherently ridiculous and entirely true to life; a bittersweet bromance writ in whiskey and spandex.

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.

Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn.

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.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.