Moira Macdonald

This Beauty and the Beast had me leaving the theater feeling utterly happy; like I’d spent time with old friends who’d grown and changed, and yet remained the same at heart.

Screen chemistry is an odd thing; often you only notice it when it isn’t there. (See: far too many Hollywood romantic comedies.) But Their Finest, an utterly charming film set in World War II-era London, contains a textbook example.

Darkest Hour is a handsome, old-fashioned film, filled with stirring music, dusty light and thoughtful performances — with one whopper of a star turn at its core.

In a movie that reminds us that parenting comes in many forms, it’s touching to learn that the Cayuga word for “aunt” is “small mother.” We almost didn’t need the definition; it’s visible, in Gladstone and Delroy-Olson’s eyes.

All of the performances are vivid (Webber’s ability to convey heartbreak in a silent gaze is uncanny), but Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” holds on to this movie the way Pansy holds on to a grudge.

Dark fare indeed, and you won’t shake it off easily.

A taut, gripping documentary about one young woman’s dream ... Maiden is wonderfully suspenseful — especially if you, like me, have no idea how the race turned out.

This magic musical seems made for film, full of gloriously elaborate sets — can I please move into that dorm room, or at least borrow a few pieces from Glinda’s mountain of pink luggage? — and action sequences that a stage production can’t duplicate.

The night after I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once I had a dream, in which I took a journey that was chaotic and messy and strangely beautiful. I suspect that dream was heavily flavored by the movie I had just seen, which also fit that description. The dream quickly faded, as dreams do, but the movie is staying with me, turning over and over in my head like stones in a kaleidoscope, ever-shifting.

His name might be a punchline, but his story — and the human toll that it took — isn’t.

The British documentary Dark Horse is a delightful story well told — and, like so many good stories, it begins with a dream.

There are moments in Gleason where it’s very hard — whether you know ALS or are new to it — to look at the screen; moments so devastating you wonder how this couple, and those who love them, can bear it. But there’s also, in this remarkable film, evidence of astonishing courage and miraculous love.

The searing documentary Hooligan Sparrow is a portrait of courage.

Those who love books, picturesque English villages and getting lost in actors’ faces should be very happy

Shot in artful, quiet light (many of the frames look like elegant paintings), The Innocents is beautifully performed by its nearly all-female cast; each nun, even those unnamed, is given her own personality and story.

To paraphrase a song that pops up in the film — of course it does — during one of countless swoony moments, you can’t help falling in love with this movie.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

Not all of Hustlers is beautiful, to be sure, but it’s always a kick.

It’s the kind of movie in which stories are conveyed wordlessly through a half-smile, a droopy posture, a man who looks for just a few seconds like he might cry but doesn’t — a film made all the more heartwarming for the work it takes to get to its heart.

The French Dispatch is an elegant ode to good writing, and to those who quietly stand behind the words.

The performances feel wonderfully lived-in, particularly Jackson’s weary, noble Doaker and Deadwyler’s brave, watchful Berniece, a widowed mother determined to make a good life for her daughter and leave the past in the past.

Mostly, we watch Binoche’s face, in eloquent, mesmerizing close-up; pain and grief engulf her expression like water flooding into a still pool. She has few words. She doesn’t need them.

The familiarity is part of what makes The Dry tick along so nicely; it reminds you of other good movies even as you enjoy its own special flavor.

On this wintry landscape, with its endless plains and biting wind, it seems as if everyone — even the quietest — has a story, if you take the time to listen to it.

Unfolding like a thriller but uncomfortably real, September 5 is a haunting portrait of a time when seeing terrorism live on television was something new and strange — and a reminder that, sadly, things may not have changed all that much. But it’s also a stirring depiction of people simply doing their jobs, making decisions in the moment as best they can, trying to do things right when there’s no playbook and hundreds of millions of people watching.

It’s a feel-good film about dreams, about obsession, about believing in yourself when nobody else seems to be doing it for you, and Hawkins carries it with effortless ease.

A Quiet Place is brief, taut and often quite terrifying. And it creates in its audience a fascinating relationship with sound.

Often beautiful, never pretty, occasionally creepy and perpetually surprising, Poor Things lives in Stone’s fiery eyes; her performance is, to borrow Bella’s words, a changeable feast.