Moira Macdonald

Pandas leaves its viewer newly educated, filled with hope, and dazzled.

Watching “The Tales of Hoffmann... feels like walking through a Technicolor field of poppies; you’re happily immersed in it and often a bit lost within, eventually emerging a bit dazed and dazzled by the experience.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread casts a remarkable spell; it wraps around you, like a delicately scented cashmere shawl woven from music and color and astonishing faces.

Nickel Boys is a life, made up of pieces; some of them lovely, some devastating. It’s a mesmerizing, uniquely told story — of memory, of injustice, of friendship, of survival.

Just as it lulls you, it also devastates.

Wickedly clever and unexpectedly touching.

“Do all lovers,” wonders Héloïse in a passionate moment, “feel as though they’re inventing something?” Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a bittersweet celebration of passion and art, feels like that; you’ve never seen another movie quite like this. In its quiet gaze, love becomes art — and vice versa.

It’s a film full of quiet magic; of the power of words not spoken, and the enduring strength of love.

Watching it leaves you lighter, happier, younger — dancing your way out of the theater to the Heads’ irresistible beats.

Johansson and Driver are remarkably, heartbreakingly good in every scene; showing their characters’ journeys to an unflinching camera, letting the gap between them get wider yet unable, for their son’s sake, to completely walk away. It’s a drama playing out on two larger-than-life faces; a family torn apart, and yet enduring.

It’s not a biopic, but I Am Not Your Negro leaves you wanting to know and read more of Baldwin, to experience the language that pours from this film like a fiery balm.

Watching Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s multilayered “Birdman” is like unfolding a piece of intricate origami; it keeps opening in unexpected directions.

You leave the film’s soft-grained world reluctantly, as if taking off a warm coat when it’s still a little chilly inside.

Twenty-five years in the making, this warmhearted, generous film is a quiet masterpiece — the very specific story of one family, but one in which many of us can find our own.

Mary Poppins Returns, made with palpable love for its predecessor, is glorious and gorgeous, and I adored it.

While it’s great fun to watch the Incredibles/Parrs zipping around saving the world (with help from their preternaturally cool pal Lucius/Frozone, voiced with gusto by Samuel L. Jackson), Incredibles 2 gets its heart by being a sweet family story.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a wondrously pure example of one of the great gifts that cinema can give us: to drop us into a time, a place and a life; immersing us in the sounds and the sights and the emotions, large and small, experienced by someone we’re not.

Though every performance is splendid, it’s Washington and Davis who create a mesmerizing symphony of emotion, finding both love and tragedy in every look, every line.

This quiet tale of an ordinary 1950s London man (Bill Nighy) facing the end of his life is a joy: elegantly written, movingly performed, evocatively filmed.

Almodóvar fills the movie with eloquent touches — scenes softly fading to black, music twisting like vines, an old house whose stories whisper in every corner, a baby’s watchful eyes, a past that informs a future. Generations pass, this wise movie tells us; family endures.

Like a gift from the movie gods, here comes Damien Chazelle’s dreamy La La Land, right when a lot of us are in desperate need of some light. It’s a valentine to cinema, splashed with primary colors and velvety L.A. sunsets.

Filmed with great respect and palpable love for its subject, Big Sonia is one of those documentaries that seems to bring its own light — just like the woman at its center.

12 Years a Slave isn’t easy to watch, and it shouldn’t be; it’s one man’s tragedy, but it’s also the tragedy of countless thousands of souls beaten down, literally and metaphorically.

This mesmerizing film is a tribute to an astonishing woman and a timely reminder of a dark period in a country’s history. And, through its vivid use of photographs (particularly the real-life ones shown at the end), it’s a reminder that through film, our stories live on.

This Frankenstein has no shortage of horrors, but it also finds notes of forgiveness and kindness; it’s a monster movie with a soul.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a film about injustice, about patience and anger, beauty and despair — but, ultimately, it’s about love.

Zhao shows us the difficulty of this life — the endless laundromats, the cramped bed in the van, the cold, the possessions left behind — but also its beauty and freedom. I wished I could have seen Nomadland on a theater screen, to see the horizons and pale-peach sunrises stretching endlessly in Joshua James Richards’ beautiful cinematography. And I wished I could have seen McDormand’s face as big as a house, looking wonderingly outward, finding possibility.

Yes, the film does strum the heartstrings a bit too emphatically toward the end, by cranking up Williams' music and giving us perhaps one tear too many, but that's a minor quibble. When Elliott and his friends soar on their bicycles, like flying Peter Pans who must soon grow up, it's as touching and note-perfect a moment as any in the movies. [2002 re-release]