Sheila O'Malley

The Greatest Showman, directed with verve and panache by Michael Gracey, is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment, punctuated by 11 memorable songs composed by Oscar- and Tony-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

You don't watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

Eloquent and moving, The Deepest Breath shows what it's like "down there," why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.

Director Greg Berlanti, who has helmed a string of hit television shows as producer and writer, uses the familiar teenage romance genre to tell an LGBTQ story, and in so doing makes these tropes feel fresh, fun, entertaining.

Sound of Falling operates like a ghost story, complete with a haunted house, but the ghosts aren’t supernatural. The ghost is history.

Babygirl is a high-wire act. It’s a small miracle the film works as well as it does.

The best part of Lars von Trier's fascinating, engaging and often didactic Nymphomaniac is that, despite the sometimes-grim tone and bleak color palate, it's an extremely funny film, playful, even.

It's truly refreshing to watch a film where nobody has anything figured out, where life proceeds messily and imperfectly. Saint Frances is unpredictable in a very human way.

One of the intense pleasures of Ruben Brandt, Collector (astonishingly, it is Krstić’s first feature) is how it suggests that theft (i.e. "collecting") is the only way to manage obsession.

It is that very lack of objectivity that makes Strong Island the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake.

I was riveted by every moment of this haunting weird film. Enys Men made me legitimately uneasy.

Is the human brain built to absorb so much of "the world"? How do we filter anything? Matt Wolf's new documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, is an interesting meditation on these ideas, as well as a character study of a fascinating news-junkie with a mission.

The film weaves a spell with its rhythms, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, all accompanied by a vivid and haunting sound design.

She Dies Tomorrow has the feel of a horror film, and is sometimes scary, but it's really an existential meditation on mortality.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

Late Night comes directly from Kaling's own experiences. This is an earnest and funny comedy, with very sharp teeth.

Carol is often about its surfaces, their beauty contrasting with the scary duality of people, relationships. The surfaces in Carol are so seductive that one understands the ache to belong in that world.

Exquisitely researched, beautifully put together, with that celebratory knowledgeable chorus of voices pouring over us, what Spike Lee's documentary really is is an act of love.

The Lobster plays rigorously by its own rules without once telegraphing "Just kidding!" While extremely funny, it is a bitter and ruthless film. Lanthimos plays target practice and his aim is deadly.

Omar is a thriller and a romance, with unabashedly melodramatic elements (there's even a love triangle), all of which are brought into stark relief by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Unlike in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," with a similar circumstance and where abortion is not even mentioned by name (except for the cowardly "schma-shmortion"), Obvious Child is honest.

Refusing to explain Ted Bundy is the strongest possible choice Berlinger could have made because it destabilizes reality. The film itself gaslights us, and this is where Berlinger and Zac Efron — an inspired choice—are powerful co-creators.

The film is thought-provoking, visually arresting, and occasionally very self-important.

Despite the harrowing stories that fill the film from start to finish, Dreamcatcher is not hopeless.

What is truly delightful about the film is its loopy, gently slapstick sense of humor, its use of continuous running gags that pay off cumulatively (no small feat), and the dreamy sense that Schilling's somnambulism is pierced through only by the insane incomprehensible behavior of others.

The film doesn't feel or look like a documentary. It's a character-based piece, but the structure is carefully considered with a clear narrative thrust and an unusual style.

Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand, these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.