Stephanie Zacharek

Queen of Earth is also a semi-comedy, often funny in an intentionally bleak way. And that, besides Moss, is what makes it work.

With Selma, DuVernay has pulled off a tricky feat, a movie based on historical events that never feels dull, worthy, or lifeless; it hangs together as a story and not just part of a lesson plan. The movie is at once intimate and grand in scope.

Magnificent and heartfelt.

It's 85 minutes of screen time that represents one crystallized moment not in the Beatles' career per se but in the parallel career they forged inside all of us, the one that will last beyond any breakup, retirement or death.

Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us.

In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive.

Drive not only met my hopes; it charged way over the speed limit, partly because it's an unapologetically commercial picture that defies all the current trends in mainstream action filmmaking.

Fincher and his screenwriter, TV writer-god Aaron Sorkin, have made a seemingly modest picture that achieves something close to greatness the old-fashioned, slow-burning way: By telling a story with faces, dialogue and body language of all types, from awkward to swaggering.

To hell with that childlike sense-of-wonder crap: Despicable Me, instead of trying to return adults to a false state of innocence, reminds us that we all started out as ill-mannered little savages.

A direct and heartfelt piece of work. It's conventional, maybe, in its sense of filmmaking decorum, but extraordinary in the way it cuts to the core of human frustration and feelings of inadequacy, reminding us how universal those feelings are.

If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.

What Press comes up with in the end isn't just a portrait of individual eccentricity. Its larger subject is the way one man, just by being alive to what's around him, has created a vast, detailed anthropological record of how New Yorkers present, and feel, about themselves.

The actresses' performances intertwine beautifully, like twin climbing vines vying for the attention of the sun.

An adaptation that wholly and faithfully captures the spirit and mood of the book it's based on, and an example of computer animation - the 2-D sort - that shows the human touch in every frame.

More universal than it is alternative, except in one sense: There's nothing else on the contemporary movie landscape like it.

The movie's intricacy, and the way it finds its way into the emotional lives of its characters via (and not in spite of) that intricacy, is what makes it extraordinary. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy challenges audiences to believe in craftsmanship again.

Wright has orchestrated every swerve and near smashup—and one glorious foot chase—with precision, a rarity in action filmmaking these days.

It's a cross between confidence and vulnerability that's hard for an actress to pull off, but Streisand hits the note perfectly. And her greatest moment of acting, I think, is also the picture's strongest musical number.

The movie is tender like a rainstorm: only in the aftermath, after you’ve allowed time for its ideas to settle, does its full picture become clear. It’s the kind of movie that makes everything feel washed clean, a gentle nudge of encouragement suggesting that no matter how tired you feel, you can move on in the world.

As close to mainstream perfection as I've seen all year. It gives us everything we want, need and deserve without batting an eye.

A sequel made with care and integrity, Toy Story 3 is just moving enough: It winds its way gently toward its big themes instead of grabbing desperately at them, and because its plot is so beautifully worked out, getting there is almost all of the fun.

The best Allen movie in 10 years, or maybe even close to 20 - is all about that idea: Reckoning with the past as a real place, but also worrying about the limits of nostalgia.

Mystic River is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande—from Australian director Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand—is the first great movie, in a long time, for the invisibles.

The picture is celebratory, in its own quiet way, as well as clear-eyed.

While it’s all to the good that Drew Dixon’s story has come to light, it’s likely that Russell Simmons will always be more famous than she is. In another, more just world, it could have been the other way around.

The Dissident feels essential. This is a somber piece of work; it’s not likely to cheer anyone up. But if the details of the Khashoggi case aren’t for the faint of heart, facing the facts squarely is at least somewhat cleansing. And as the story of a man who put his life on the line for his ideals, it’s as bracing a narrative as any novelist could invent.

Speaks to the teenager in all of us.

Denis’s movies can be imaginative and poetic; sometimes they’re unflinchingly brutal. High Life, her first English-language picture, is all of those things, a work of great beauty that’s also at times difficult to watch.

Imaginative and intricate, but it's also joyfully casual, maybe to the point of being a little messy in places. But even its flaws work in its favor.

Virtually nothing at all is wrapped up in The Lawless Heart, which is probably why it feels so satisfyingly whole by the end.

Kids have no idea they’re feeling wonder — just feeling it is the thing. That’s the lightning in a bottle captured by director Sean Baker in The Florida Project.

Hits every color note just right. It's a visual antidepressant.

Borat is an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is.

The small miracle of the movie is that Simien finds so many laughs in what are genuinely bewildering issues.

I never would have believed it, but Branagh gets the balance between pageantry and silliness just right.

A surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.

Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous.

It's a fine-grained picture that goes for the sideways laughs rather than the straight-ahead ones. This is sketch comedy as method acting.

Poor Things might have benefited from some trimming—it takes a little too long to get cooking—but it’s Lanthimos’ finest movie so far, a strange, gorgeous-looking picture that extends generosity both to its characters and the audience. And Stone—so dazzling in The Favourite—provides its thrumming pulse.

The Hangover is a shaggy-dog tale that's actually, when you step back from it, perfectly shaped.

In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we've got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who'd like to be in love but don't know how to go about it.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.

Like all good documentaries, Iris is about much more than what we see on the surface, no matter how dazzling that surface may be.

Limbo, tender and searching, shows what can happen to people when they’re between points A and B, a nowheresville that can change the shape of a life forever. It’s also about the meaning of musicianship, of how songs and sound can define who we are and where we come from.

This, possibly, is the best kind of movie, the stealth achievement that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

This is that rare movie version of a great novel in which watching IS reading.

The movie has a crispness about it, an unwillingness to succumb to sentimentality.

Mommy is first and foremost a mother-and-son story, but it's also a surprisingly delicate exploration of lonely lives, and the temporary islands of companionship that make them bearable.

What's remarkable about Pina is how democratic it is, how casual it is about opening up the world of modern dance to people who know, or perhaps care, little about it.

It miraculously pulled off the effect of feeling like a surprise: The picture both fulfilled some vague, unexpressed hopes I didn't know I had and also left me with the sense that I'd just seen something I wasn't quite prepared for -- the kind of contradiction that great showmanship can bridge.

The Class is a lovely, exhilarating work about the ways in which failure and frustration can open the pathways through which we make sense out of life.

If only every actor we loved could leave us with a farewell film like this one.

Watching Street Gang is a largely joyous experience, but there’s also something heartbreaking about it.

The Company Men is infinitely more despairing and yet also, paradoxically, more hopeful. It suggests that work can actually mean something to people, beyond just giving them the means to afford a nice house or a fantastic car.

Bridges knows just what he’s doing, and with the splendid West Texas waltz of a drama, Hell or High Water, British director David Mackenzie has given him the perfect hook on which to hang his hat.

The majesty of nature is Embrace of the Serpent’s true star, and Guerra captures the glory of every leaf, every inch of sky, in pearlescent black-and-white as luminous as the lining of a clamshell. In Guerra’s eyes, as in Karamakate’s, the forest is magic itself—and it’s no less remarkable for having sprung from something as lowly as the earth’s soil.

Sorkin takes a rather dense, complicated court case—one peopled with figures who clung to stubborn differences even in the context of their shared ideals—and keeps it aloft every minute, as if he were following the aerodynamic principles of hang-gliding rather than moviemaking. Best of all, he brings out the best each actor in this enormous ensemble cast has to offer; every character is rendered with jewelers-loupe clarity.

It's an unapologetic dazzler, which is why it's never overwhelmed by its themes.

Simultaneously meticulous and casual, it’s the kind of movie only a master filmmaker could have made—though it's doubtful Soderbergh, perpetually moving away from one movie and toward the next, thinks of himself as a master filmmaker at all.

Ondine suggests that coincidence and magic are often the same thing.

Coming Home obviously has historical and political significance for Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and for families that were torn apart by it. But Zhang tells this particular story in a deeply personal way — the time and place of its setting have a specific meaning, but its emotional contours spread out into something bigger.

Eloquent and unassuming, it's a picture that hits home precisely because it doesn't overreach its grasp.

Parallel Mothers is a movie of infinite tenderness, that rare ode to motherhood that acknowledges mothers as women first and mothers second.

For all the full-throttle dazzle of Furious 7, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life, and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie.

Before I Forget is, in the broad sense, "gay-themed." But it's also one of the loveliest, most direct and most devastating pictures about aging that I've ever seen.

Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart.

If A Quiet Place has one flaw, it’s that it never lets up. There’s little breathing space between its breathtaking moments. Even so, Krasinski has made one of the most poetic horror movies of recent years.

We need filmmakers who can move us forward even as they maintain a sense of the past. To that end, Grindhouse captures a bit of rowdy movie history in a bell jar.

It’s meditative, mournful and gently funny, and celebratory, too, but in a muted way. If you don’t know what kind of movie you’re in the mood for, this may be the one. It’s a tonic for listless times.

LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn't be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it's a humble picture, a movie that isn't afraid to be an entertainment.

Sometimes a movie reaches the unreachable in us, not because it’s a grand masterpiece but because it’s as quiet and intimate as air.

It's the perfect marriage of music and animated movement. But even when there's no music playing in Waking Life, the movie's lyricism is sustained by the way it looks and feels.

Sandler has perfected the art of talk-smiling through his teeth, barely moving his lips, and it’s perfect for Howard: He’s a guy who’s always hustling, because to stop would be a kind of death. He shows what he’s feeling by trying to hide what he’s feeling. He’s extreme, but he’s also for real. And his is the shtick you keep buying even when the movie around him tempts you with cheaper, shinier stuff.

An imperfect work of genius, a satire of Hollywood excess and vanity that dares to tread territory laden with minefields.

It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.

Scorsese didn't need to remake "Infernal Affairs," but what he has done with it is a compliment rather than an affront to the original: The Departed reimagines its source material rather than just leeching off it, preserving the bone structure of the first movie while finding new curves in it. The story has been clarified; the ellipses of the original have been filled in with just the right amount of exploratory shading. This is a picture of grand gestures and subtle intricacies, a movie that, even at more than two hours long, feels miraculously lean. It's a smart shot of lucid storytelling.

Watching it is like being trapped in one of those nightmares where you need to get somewhere, fast, and you're distracted and delayed at every turn. Only in this case, the nightmare is happening to someone else, and it's costing an awful lot of money.

It's both a perceptive dual character study and, that rarity of rarities, a large-scale action movie for grown-ups, one worth leaving the house for.

Part noir-comedy, part ghost story, but it's mostly a potent reflection on how where we come from shapes us, in ways we can't understand until we've been away for a long, long while.

Its look has the same grudging beauty that, once you get used to it, English weather does: It's so defiant in its grayness that you come to appreciate its conviction.

Noyce takes a great deal of care with this adaptation. For one thing, he includes as much of Greene's potent shorthand as he can without weighing the movie down.

It's Kline who anchors the movie, swan-diving into Flynn's complexities without making excuses for him.

If Elise and Frank are opaque to each other, they're opaque for a reason, as, sadly, lovers sometimes are. (Come to think of it, this picture has more in common with "The Lives of Others" than you might expect.)

What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain.

Frances Ha is a patchwork of details that constitute a sort of dating manual—not one that tells you how to meet hot guys, but one that fortifies you against all the crap you have to deal with as a young person in love with a city that doesn't always love you back.

The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world.

The picture does, in places, feel like an unspoken homage to Kurosawa, though it's certainly its own distinct creation. But I wonder if it more closely resembles another end-of-an-era picture, Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch."

Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini are lovely together, though her character is the sharper-edged of the two. It's Gandolfini's Albert, soft-hearted and soft-bellied, who suffers more. Gandolfini takes the movie's small, offhand jokes and intensifies them.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is compelling, sometimes in a hypnotic, sleepy-bye way.

There's nothing too clean or too overbright about it. It's magic, but not the loud, shiny kind: It has the texture of worn velvet, or a painstakingly hand-knit sweater stored away for years in tissue paper.

Pictures with the grand sweep and dreamy energy of The Lost City of Z don’t come along every year—they barely come along at all. This is itself a message in a bottle, a missive from a lost city of movies.

So intrinsically rich that it doesn't need any metaphors.

With her film adaptation, Gerwig re-embroiders and reinforces that unspoken reassurance. Like Alcott, she leads by example: She has made a film that’s complex and thoughtful but that is also, at every moment, pure pleasure to watch.

Though beautifully made and acted, The Souvenir had the sad, chilly pallor of a centuries-old miniature portrait, a bit of the past you could hold in your hand and yet never fully grasp. The Souvenir Part II puts the earlier film in a bigger, more detailed frame, rushing in with swirls of context, color and perspective.

Isn't much more than marvelous entertainment -- but then, that's a lot right there.

My Life as a Zucchini is so warm, so alive, that we forget we're watching cartoon figures. And when they belong to us, they're no longer orphans.

Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.