Stephanie Zacharek

You’ve seen every element of Sing Street hundreds of times before — it’s Carney’s knack for assembling them that makes the difference. In his hands, this isn’t just a nostalgia trip. It’s an homage to teenage kicks and the urgency of getting them any way you can.

A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.

All three actors are clearly having a blast with this satire of actorly egos and vanity projects, but it’s Cruz who truly dazzles.

Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why.

Revenge of the Fallen just comes off as a bratty kid showing how many swear words he knows.

Have you ever had an intense experience—fallen madly in love, say—only to look back years later and feel it had happened to a different person, a person who had walked through a dream, and survived it, to get to the self you were destined to become? That’s the feeling Sofia Coppola captures in her quietly extraordinary Priscilla.

Aronofsky isn't loose enough, or canny enough, to be in touch with its camp soul.

Your enjoyment of Black Bear will depend on your tolerance for cerebral game-playing for art’s sake. But if the movie is sometimes a little too hung up on its somewhat tortured premise, it still offers some subtle, dusky pleasures. Chief among them is Plaza’s performance.

For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman’s proving what a tortured smartie he is. I’m Thinking of Ending Things must have been arduous to make, and it’s excruciatingly tedious to watch.

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.

There’s no way to put a positive spin on Parkinson’s. But how we handle the cards we’re dealt is everything, and Davis Guggenheim’s remarkable documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie reminds us that a person stricken with a disease doesn’t become that disease.

It’s worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

There’s nothing exactly like it: It has a bracing, melancholy energy all its own.

Its thoughtfulness somehow shines through its heavy-duty stylistic quirks. And it has a breezier, more relaxed vibe than either of July’s earlier movies thanks to one glorious, effervescent performance: when Gina Rodriguez appears, she turns the picture around — it begins to truly breathe — and she carries it along straight to the end. If you see Kajillionaire for no other reason, see it for her.

Lovely and deeply touching picture.

Anderson's Lily is the kind of heroine who earns our protectiveness by never begging for it; it's an astonishing performance.

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall.

It's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page.

Although 3 Faces is far from Panahi’s best work, it’s still a solid primer on how much a skilled filmmaker can achieve with very few resources.

In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin.

Vital and affecting romantic drama.

The Deep End doesn't have a knotty message, but it's a much more meaningful picture than "Suture."

There’s one significant problem with both Fifty Shades movies that’s impossible to ignore. Dornan is just a dud.

The performances are so plainspoken and direct that they manage to push the material beyond the confines of a mere social-problem tract -- as played by the cast, these characters aren't symbols of inner-city hardship, but people.

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.

After Yang invites us to think about big questions that might normally invite melancholy. Yet somehow, Kogonada pulls off the opposite effect. His movie makes us feel less alone, part of a network we can’t fully comprehend from our place on Earth.

With Gloria Bell, Lelio revisits a story he’s told before: It’s a close remake of his 2013 Spanish-language film "Gloria," starring the superb Chilean actress Paulina García. Both films are terrific, but with Gloria Bell, Lelio may have buffed out a few rough edges; the new picture feels subtler, more shimmering.

Blue Jasmine is so relentlessly clueless about the ways real human beings live, and so eager to make the same points about human nature that Allen has made dozens of times before, that it seems like a movie beamed from another planet.

Poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured -- is a very different picture from "Pan's Labyrinth." But there's no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.

I suspect nearly everyone who sees the picture will have a loud opinion about this ending, which is just one way Holofcener works her stealth magic as a filmmaker and storyteller: She doesn’t close up shop on her movie until she’s made each of us an honorary New Yorker — in other words, a person with a strong stance and something to say.

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.

It’s simply blissfully restorative, a movie that gives you back something you didn’t realize you’d lost, one that might even make you forget what year you’re living in. Its pleasures run quiet and deep.

It's a chilly, elegantly assured little picture, a horror story with its roots not in fantasy but in the reality of hurt feelings.

Roadrunner is lively, comprehensive, moving and troubling, as well as suitably joyous, capturing everything about why viewers loved Bourdain, while also reminding us that even those very close to him couldn’t always fully understand him.

The Card Counter, with Isaac’s superb performance at its heart, might be the movie you didn’t know you were wishing for, coming at a time when wishing for life to restart has become a consuming preoccupation.

In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of Hustle & Flow lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.

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.

Avengers: Endgame isn’t a great movie, but there are flashes of greatness in it, and quite a few of them belong to Evans. His Captain America rewards us with a revelation and escapes with a secret. The best thing in Avengers: Endgame is everything he doesn’t say.

Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, Oldboy is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.

A work of astonishing delicacy and force, a tone poem about the Frankenstein jolts that all of us, at one time or another, have to live through.

Blue Moon is both a modest movie and a dazzling, generous work.

The most beautiful magic in it is left unseen. And still, it emerges with absolute clarity.

There are enough under-the-radar subtleties, rendered with a refreshing lack of smart-aleckiness, to make Zootopia feel current and fresh. It’s a modest, unassuming entertainment that’s motored by a sly sensibility.

Guest revels in the eccentricities of dog lovers everywhere, but there's kindness at his core. He's a mensch among mutts.

I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how piercing it is until after the credits have rolled.

It’s the most truthful movie you’ll see in 2019, because it swears on nothing but the Gospel of Bob, and in more than 50 years of singing, songwriting and much, much touring, he has never promised us anything beyond pleasure and illumination.

Dickinson is superb at tracing that veiled anguish, and Hittman--who wrote and directed the 2013 film It Felt Like Love--is a discreet and sympathetic guide to his fractured world.

This explicit movie about a sexually insatiable 19th century courtesan emerges like an erotic dream.

The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

It's a universe invented for our delight and pleasure and nothing else, a world made up of colors not found in nature but in a little girl's sock drawer. In Powerpuff Girls, shapes, images and colors make up the most crucial part of the message. It's a hot-pink little movie.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.

The grand scale of this Frankenstein is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.

The most of-the-moment movie on the landscape right now — it may end up being the most politically and culturally relevant movie of the year. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s far from perfect.

The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.

Mendes has made a film that feels wholly alive. It’s a carefully polished picture, not one that strives for gritty realism. But its inherent devotion to life and beauty is part of its power.

Delightful and visually splendid.

The Substance is distinctive less for its nutso, over-the-top gore than for a single scene midway through the film that exposes a different kind of body horror—or, more specifically, the way insecurity can be its own kind of horror.

There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.

Independently financed and distributed by Soderbergh, Logan Lucky is a magnificent movie that comes disguised as a modest one. Or, as I like to call it, a Joe Bang.

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.

Beautiful young people, stunning scenery, and—did I mention?—unreally gorgeous tomatoes: none of these are negligible movie pleasures, and You, Me & Tuscany—directed by Kat Coiro and written by husband-and-wife team Ryan Engle and Kristin Engle—serves them up unapologetically.

Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield may not be perfect, but it is alive, at least partly because of its perceptive, jaunty casting and fine performances.

Hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic.

When you look at the faces of the elderly Donahue and Henschel, even at their most frail, the young women within shine through. It’s enraging that society made them feel they had to hide. But their happiness is the ultimate triumph.

Till is an affirmation of just how much Emmett Till’s life mattered, and continues to matter long beyond his last breath.

Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.

Because Nope, enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones.

At its simplest level, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a portrait of a master. In its deeper layers, it explores what drives us to make things: Beautiful, jewel-like things, or things that delight our palate – or, in this case, both.

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

(Coppola) connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it.

As Adenike, Gurira is wonderful: Her face is equally radiant whether she's channeling anguish or joy, and she captures the ways in which this woman, so old-country dutiful, also longs to join the modern world.

As good as Harris is, though, it's Harden's performance that sticks with you long after you've seen the movie. She understands what Krasner must have known intuitively. Greatness comes not from cleaning up messes, but from allowing them to be made in the first place.

Levinson has ripped quite a few rock ’em-sock ’em pages from the John Cassavetes tradition, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But if the couple’s fighting is amusing at times, it’s mostly lacerating and circular in a way that courts boredom rather than sympathy or any other deep, honest response.

Wild Tales is loose-limbed, rowdy, and exhilarating — in its vibrant lunacy, and with its cartoonishly brash violence, it's a little bit Almodóvar, a little bit Tarantino.

It's fascinating. It's horrible. It's fascinatingly horrible. It's also, as Gladstone points out, a sterling example of the power that television, when it was still a "public square," could have.

Personal Shopper is a strange and beautifully made film, and both star and director are clearly energized by their dual mission.

Can Eminem act? Who knows? But his star turn in 8 Mile -- is memorable -- even if we've seen it all before.

Somehow this Jungle Book works, because Favreau has both a sense of humor and a sense of spectacle.

Baumbach has made some fine pictures (Frances Ha) and some deadening, hermetic ones (Margot at the Wedding), but it's While We're Young that really fulfills the promise of his brash but fine-grained debut.

A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them.

What's remarkable about Dallas Buyers Club is its lack of sentimentality. The movie, like its star, is all angles and elbows, earning its emotion through sheer pragmatism.

It doesn't matter if the movie around Firth is a good one or a lousy one: Either way, I wouldn't be able to explain how an actor could come up with a performance as subtle, in both its heartbreak and its magnificence, as this one is.

You don’t need to be a woman working in finance to get a shivery thrill—and possibly a few chills—from watching Equity, a modestly scaled but perceptive drama about an investment banker who just happens to be a woman.

As its title suggests, the picture is something of a ballad, an ode to an elusive character who's both quintessentially human and so outlandish he almost seems unreal.

What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.

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.

Presence follows you home, long after the camera has stopped rolling.

It's a lean, mean movie, and not a pretty one, but it leaves no question as to Breillat's angular originality as a filmmaker.

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.

The movie "Munich" should have been. At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.

This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.

Gosling is such a human, and humane, actor, that he can easily mirror the humanity of a creature who’s not even human—one who doesn’t even have a face. Together, these two are unbeatable, and they also represent an old-fashioned ideal of what the movies used to mean to us.

This is a horror movie with a soul. It’s less ambitious and aggressively complicated than, say, Ari Aster’s "Hereditary" — another movie about the sometimes-unnerving complexity of parent-child bonds — but it’s also, in the end, more thoughtful.