Stephanie Zacharek

Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.

It’s also hugely entertaining and joyously profane, a movie whose spirit is so big the screen can barely contain it.

If this Hamlet weren't so perfectly conceived visually, it would probably stand solidly on the basis of its acting alone.

Zero Dark Thirty is precise, definitive filmmaking, yet Bigelow refuses to hand over easy answers. Some people call that evasion. I call it the ultimate despair.

The Incredibles has that rare quality of feeling modern and classic at the same time.

It's a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way - by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.

La La Land is both a love letter to a confounding and magical city and an ode to the idea of the might-have-been romance, in all its piercing sweetness. It’s a movie with the potential to make lovers of us all. All we have to do is fall into its arms.

Sophisticated, brash, sardonic, completely joyful in its execution. It gives anyone who ever loved movie musicals, and lamented their demise, something to live for.

Very little in Under the Skin is clear at all. Its secrets unspool in mysterious, supple ribbons, but that's part of its allure, and its great beauty.

The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about.

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.

This is a tender, rapturous film, both joyous and melancholy, a reverie for a lost past and a door that opens to myriad imagined possibilities.

Cheung is one of the finest actresses working today, an expressive, lustrous beauty capable of plumbing a boundless range of emotional hues. This is the greatest performance she's given to date.

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think that’s all it’s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and it’s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

This glorious, tender picture, a memoir written in film language, is only indirectly about the man who made it. He stands off to the side, in the shadows, beckoning us toward something. Roma is filmmaking as gesture, an invitation to generosity that we perhaps didn’t know we could feel.

It’s about love and poetry and dreams, and about the chance encounter that can close a wound with the magic efficiency of a tiny butterfly bandage. How you pour all of that into one movie is something of a mystery. But then, a good poem is always something of a mystery too.

This radiantly sensual film ends on the perfect note, a rush of emotional intensity that’s wrapped in a secret, as hushed as the rustle of silk.

What’s wonderful about Wells’ instincts, and her sense of craftsmanship, is that she never spells anything out for us. Yet we walk away feeling that we know these people, even if we aren’t clear on all the specifics of their lives.

The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.

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

Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyperanimated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind, Pee-wee Herman, is pure pleasure.

Aside from the effectiveness of Set Me Free as a coming-of-age story, it's also one of the most poetic avowals of love for movies that I've seen in years.

The beauty, and the horror, of Bill Pohlad's exhilarating and inventive Love & Mercy...is the sense it gives us of the world passing through Brian Wilson's ears.

Although the Coens are consummate craftsmen, they don't always show the lightness of touch or the depth of feeling they do here.

A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.

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

The director's last film was the superb 2012 Barbara, also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld, another romance with a mystery built in; Phoenix is an even finer piece of work, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect.

Blissful, blazingly intelligent adaptation.