Stephanie Zacharek

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

That sense of one small, private world shattering within the larger and even more unstable one around it is the essence of Michael Winterbottom's unmooring, bleakly beautiful film version of A Mighty Heart.

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.

This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.

This is a shimmery beaded curtain of a movie, a slight, charming picture that's almost all facade. But what a facade!

All lives are made of shadow and light, and The Times of Bill Cunningham acknowledges that. But through it all, spending time in Cunningham’s presence is bliss.

It’s effective in a somber way, and as shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, it’s dazzling to look at, a reinvention of classic literature of the old west with a storybook feel.

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

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is probably about as good a movie as you can make from just half of a rather complicated book. But then, it's not just a movie but a promise: When Part 2 arrives, next summer, a cloud of desolation is likely to descend upon us.

It’s the kind of story that was made for the intimacy of the movie theater, and for the possibly lost tradition known as movie-date night. As ambitions go, that’s a pretty noble one.

Levinson and Pacino's willingness to explore the creakier end of life isn't a drawback; it's what gives The Humbling its bittersweet vitality.

This is a teasingly complex political thriller, but it's also a sort-of romance.

12 Years a Slave works so hard to be noble, but it doesn't have to: Ejiofor is there to do all the heavy lifting.

It's hard to say whether Patric Chiha's unabashedly out-there drama Domain is actually good or whether it simply nuzzles very cozily against the shoulder of so-bad-it's-good. After seeing the movie twice, I'm inclined to say Domain splits the difference.

Red Rocket isn’t the warmest of Baker’s films; it has a flinty edge that makes it hard to embrace. But as movie characters go, Rex’s Mikey, a magnetic egomaniac, is an extraordinary creation.

Farewell, a cold war drama by the French director Christian Carion, isn't just a movie set in 1981; in many ways it feels like a movie made in 1981.

Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.

To watch this movie’s actors, many of them playing versions of the men they used to be not so long ago—to see them incorporating classic pop-locking moves into their swordplay, or tinkering with the phrasing of Hamlet’s soliloquy until it rings true to their experience—is to witness a cautious but joyful reawakening.

Downton Abbey: A New Era goes down as easy as a Nice sunset.

A wry, openhearted, vaguely outré romantic comedy, albeit a bittersweet one.

The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one.

Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.

Hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic.

The Courier is almost two films in one: the second half is much darker and more intense than the first, but the shift is so delicately abrupt that at first you barely register it. That’s part of the movie’s edgily engaging artistry; what begins as a shadowy spy adventure ends in a place of mournful resignation.

The movie is an act of loony generosity we shouldn’t refuse. This is ludicrous entertainment for frazzled times.

Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.

A character who triumphs over a clumsy story line is a very rare creature. It takes a smart director and a sensitive actor to bring him to life, and to keep him breathing all the way through.

As Bernal plays him, Cassandro is a hero for our dismal times, not just because he crashes through norms, but because he makes it look fun, even when it most certainly isn’t. This is a performance filled with truthful joy, and it floods this modestly scaled but open-hearted movie with light.