Stephanie Zacharek

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.