Stephanie Zacharek

A triumphant movie about failure.

There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.

Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.

The movie is so light on its feet that it never feels forced or didactic, even when it asks us to confront piercing truths about love and the elusive meaning of happiness.

Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch.

To live with, and in, All of a Sudden is to match heartbeats with these two women for a few hours. There are worse ways to spend your time.

There is no more beautiful-looking film this year; shot by Michal Dymek, it often looks lit from within, glowing as softly as a lantern. And even beyond that, EO may be one of the greatest movies ever made about the spirit of animals, as much as we can know it.

Le Havre proceeds from the usual Kaurismäkian premise: Things are only going to get worse, so why not just go with it?

There's more drama, and more heartbreak, in March of the Penguins than in most movies that are actually scripted to tug at our feelings.

Mirren's performance is glorious: Rather than impersonate the queen -- which would have been all too easy to do -- she reaches deeper to locate the buried, calcified thoughts and feelings that might guide this deeply inscrutable woman.

The chase scenes in The Italian Job are the most exciting ones I can remember seeing in a movie in a long time, probably because they're the only ones I can remember -- and that's saying something.

Polanski orchestrates this cat-and-mouse game with devilish delight, dancing around Ives's play as if it were a pagan bonfire, jabbing at it with his figurative pitchfork.

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.

It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us; telling a story effectively is hard enough. Best of all, Cooper has succeeded in making a terrific melodrama for the modern age.

Ford v Ferrari is a little too long; some scenes leave unnecessary skidmark trails. But the movie still has amiable style and energy to spare. It’s fast but never furious.

John Wick: Chapter 2 has style to burn, and oh! what violence — terrible, bone-crunching, glorious violence, beautifully orchestrated by director Chad Stahelski.

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

The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape—a shape you could almost trace with your thumb, as if it were made of clay and not images, air, and feeling.

The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.

Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

To say Toni Erdmann is funny doesn’t even begin to capture the out-there texture of the jokes, and of the actors’ timing.

A narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.

It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental.

McKay approaches this adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book with wit, energy and a surprising degree of clarity. But if the movie is a crackerjack entertainment, it’s one with a conscience.

This is a smart, lustrous film, and a bracingly honest one, the kind of movie that leaves you feeling both invigorated and a little blue.

The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?

A thriller for modern women who identify more with the messiness of human lives than with flattened slogans about how great women, as a monolithic group, are.

Birds are not just the movie's stars, but its whole universe. They inspire in Perrin and his crew, and in us, not just awe but humility. You'll never look at them the same way again.

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.

Though it borrows some of the gauzy mood of The Virgin Suicides, it’s essentially unlike any other Sofia Coppola film, a serene, supple picture that hits more than a few notes of despair.

This is an imperfect film that still captures an elusive and incandescent vibe, as alluring as a strand of lights strung up for an impromptu concrete picnic.

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically.

A quiet, raggedly beautiful mini-epic, Eden isn't a success story; it's a failure story. But it's also a glittering acknowledgement of the fact that failing is the only path toward growing.

It does show us, in threads deftly woven, how circumstances can push hard against people, making everyday living a battle.

Hall’s Christine draws us closer rather than pushing us away — this performance is a quiet, multidimensional marvel.

Now that Pitt no longer has brash youth on his side, he's digging deeper and doing more with less. It's the kind of acting - understated but woven with golden threads of movie-star style - that gives us more to look at rather than less.

Together is the kind of picture that makes you feel that there are many good reasons to actually LIKE mankind.

Hugo states, in its adamant, straightforward poetry, that old things do matter.

The triumph of Still Alice is that it’s not about an illness; it’s about a person.

This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.

Every single actor here rises to the occasion.

This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making.

It’s ridiculous, and it’s wonderful. Falling in love is stupid like that.

Here, the effect of merely hearing his voice and watching his hands is so intimate that we walk away with an almost tactile sense of who Martin Margiela is, the way we confidently, yet only sort of, know what the man in the moon looks like. His mystery becomes our secret too.

In Time has so much style and energy that it comes across as an act of boldness rather than just a liberal-minded tract, though of course, it's that too. If there were ever a movie made for the 99 percent, this is it.

The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way - its charms have a noirish gleam.

The Favourite is a wicked delight, a fantastic little cupcake of a movie laced with thistle frosting.

Sin City is the first mainstream American picture I've seen this year that feels even remotely brash or original. It's a hard, viciously funny little movie, one with all the subtlety of a billy club. But there's artistry here.

Though it's made with lots of modern tricks and technology, it's old-fashioned in the best sense, and not just because it's set in the Sixties.

Sordi is an elegant comic actor in the vein of America's William Powell; the world may confound him, but it can never rumple him.

This is Bond as we've never seen him, more naked, alive and mysterious than ever.

The devastating truth of 45 Years, so beautifully wrought, is that even the most devoted couples are made up of two people who are essentially alone.

Hogg has made a gorgeous, haunting movie drawn from a very real place and time.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hours and 48 minutes of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She’s the lure skimming through the water; we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.

To call The Lost Daughter an assured debut is to do it a slight disservice—assurance suggests that a filmmaker knows everything going in. What we see in The Lost Daughter is something greater: the act of discovery—of the gifts actors can bring to a story, of how to hold a complex narrative together—in progress.

The movie's final moments are the equivalent of the half-jubilant, half-mournful thrill you get when you close the cover of a book you've savored.

Slinky, smart and funny, Irma Vep doesn't send up that sticky-sweet incense smell you usually get in movies about the joy of cinema-with-a-capital-C. It's a languorous love ballad, and a daring one, about the way moving pictures move, the way they hold light, the way they steal from us when we're not looking.

The film works on its own terms, capturing, at least, the mournful vibe of O'Brien's book. What's more, Zobel's revision opens up plenty of space for the three actors who inhabit this circumscribed little world, all of whom are terrific.

This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale.

The picture is potent and engaging; even its fictionalized elements ring with the spirit of truth. And Stewart is off the charts, though that’s hardly a surprise.

Mangrove, too, tells a sometimes harrowing real-life story. Yet it has a lightness of touch that McQueen hasn’t shown before. Mangrove, as is all of Small Axe, is personal for McQueen — he is of West Indian descent himself — and his affection for these characters, as well as his passion for their cause, ignites his telling of their story.

Get On Up isn't a perfect-picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don't quite pay off. But it's one of those experiments that's both flawed and amazing, a mainstream movie (with Mick Jagger as one of its producers) that fulfills old-fashioned, entertainment-value requirements, even as it throws off flashes of insight.

Idlewild has just about everything a popular entertainment can offer. It also has a soul, and that comes free with the price of a ticket.

Going into C’mon C’mon, you may think you know exactly what it’s going to be. Coming out, you’ll probably see that you were mostly right, but that you also got a million little firefly flashes of feeling you weren’t expecting. And that right there is the Mike Mills touch.

The Worst Person in the World is a comedy, not a drama. But it’s ruthless in the way the best comedies can be.

One problem with social-issues documentaries is that you almost always know where they stand, and where they’re headed, from the start. But Collective is as tense and as taut as a great fictional drama.

Unlike so much contemporary horror, it's devoid of sadism and mean-spiritedness. The looseness Raimi allows himself here results in an especially joyous kind of filmmaking, the sort where the filmmaker's delight in scaring us (and making us laugh) becomes part of the movie's fabric.

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.

(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.

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.

If Incredibles 2 harbors a current of seriousness, what really makes it work is that it is so purely delightful.

May not hit every note perfectly, but the picture they've come up with is full-bodied and intelligent.

Roy-Lecollinet’s face, both haughty and welcoming, both anchors the movie and sets it free in the wind. No wonder Paul can’t shake the memory of it. It’s the thing that will age him before his time—and also keep him young forever.

No matter how much money has been poured into a movie, it’s emotional generosity that matters, and Johnson gives without squandering. His great gift is that he knows when to stop.

I recently heard someone describe Gloria as a midlife-crisis drama, which stunned me. In the most convenient terms, I guess that’s what it is. But what Lelio and Garcia pull off here is so delicate and sturdy that it defies such easy categorization.

Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it's everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make perfect alt-universe sense.

In the early moments of The Trip, you wonder if either actor will survive the enterprise.

Beginners is all about beginnings that begin with endings - the point, Mills seems to be saying, is that sometimes you need to say good-bye to make room for hello.

Breillat manages to give us a lush, quiet spectacle with The Sleeping Beauty.

Bad Teacher is hardly a perfect picture, but in the context of every other comedy on the summer movie landscape - from the faux empowerment of "Bridesmaids" to the neurotic frat-guy heteromania of "The Hangover Part II" - it feels revolutionary.

That she makes it all look so effortless is part of the fun – as long as you're not unlucky enough to be the guy with his nut in the nutcracker.

One of those big, extravagant-looking romances that you might automatically deem "conventional" - except for the fact that almost nobody makes big, extravagant-looking romances anymore.

There's action here, too, and a great deal of vitality that feels true both to the spirit of Collins' book and to the idea of movie entertainment as it exists.

Craig has one clear advantage over Michael Nyqvist, the actor who played the same character in the Swedish Girl movies: He has erotic charisma to spare, as opposed to Nyqvist's perfunctory, doughy sexuality.

A small but extremely significant message in a bottle. That metaphor is almost literal: The picture made its way to Cannes via a USB drive -- which was smuggled in a cake.

The picture is rambunctiously affectionate; Guiterrez may go for the broad joke, but never the cheap one.

I've seen Detective Dee twice now, and I still don't think I've taken the full measure of the visual nuttiness, and lushness, Tsui has packed in there.

Mulligan is terrific here, and restrained in a way that suggests an actorly generosity unusual for someone so young: Her scenes with Fassbender don't so much say "Look at me" as "Look at him."

While the media desk isn't the whole of the New York Times, it does give Rossi a solid perch from which to survey the paper's recent and ongoing struggle for both relevancy and revenues.

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.

Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much.

For all its borrowing from old Hollywood, I don't think War Horse is particularly nostalgic. The word I'd use is wistful. It's the largest, most lavish handful of wistfulness money can buy, and sometimes it's too much. Yet it's nice to know that even Steven Spielberg can still wish for something.

This is a picture whose dance steps are determined by any number of mishaps and misfortunes; like the dance floor of a great club on a good night, it's gorgeous, unruly and exhilarating all at once.

My heart belongs to Bear Elinor, whose movements and mannerisms are a tender echo of Human Elinor's – her character is designed and drawn just that carefully.

The low-key quality of the filmmaking in Restrepo only intensifies the reality of how much these kids are risking.

Redgrave puts all she’s got into something other actors might just toss off or throw away. She’s present every moment; this is an actress who doesn’t have a second to waste.

By the end you feel you've learned something about the man, yet his mystique emerges intact.

The Dictator, for all its liberal leanings, doesn't let anyone off the hook, not even well-intentioned liberals. Cohen comes right out and says things that most of us, in polite conversation, wouldn't dare. He knows it's the impolite conversation that really gets things moving.

Let Me In is a chilly little story set in a very cold place. But Reeves still knows when to go for the burn.

The faces of these performers - particularly Williams' - are the key to Blue Valentine.

A Separation doesn't try to make easy sense of that world, or of this family's suffering. It's simply a quiet cry of anguish.

This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That's more of a rarity on today's landscape than it should be.

The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR - and not human lives - were the most important consideration during wartime.

Olsen's performance is restrained but not tentative; you could say the same for the movie around it.

The Extra Man is something of a love letter to the marvelous weirdos of New York.

The "black maid" may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?

The thrill of Tony Scott's Unstoppable, in which a runaway freight train hurtles through rural - and toward not-so-rural - Pennsylvania, is that its setup asks us to believe only in human ineptitude.

Mattie is a no-nonsense mite with a forthright manner and a mean head for figures; she wears her hair in two sturdy braids whose tips have never seen the inside of any inkwell, believe you me.

O'Brien describes a number of those basic human feelings that drop-kick all of us from time to time, like being resentful of anyone and everyone who still has a job when we don't.

It's the kind of movie that makes the world feel like a smaller place, suggesting that the similarities connecting us across continents and cultures are more resonant than the things that divide us.

Dark Skies is about the fragility of family, a muted meditation on how precious it is...it does affirm that genre filmmakers who work with their eyes, their hearts and their brains still walk among us.

LUV is partly a story about drugs, guns and street crime, the legacies we pass on to our children despite our efforts to do otherwise. But it’s also about the things we pass on to our children with love: How to tie a necktie, hold a steering wheel, shake another person’s hand. And it’s about the hope that those things will win out in the end.

No is anything but a somber political tract; it’s a little bit of a thriller, and more than a little bit of a comedy.

If Broken City – the first film to be directed solo by Allen Hughes, one-half of the Hughes Brothers directing team – is a little flawed and cracked itself, it still squeaks by as a reasonably thoughtful piece of big-screen entertainment.

A true New York City movie, alive every minute. There’s some Woody Allen in its veins, but it’s driven more by the free-for-all spirit you find in pictures like Peter Sollett’s 2002 “Raising Victor Vargas” and Spike Lee’s 1986 “She’s Gotta Have It.”

Levine – whose last picture was the intriguing, if only partly effective, cancer comedy “50/50” — is going for something more here, exploring what makes us human by contrasting it with a character who has lost all the basics and is desperate to get them back.

A Place at the Table is a fairly no-frills effort, but the ideas behind it are sound.

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

The movie is smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive.

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.

Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs. In that way, Wedding Crashers isn't just the life of the party, but its pulse.

There’s a fantasy element to Master Gardener that bolsters the movie’s convictions rather than weakening them.

The group's members come off more like real musicians than parodists.

It's mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. It burns clean.

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

Fans of "Swingers" may be disappointed. Made doesn't give us as many jazzy catchphrases to latch onto, or figuratively hoist us aloft on a giant martini glass of prolonged adolescence. But then that's precisely why it's the better movie.

I can't recall the last time a picture left me feeling so caffeinated.

You can probably guess every beat of The Mustang ahead of time, but what does that matter? The picture, shot by Ruben Impens, is gorgeous to look at.

Shazam! just breathes, and it’s bliss.

Edwards (director of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the 2014 Godzilla) and Koepp (who wrote the scripts for the first two Jurassic Park movies) know what they’re doing here: they locate the perfect ratio of human business to dinosaur antics, favoring the dinosaurs when in doubt.

It’s not going to change the summer-blockbuster landscape single-handedly, but at least it comes by its thrills honestly: This is a spectacle that trusts us to think.

In A Touch of Sin, Jia is attuned to, and saddened by, the violence he sees creeping through his country, caused at least partly by the ever-widening disparity between rich and poor. He ends on a note that's more haunting than hopeful.

There’s enough magic, and extraordinary visual imagination, to smooth the edges of the movie’s problems.

Documentaries don't have to be technically great to be irresistible, and Bess Kargman's First Position, which follows six young ballet dancers as they prepare for an elite competition, is a case in point.

Buirski clearly shows that the spark that made her great couldn't be snuffed out so easily.

Such an exhilarating, spirited piece of work that its embellishments and omissions cease to matter.

When Rose-Lynn opens her mouth to sing–her speaking voice has a Glaswegian burr, but her singing voice is all Tennessee–you’re wheedled into forgetting her flaws and sins and wanting only the best for her and her kids

Though Guadagnino is a gifted director, his style is sometimes showily baroque to a fault. (Exhibit A: Suspiria.) But Queer, stylish as it is, may be his most heartfelt movie, at least since Call Me By Your Name.

Aside from the fact that Operation Mincemeat features not one but two former Mr. Darcys (one from the much-loved 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series, the other from Joe Wright’s similarly marvelous 2005 film adaptation), and works beautifully as a romance, it’s also a cracking espionage caper.

Nichols—director of Take Shelter, Mud and, most recently, Midnight Special—tells the Lovings’ story in a way that feels immediate and modern, and not just like a history lesson.

A picture that's fully open to some pretty rough truths. But it's also a joyful, heartfelt movie, one that speaks to the openness and vitality we see in Bettie's pictures.

This is primo Nicolas Cage dialogue, inquisitive and soul-deep, the kind of stuff he was born to say. To hear and watch him in this movie is like greeting an old friend. Pig seems to have come out of nowhere, but we’re lucky to have it.

A clever picture, and something of a novelty -- it's not going to change the face or direction of horror filmmaking in any drastic way. But it's fun to watch something that's so obviously made with love.

This odd little wonder captures the delicate textures and shadowy half-secrets of family life, mapping them out in a mosaic of fragmented dialogue and half-poetic, half-prosaic images.

This ambitious blend of live action and computer animation runs the risk of being overwhelming and sterile, but it turns out to be a pleasing and sweet-natured adventure thanks in large part to Spielberg’s big, friendly secret weapon: Mark Rylance, as the BFG himself.

With his charming, sympathetic picture The Lost King, Stephen Frears digs into the fairly recent rehabilitation of the misunderstood monarch’s legacy—as well as the 2012 discovery of his long-lost bones beneath a Leicester parking lot.

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

The kicker is that Joy Ride is funny, too. In fact, it would be a superbly frightening entertainment if not for the way Dahl fixates, disturbingly, on sadistic details.

Like so many movie love stories before it - from Murnau's "Sunrise" to Linklater's "Before Sunrise," and beyond - Cairo Time is about two wandering lovers, people spending time together without realizing how precious that time will come to be.

Although Eggers is discreet – the things you don’t see are more horrifying than those you do – the picture’s relentlessness sometimes feels like torment. But if you can survive it, The Witch is a triumph of tone.

The picture itself is so ebullient and celebratory that it practically beams with perverted innocence.

The picture is clever and vivacious -- at times, like the first "Shrek," it seems a bit taken with its own precociousness. But its moments of sheer inventiveness can still catch you off-guard, and some of them are wittily poetic.

Among the least-heralded of the Christmas releases, Casanova is one of the few that's wholly enjoyable.

Lee seems less interested in capturing how people of color talk than in capturing how people talk. He coaxes us to step in and listen, and the very casualness of his invitation is the key to the joyousness of The Best Man Holiday, flaws be damned.

There's so much dreamy beauty in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that it's almost like a narcotic.

The World's End is a big, shaggy dog of a thing, a free-spirited ramble held together by off-kilter asides, clever-dumb puns, and seemingly random bits of dialogue that could almost become catchphrases in spite of themselves.

A picture that's by turns inventive, tender and boring, and one that uses a variety of novelty point-of-view techniques: If Penisvision isn't your thing, then Vagin-o-rama just might float your boat.

What you DO get with Secretariat is a picture that, unlike its bland predecessor Seabiscuit, actually captures some of the thrill of racing.

It's a breezy and entertaining little charmer.

Cooper also pulls off the near-impossible, making us feel dashes of sympathy for this twisted and unscrupulous man.

There’s poverty in every country, and in every country there are people yearning to do better for themselves. But The White Tiger—especially Gourav’s performance, marvelous in its intensity and shifting tones—captures that drive in a specific and persuasive way.

The Dig—set in Suffolk, England, in 1939 and based on a true story of buried treasure—is a restorative escape, a smart, gentle picture whose transportive qualities should not be underestimated. It’s the cabin-fever-relief movie of this bleak midwinter.

The picture works because, despite the fact that it took nearly six years for the filmmakers to bring it to the screen, it doesn't strive for greatness. It's fleet, concise and clever in a nut-ball way.

As reporters, they’re tireless. As moms, they’re tired. That’s what gives She Said its believable texture. That and the fact that, regardless of this story’s ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work.

This is a comedy with grim underpinnings, set in a society where violence seems to be the only answer. Anderson doesn’t find that exhilarating—if anything, he’s despairing about it—yet he soldiers on, pinpointing some truths so somber and dismal that it hurts to laugh about them.

Pacific Rim is big and dumb in a smart way.

Breezy and enjoyable.

The best rock 'n' roll movies are less about strict authenticity than about capturing a vibe. And The Runaways gets the vibe just right, from its opening shot.

It's such a lovely piece of work -- and, especially for a filmmaker whose name is barely known outside of art-house circles, so pleasingly accessible -- that it's troubling to think that few people outside of major cities will be able to see it.

There are so many ways Despicable Me 2 could have gone wrong, and so many things it does right.

How many human beings among us are capable of making a comedy with wit and intelligence that also takes bold pleasure in unabashed silliness? I think this is what happens when you let an elf loose with a movie camera.

An intelligent adult thriller about the death of newspapers.

It's immediate and vital, and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve got all the right answers.

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.

At once deeply affectionate and sharply observed: There's never anything smart-alecky about Wright's approach as a director.

Lingua Franca — which made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last year, the first film by a trans woman to be featured at the festival — is a gorgeous and delicate picture, an understated work that opens a window on an intimate world.

The picture is grand and nutty and visually splendid: Vogt-Roberts knows he's gotta go big or go home, so he treads boldly.

In Berger’s hands, it all works a treat, right up to the movie’s shockeroo surprise ending. Berger’s 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front won the Best International Feature Oscar, and he guides this film, too, with a sure and steady hand.

That’s the magic of Leigh; it’s white magic, not the dark kind, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.

Director John Cameron Mitchell - adapting David Lindsay-Abaire's play - has a surprisingly deft touch with this admittedly downbeat material; he builds dramatic intensity in subtle layers, rather than slapping it on with a trowel.

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.

This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness.

Minari is a gentle, lovely picture, one that acknowledges there really is no “immigrant experience,” beyond the pure human experience of finding yourself adjusting to a new environment.

You could compare Armageddon Time to autobiographical reflections like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, both stories in which kids’ eyes are suddenly opened to the unfairness of the world. But for all its tenderness, this isn’t a movie that allows you to make peace with yourself, or with our highly imperfect world.

The drawback is that even though The Hurt Locker is extremely effective in places, it ultimately feels unformed and somewhat unfinished.

In No Bears, the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.

Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer and Brenda Blethyn shine in a delicate, loose-limbed and tremendously alive indie about women, family, self-image and survival.

The Testament of Ann Lee is unimaginable with any other actress—but then again, it’s unimaginable, period, a movie that takes big chances in a culture that, most days, seems allergic to them.

Florid, passionate, frequently hilarious and loaded with messy emotions that nobody in his or her right mind should even attempt to explain, it's operatic in its nutball intensity.

American romantic comedies have become so dismal over the past 20 years that it wouldn't be hard for even the Romanian film industry to show us up. I'm still waiting for the great Romanian romantic comedy (and hey, it could be out there), but for now, France saves the day with Heartbreaker.

What is surprising is how poetic the movie is, partly thanks to its high-lonesome sound design and the desolate beauty of its visuals, but mostly because of its star, Liam Neeson.

It doesn't sacrifice craftsmanship and elegance at the altar of its strong convictions.

It's an expertly made picture that I wish I could stamp out of my mind. What's the value of artistry that sucks the life out of you?

Gallenberger tells Rabe’s story deftly, establishing essential elements of the man’s personality in subtle shorthand.

The Eternal Daughter isn’t just a ghost story but a song, sung by a daughter to her mother across a small table at dinner, or across the space that remains when the people we love have left us.

Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent tries to sweep the evanescent butterfly Yves into its net: The movie isn't enough, but it's something.

The brilliance of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie -- as well as the show -- is that it's cognizant without being self-consciously knowing.

When Craven says "Jump!" we all do it at once, and giggle at how easily we've fallen under the spell. The key is that Craven is laughing with us, not at us.

This is a wonderful, horrifying performance: Whitaker doesn't take the easy way out by playing Amin as a killer clown, a treacherous buffoon.

The movie's climactic battle scene is mildly thrilling -- although it's not nearly as exciting as simply watching Downey and Bridges work together. Bridges makes a great villain precisely because he's such a relaxed, affable presence.

Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.

Watching McDormand navigate that transformation is the kind of thing that can keep your hope in movies, and in actors, alive.

Respect honors the utilitarian nature of songwriting, and of making art in general. But the movie honors subtler elements of Franklin’s nature, too—as much as we can know of it—most notably her guardedness, born of necessity.

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

Less like a movie than an interpretive-dance piece, with Cage as its lurching, depressed-satyr star.

Best of all may be the narration, by Sam Shepard: His voice, the kind of voice God might have if he'd ever smoked Camels, frames this gentle but potent little story with good-natured authority, making it feel modern and ageless at once.

A rare and tender delight.

A sweet and sexy celebration of real women's real bodies.

So unapologetically loopy and lush and ridiculous that I found it irresistible.

Might not be as intriguingly odd as the picture that inspired it. But like that earlier picture, it bristles with life and energy. It's a movie made with equal measures of bravado and humility -- the same mix of qualities you need to play Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.

This is a movie that’s both entertainment and spiritual toolkit — take from it what you need.

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.

Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel charm the pants off us -- and each other! -- in this irresistible comedy.

This picture has a more melancholy, resonant edge. And as with "Beginners," there’s an extraordinary performance at its heart: Bening is terrific, getting at the way middle-aged loneliness and contentment can be so intermingled that it’s almost impossible to tell which is which.

This film's intelligence and forthrightness about the things women sometimes do to one another -- and its resoluteness about where the line should be drawn in terms of selflessness between friends -- set it head and shoulders above most contemporary movies that deal with friendships between women.

It’s a pleasure — both a delight to watch and a great piece of pop scholarship, an entertainment informed by a sense of history and of curiosity.

The magic of Summer Hours is that even in its elusiveness, it gives us something to hang onto.

Happily Ever After is an exhilarating, joyous picture, but it's sometimes terrifying, too. It offers a vision of marriage as an adventure we embark on together, alone. If you didn't cry, you'd laugh.

It's Foster who rules the movie like an ice queen.

No Sudden Move riffs on stereotypes of the 1950s, even as it suggests we haven’t come as far as we might think.

Reid is stunning here.

Though Skater Girl may give the illusion of telling one seemingly simple story, Makijany—who cowrote the script with her sister, Vinati Makijany—is really weaving many stories into one.

Carell's physical comedy is close to genius.

Westfeldt and Juergensen keep Kissing Jessica Stein bright and funny and loose.

See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from it as you can and run like hell. I say that not because I hated Masked & Anonymous, but because I loved it.

The scenes between LaPaglia and Weaver, directed and played with a straightforward austerity that occasionally moved me to tears, make up for every one of The Guys flaws.

Visual tone poem.

The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

The Other Guys isn't easy to peg. It's not a comedy that loosens you up and mellows you out; it works by needling you progressively into a state of anxiety.

It’s all so silly. But it’s also kind of great, like a single glass of sparkling wine after a really bad day. And the light dancing off the brilliant blue sea isn’t so bad, either.

It's a comedy that moves with a sense of purpose, as Gordon-Levitt does in the title role.

What people want from Bill & Ted Face the Music matters a lot less than what it actually is, a crazy, imperfect but deeply gratifying burst of optimism at the end of what has been — inarguably — a terrible summer. Its ramshackle earnestness, its certainty about nothing beyond the fact that we need to get our act together as human beings, is its great strength.

You don't have to believe all of it - or even any of it - to enjoy the rascally charms of Mr. Nice.

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

Chomet bows to the tradition of conventional animation even as he tests its limits.

A superb mainstream entertainment in the purest sense of the term: It's a picture made to please a wide audience without ever pandering to it.

One of the truest American gangster films of all time.

Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.

The Father is a horror movie with not a single supernatural element: All of its terrors are implied, drawn from the tricks the human mind plays on itself, even more so in old age.

But even here, in a role that doesn't ask much of Wahlberg, I find plenty of evidence that he's among the finest actors of his generation.