Stephanie Zacharek

The movie Wenders and Juliano have made is a tribute that feels both grand and modest in scale: Just as Salgado's photographs do, it extends the notion of friends and family to include every citizen of the world.

Jenkins has made a movie that captures both the joy of Armstrong’s music and the distinctive nature of his personal charisma, though he doesn’t shy away from some of the more controversial elements of Armstrong’s legacy.

Intelligent, visually rich filmmaking.

It's a tricky feat, channeling the glamour of a famous international terrorist without glamorizing him. But damned if French filmmaker Olivier Assayas doesn't pull it off with Carlos.

Adult World captures beautifully, and with a great deal of self-deprecating humor, what it's like to feel trapped in a place you think is too small to hold you.

James — the director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters — gives us a sense of Ebert as a man who kept reinventing life as he went along — out of necessity, sure, though he also took some pleasure in adapting. It couldn't always have been easy, but that, too, is part of the story.

There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain!

There's something grand and enveloping about Fearless.

This is the kind of sophisticated storytelling you rarely get even in live-action movies any more, full of unexpected turns and unruly human complications.

Like all of Branagh's films, even some of the bad ones, Cinderella is practically Wagnerian in its ambitions — it's so swaggering in its confidence that at times it almost commands us to like it. But it's also unexpectedly delicate in all the right ways, and uncompromisingly beautiful to look at.

At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, Dave Chappelle's Block Party feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism.

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.

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.

Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.

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.

There’s some creepy, spooky stuff in Hereditary, images and ideas that just might surface in your nightmares. But the radical, undiluted humanness of Collette’s performance is the movie’s most haunting effect. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Call it the best humans can do without witchcraft.

If it's a far less flashy film than The Act of Killing, it's also a better and possibly more honest one.

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.

Van Warmerdam keeps such a calm, firm hold on the material that he practically hypnotizes you into following along to the end. The craftsmanship is precise; the result is enigmatic.

A multifaceted, bittersweet delight.

Meek's Cutoff is an ambitious feat of visual storytelling that's alive to both its landscape and the actors who people it.

The film works on its own as an unfussy, passionate and gently erotic love story that never tips into sentimentality.

So much modern animation is technically brilliant and yet comes off as cold and indifferent. But Wallace, Gromit, and the people and creatures in their world always look warm to the touch. Someone made, and moved, all those bunnies by hand. It's impossible NOT to believe in them.

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.

Smolders with more reserved passion than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Meticulously and sensitively made, though its best moments may be the lovely but intense watercolor-toned interstitial animated sequences that illustrate the monster’s thorny spiritual allegories, cartoons for grownups rather than for little ones.

You’ll learn a lot from Varda’s narration, about filmmaking, about life, about her. If you want to know how to turn scraps into gold, this is the masterclass for you.

But Bad Santa does feature one last turn from the late John Ritter as a twittery department-store manager (his name, Mr. Chipeska, is a stroke of brilliance that I still can't quite put my finger on).