Stephanie Zacharek

My Life as a Zucchini is so warm, so alive, that we forget we're watching cartoon figures. And when they belong to us, they're no longer orphans.

The sight of Hedwig and his band transforming a trashy trailer into a glitter-rock stage during "Wig in a Box" was so exhilarating I almost leapt out of my seat. The movie is pure theater, as it should be.

Exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of picture you don't bounce back from immediately. Yet its elusiveness is the very source of its poetic energy.

Nolan may want us to believe in the darkness that lurks within each of us, but instead of leading us to it visually, he chops it up and sets it out in front of us, a grim, predigested banquet.

The picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a seemingly straightforward picture that’s surprisingly stealthy in capturing the joy and exaltation of being an almost-adult but still feeling young, of messing around and messing up, of waiting and hoping for the chance to meet a guy or girl you really like.

Pillion is tender in a sneaky way: without judgment, it reckons with the things humans want, in bed or outside of it, and are sometimes afraid to ask for. It’s also in tune with the reality that we’re not born knowing everything about ourselves—and where’s the fun in that, anyway?

Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.

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

The Tree of Life is gorgeous to look at. It's also a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption masquerading as spiritual exploration.

The storytelling isn’t always straightforward. But stick with it, go with it, and revel in the pleasure of being spoken to as an adult.

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

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

Fruitvale Station is intimate in the best way, thanks largely to Jordan's deft, responsive performance.

The picture may end a little too breezily, but Demme knows we have to be left with some hope for these wandering souls. Someday, they'll find their way home; it just may not be the same thing as going home.

The picture is so dramatically textured that you feel something's happening every minute.

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.

The Vuillards are not an easy family, and A Christmas Tale is not an easy movie. But by the end, what Desplechin has given us -- in his own inexplicable way, which is sometimes meandering and sometimes piercingly direct, and sometimes both at once -- is a benediction.

Director Brett Haley, who co-wrote the script with Marc Basch, brings enough understated sympathy to Lee's character to make the picture work--it throws off a gentle, sweet-spirited energy.

The wonder of Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Are You There God? isn’t just that it deals directly, and without condescension, with the vagaries of preteen awkwardness. It’s that it speaks so ardently to the adolescent in all of us—particularly, maybe, women who are going through menopause or already on the far side of it, an event that in some ways returns us to a lunar landscape whose contours we’d forgotten.

A solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away.

If Kaluuya is the backbone of Judas and the Black Messiah, Stanfield is its agonized soul. William O’Neal wrote his own tragedy, and Stanfield breathes life into it here, a confused, twisting spirit forever trapped in a hell of its own making.

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.

So why can't I love Moonrise Kingdom? For all the movie's technical meticulousness, the storytelling still has a wiggly-waggly quality, like a dangly loose tooth.

What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain.

Feldstein and Dever have a kind of mad, cartoon chipmunk chemistry, playing characters who know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences and step on each other’s lines. What their friendship really needs is a little room to breathe. Booksmart is smart about that too.

Is God Is is fanciful and brutal, sometimes simultaneously, taking a page or two from Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Let’s call it a perfectly acceptable work of superfluousness.