Tasha Robinson

It's typical Hitchcock: taut, morbid, stylish, and determined to confound expectations all the way up to the final shot.

A wonderful encore, marked by the painstaking attention to detail and artful balance between terror and joy that make Miyazak's work unique.

Bird and his co-writers leave room for quiet moments and gentle morals, but for the most part, they send visual gags and verbal punchlines tearing past at an enjoyably demanding speed, whipping up the film's energy at every turn.

It's Pixar's most daring experiment to date, but it still fits neatly into the studio's pantheon: Made with as much focus on heart as on visual quality, it's a sheer joy.

The Searchers is more a look at American genocide and racism, and the poison of revenge-obsession, than it is an adventure movie, and it feels like one of the wisest and most mature Westerns on the classics docket.

Fireflies makes its doomed subjects seem utterly human, with the wealth of personal details and believable characterizations common to Studio Ghibli's peerless animated films.

Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.

Its complete lack of restraint, cynicism, or self-consciousness invites viewers to drop their own reservations and just feel the big, broad, simple emotions as they're played out on-screen, through memorable songs and elaborate fantasy sequences.

Schnabel's sleepy, drifty, at times morbidly funny film tackles something more ambitious, by getting into the head of someone who's trying to get out of there himself.

The film never lets banter, visual gags, or the usual manic kid-flick running about interfere with its more delicately handled thoughts on loyalty, longing, broken relationships, and generational continuity. It honestly earns its emotion, moment by painstakingly executed moment.

It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution.

Audiences will likely come away from The Last Jedi with a lot of complaints and questions. But they’re at least likely to feel they’re in the hands of someone who cares about the series as much as they do, someone who loves its history, but sees the wide-open future ahead of it as well.

The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.

It's still a mixed bag with a lot of cutesy awfulness to wade through, but the acerbic ending is enough of a punchline to suggest that Westfeldt understands what a joke this kind of film can be.

Plenty of films give the viewers far more information and still wind up feeling opaque and distanced from the characters' lives. But The Fits is all about the experience of the moment, and it winds up feeling remarkably immersive and lyrical.

It's a beautifully shot, beautifully acted piece of fluff.

More disappointingly, the entire cast seems less committed than they were the first time out.

A technically groundbreaking collaborative work with humor, heart, and talent showing through in every carefully chosen line.

Like all Burton's best work, it takes place in a distorted, vividly colored, meticulously crafted world where whimsy and gleeful ghoulishness mix freely.

Has its heartbreaking moments and its surprise giggles, particularly thanks to Ron Hewat's minor role as a former hockey play-by-play announcer now narrating his nursing-home life.

The film’s symbolism is never subtle, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

The King's Speech is admirably free of easy answers and simple, happy endings; it's a skewed, awards-ready version of history, but one polished to a fine, satisfying shine.

For all the methodical pacing and old archetypes, Hell or High Water is a thoroughly contemporary action film, complete with fast chases and flashes of dark comedy. But like the classic Westerns, it invites viewers to evaluate, one more time, the myth of the American outlaw, and the idea of criminals as heroes.

Up is challenging, emotionally and narratively, but it trusts viewers to keep up; Pixar has never been interested in talking down to children or their parents.

What ultimately makes Tootsie linger past the giggles is its immense affection toward everyone on the screen.

It's almost charming in its sheer lack of ambition, but the lack of creativity in its by-the-numbers shocks is harder to excuse.

The superbly edited original version of Amadeus used overlapping sound cues for a lively flow between scenes, and the new version breaks up some of that flow with lengthy, talky interludes. Still, Ondricek's breathtaking images and Forman's essential craft are best appreciated on the big screen, and another theatrical run for Amadeus is a welcome gift, no matter how much this edition unnecessarily gilds what's already a near-perfect lily. [2002 Director's Cut]

As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.

The humor edges against absurdism, but stays self-aware and witty, with that mild-mannered optimism presiding.

Hereditary is a hell of an intense ride, made for a crowd that enjoys heart-clutching adrenaline spikes. The cast is unerringly terrific.

The Wicker Man ultimately succeeds on the strength of its powerful imagery, its increasingly chilling tone, and its final, sudden shock.

Along the way, Murderball surpasses the typical who-will-win sports-film dynamic and becomes a fascinating and personal exploration of quadriplegia.

For those capable of falling into the spell del Toro is casting, The Shape of Water is a breathless film, anchored by Hawkins’ visible, ardent longing for connection, and her fierce defiance when the things she loves are threatened.

Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

It’s no wonder that every part of Across the Spider-Verse is an attempt to outdo the first movie. The idea of growing, of surpassing and ignoring everyone else’s limits, is the heart of this series’ heroes and their individual journeys. It looks like the movies themselves are designed to follow suit.

For a first film, made on a shoestring with a largely non-professional cast, Krisha is remarkably textured.

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

Powell and Loy's light, witty, unflappable characterizations became the unwavering backbone of a terrific series.

The playful performances haven't aged, and it still finds all the carefree thrills of being young, dumb, in love with life, and ready for death.

Revisiting Saks’ screen version nearly 50 years later is like a class in how comedy and storytelling evolve, and how some aspects of a story endure over time, while others get sloughed away.

The film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.

It’s essentially a stroll through a fantastically detailed pastel world, in which the plot is little more than an excuse for Miyazaki to dive into a world teeming with colorful (and sometimes prehistoric) life.

Ernest & Celestine isn’t just cute or thrilling, though: It’s openly funny, in a wry, unpredictable way.

It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.

Let The Fire Burn is a fascinating look at official overreaction, government overreach, and the corrupting effects of prejudice on powerful institutions.

It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.

This is the most epic of the Harry Potter movies, the one that finally dispenses with side-quests and open-ended plotlines and offers up all the final payoffs.

Like so much of Key & Peele’s comedy, Get Out is refreshing in its naked, frank aggression about confronting racial issues, with comedy, drama, and sharp, unsparing insight.

It’s a hell of an achievement, and the rare case where a remake feels like an act of fervent fandom.

It's a rousing, thrilling adventure, beautifully animated in rich, deep hues with a look that meets neatly between the flow of hand-drawn cels and the smoothness of digital animation. But it's also a powerfully emotional piece, about family and friendship, about betrayal and disappointment, and about first love and old enmities.

While the procedural story takes up a fair bit of screen time, the emotional story is the center of the film, and the one that’s likely to stick with audiences longest and most clearly. As a story, it lacks the verve and dynamism of his early action films. As a portrait of obsession and regret, it’s remarkably sophisticated and satisfying.

Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure.

Goes from sleepily hypnotic to riveting over the course of 90 minutes.

The results are disappointingly conventional for a Ghibli film—the film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.

War Witch is a remarkably mature portrait that trusts its audience to have their own reactions to its material; it doesn’t yank at the heartstrings so much as expertly strum them.

The story of The Vast of Night is nothing particularly special. The storytelling, though, is spectacular.

It catches, in the most authentic and democratic way possible, a collection of people who’ve developed a strong taste for revolution, but are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

One of the many things that makes Boys State entertaining as well as relevant is the way Moss and McBaine capture these kids’ different facets, and track how their combined ambition and naïveté play into the big picture.

The miracle of Weiner is that like the complicated man at its center, it's open to interpretation. Schadenfreude seekers who just want to see Weiner sweat and suffer will get their money's worth. But so will curious viewers who show up in a spirit of inquiry, looking for the full story. They'll get more than one.

It is, in short, a strange and unrepeatable success, driven by its own uniqueness as much as anything else.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.

This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.

Soul feels like the best Pixar movies used to feel — deeply humanistic, with both silly, kid-friendly humor and a sincere solemnity that feels entirely adult. Docter and Powers weaponize all of this in a story that literally and directly questions the meaning of life.

Taken as a whole, Blackfish does an admirable job of preaching without force-feeding, seamlessly blending opinion with reportage, and addressing its central issues from enough angles to make a series of end-runs around dubious viewers.

While Gloria lacks impact, urgency, or any sense of rising and falling action, it’s beautifully rendered through Benjamín Echazarreta’s warm lens and García’s subtle performance.

However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.

Porco Rosso was initially conceived as a short film for Japan Airlines, and its roots show in its delight with aviation and the experience of flight, but also in its somewhat shapeless plot.

The film has any number of chances to exploit the setting and Butterfield's wide-eyed innocence, but instead, it mines a vast, eerie tension by keeping both boys in the dark.

These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.

Street Gang certainly doesn’t tell the whole story of Sesame Street’s early years — it can’t begin to. But it’s an absorbing, nostalgia-courting start, and for people with fond memories of the show, it’s an unbeatable chance to approach it as an adult, and understand their own childhoods a little better in the process.

It's a cynical look not just at society and its structures and strictures, but at love itself. But it's still mesmerizing in its oddity, and it's exceptionally daring.

Miyazaki's animated adaptation of Jones' book is a charming and thoroughly absorbing treat.

It lacks Hitchcockian tension or Christie-level dignity, but it’s funny, surprising, and intriguing in the way it flips the usual murder-mystery script.

Challengers is a sharp and snappy movie, full of big emotions expressed through fast-paced dialogue in some scenes and through silent, sensual physicality in others, all shot with creative verve and aggressively in-your-face energy. Everyone in this movie is chasing sex and success, and conflating those things with each other in unashamedly provocative ways.

The performances are winning, the story is surprising without relying on unlikely twists, and the relationships are the richest and most nuanced since Leigh's "Secrets & Lies."

For viewers who are still impressed by CGI destruction and thrilled by the sight of realistic mechas in action, Uprising is yet another escalation in scale, staged creatively and with apparent love for the old-school kaiju genre.

Everything Everywhere’s multiverse is a remarkably flexible metaphor. It’s equally suitable for expressing some common frustrations the audience may relate to, about botched choices and wasted opportunity. But it’s just as suited for setting up a series of ridiculously kickass action sequences where literally anything is possible, because the characters aren’t bound by reality or causality.

Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.

The film sometimes seems to get lost in self-admiration and its own melancholy mood. Still, Amirpour maintains that mood exquisitely well.

Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving.

McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow.

So polished that it might pass for a scripted narrative feature, but that's not a bad thing. They found a remarkable spokesman in Bolivian teenager Basilio Vargas, and while his cogent, organized descriptions of his life, beliefs, history, and ambitions sometimes seem too calculated, at least they're calculated to communicate efficiently and appealingly.

All the beats proceed exactly as expected, but they hit with admirably precise timing, amid a strikingly beautiful landscape where every leaf is rendered with loving clarity. The humor, the wonder, and the awwww moments all hit home comfortably. This is such a perfect execution of the Disney formula, it feels like the movie the studio has been trying to make since Snow White.

The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.

A film that so perfectly reveals its characters both through the way they charge past calamity, and the way they subtly reflect their own pasts.

Whenever it hits its stride, it's a well-acted, vividly executed, full-speed-ahead special-effects extravaganza that puts as much bang as possible into every remaining scene.

A film so joyfully insane that it feels like Kon is overcompensating.

The most tremendous thing about Starred Up is exactly how simple it keeps things, and what a richly nuanced story emerges in the process.

Heiskanen plays her layers beautifully, alternately revealing a talented artist stymied by poverty and marital problems, and a woman fiercely devoted to family first.

Even when making movies for small children, Studio Ghibli produces stories that are more emotionally sophisticated, and less philosophically polarized, than most adult fare.

While the film will likely stick with viewers, it's ultimately a tossup what they'll remember most: the stunning buildup, or the massive letdown.

Incredibles 2 is a lighter and more incident-packed adventure. The same characters are running through some of the same emotions but with much less of a sense of weight and impact.

One of Arnold's greatest accomplishments in American Honey is in illustrating, with a loose and comfortable storytelling style, how these misfits build a form of easy intimacy without really opening up to each other, or getting attached.

Iris isn’t groundbreaking doc filmmaking, but it’s amiable and jovial in a way rarely seen in the field, which tends more toward drama, trauma, and forwarding big causes. Maysles doesn’t seem to have an agenda, beyond capturing Apfel as she is in this moment, as a complete, highly specific, and thoroughly charming character.

In some moments, White God is a fast-moving thriller... At other times, it’s a standard-issue slasher movie... But when Mundruczó pushes the camera in close on Lili or Hagen, it just becomes a family drama, and a portrait of longing—for freedom, for emotional reciprocity, for comfort.

This might be pleasant to watch, in a floaty '70s-movie kind of way, if not for the film's groaning 168-minute length and abrupt thudder of an ending.

A compelling, well-researched, beautifully assembled document.

The results are nothing short of magical.