Ty Burr

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

Coco is a day-glo firecracker celebrating a country and a culture that has been (and continues to be) much maligned, and it’s at its most vibrant when it journeys into and beyond the shadow of death. That’s a paradox I can live with.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.

One of the more entertaining yet profoundly disturbing documentaries of this or any year.

After a while, you may suspect that things aren’t adding up. Later still, you begin to realize they may never add up.

Coriolanus leaves an acrid, unfinished taste. Fiennes, making his directorial debut, gets into the meat of the thing, and he takes advantage of the bluntness of the text; even Shakespeare newcomers will be able to follow along.

Taken as a whole, Dunkirk invites comparisons to the works of Kubrick and Spielberg, but it’s neither as scalding as “Full Metal Jacket” nor as clear-eyed, as aware of war’s terrible randomness, as “Saving Private Ryan.” Instead, a streak of honest sentiment, earned under the most hellish of circumstances, courses through this movie and provides it with spine and a soul.

What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.

Selma is at its very best when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces.

A nice long soak in the Proustian detritus of its era.

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

Clemency observes its characters with a steady, unmodulated pace and a minimum of frills.

On the level of a popcorn thrill ride, Snowpiercer is a beaut.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

Mudbound is four-square and unshowy, and you might mistake it for old-fashioned. But the presence of an African-American director behind the camera affects everything in front of it.

The movie takes its place alongside Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” (2016) as a work of true solemnity, one that wonders what we owe the divine in our worldly life. If the Scorsese film is arguably about the profoundest of doubts, A Hidden Life is something different. It’s an act of faith. Maybe Malick knows we’ll be needing it.

Capernaum is a hard, hard watch meant to force comfortable moviegoers out of their bubbles of ease. The rewards, in no particular order, are the central figure, the young actor playing him, and the film’s magnanimous windows onto suffering and resilience.