The film, bathed in gorgeous shadow and light by cinematographer Joe DeSalvo, gets more personal as it moves along. You can feel the romantic ache when Bruce and the missus duet on “Stones.”

This is where Fonte comes in. An actor who can make Marcello seem like a pitiful beta-male grotesque one second and a noble, sympathetic hero the next, he’s the thrumming motor behind this fairy tale of dogs and monsters. It’s hard to underestimate how his award-winning performance — good call, Cannes Film Festival — shapes the film and sets its humanistic tone.

The Sound of My Voice ends with a very different voice, as we see Ronstadt, filmed this year, attempting to sing a Mexican folk song with a cousin and nephew. Parkinson’s has clearly weakened her, but she still watches her relatives attentively and opens her mouth to verbalize along with them as much as possible.

A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.

Told in five chapters and across multiple storylines, Tost’s first feature is an admirably weird and engaging odyssey that’s like Tarantino meets The Sugarland Express (with a healthy dose of Smokey and the Bandit). It’s brimming with ideas and winning turns, in particular Sweeney and Hauser, whose romantic chemistry is terribly endearing, and McClarnon as the deadpan-hilarious face of anti-colonialist vengeance.

It may not be Larraín’s best film (we’d nominate No). But it’s unquestionably the movie he was, in so many ways, born to make.

It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.

For a film so consumed with hitting something over a net, O’Connor’s work here is practically an ode to performing without the safety of one.

It’s a power house.

A potently acted, buoyantly funny film that trades on emotion without making you gag on it.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

You wanna feel all right? This is the holiday movie that will do it.

Leaves you feeling tense and terrific. It's fun to be fooled.

Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story.

Restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it's not perfect? It's magic.

What starts out as an impressive mix of various classic-Italian-cinema strains turns into something much richer, rewarding and singular. Rohrwacher isn’t interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and modern-day anger.

The result is a film of surprise and wonder, lyrically attuned to the ticking intensity of romance.

A blast of comic irreverence that serves as a starring vehicle for two stoner characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines.

What the Beatles did in 1964 alone continues to change the world—and Beatles ’64 is testimony to that ongoing story.

You’d have to search hard to find a movie this hypnotic and haunting.

What shakes the dust off this period piece is the vibrant acting.

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

Eddie Murphy is funny again. Sadly, he lacks the guts to follow through on the cathartic self-satire that gives the film its distinction.

Craig Zobel's potent and provocative Compliance is torture to sit through. It's also indispensable filmmaking. How is that possible? Check it out.

Clark is a talent to watch. He's made a transfixing film about a family that looks touchingly and unnervingly like yours and mine.

It's a blast.