Representing a dazzling artistic leap forward for LAIKA, the stop-motion animation studio’s fourth feature — and first full-blown fantasy — is an eye-popping delight that deftly blends colorful folklore with gorgeous, origami-informed visuals to immersive effect.

Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here too.

The performances are impeccable. Sachs is a master of expressive understatement, and that applies both to the young actors playing the boys — there's not a false moment from either of them — and to the adults.

Expectations are fully met in Park Chan-wook’s exquisitely filmed The Handmaiden (Agassi), an amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a product of American realism, and it is a rare and worthy treasure.

According to the most basic laws of cinema, Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade’s third feature as a writer-director (she has five times that many credits as a producer), shouldn’t work. It’s practically one long string of nesting, oxymoronic self-cancelling paradoxes: here is the world’s first genuinely funny, 162-minute German comedy of embarrassment.

The movie is a small marvel of impeccable craftsmanship.

Confidently dovetailing three strands that depict present and past reality, as well as a dark fictional detour that functions as a blunt real-life rebuke, the film once again demonstrates that Ford is both an intoxicating sensualist and an accomplished storyteller, with as fine an eye for character detail as he has for color and composition.

Barry Jenkins' Moonlight pulls you into its introspective protagonist's world from the start and transfixes throughout as it observes, with uncommon poignancy and emotional perceptiveness, his roughly two-decade path to find a definitive answer to the question, "Who am I?"

An ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.

An extraordinary motion picture, greater in dimension and significance than any similar film of our time, Ben-Hur is more spectacular than any of the previous spectacles. More importantly, it is at the same time a highly rewarding dramatic experience, rich and complex in human values: a great adventure, full of excitement, visual beauty, thrills and unsurpassed cinema artistry.

Personal footage interacts intriguingly with reportage here, sometimes making it more than the greatest-hits montage it initially seems.

Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American first lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband's death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote.

The Woman Who Left is an immensely immersive and engaging tale about a wronged individual's grueling struggle between reconciliation and revenge.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

Captivating, funny and possessed of a surprise-filled zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it's headed, this is a deeply humane film that, like the best Hollywood classics, feels both entirely of its moment and timeless.

Disney's 30th animated feature, Beauty and the Beast stands at the pinnacle of animated accomplishment, even when weighted against the excellencies of its lineage.

The unique charm of Isle of Dogs is its bottomless vault of curios, its sly humor, playful graphic inserts and dexterous narrative detours.

Though clearly not a proposition for either devout Christians or audiences for whom the multiplex is a temple, this is the kind of take-no-prisoners art house fare that advances and deepens the understanding of a singular director’s oeuvre as a whole.

At every imaginative juncture, the filmmakers (the screenplay is credited to Pixar veteran Molina and Matthew Aldrich) create a richly woven tapestry of comprehensively researched storytelling, fully dimensional characters, clever touches both tender and amusingly macabre, and vivid, beautifully textured visuals.

With the aplomb of a modern Mesmer, DeMille forges The Greatest Show on Earth into a fabulous entertainment experience — a big, seething SHOW, spectacular, exciting, colorful.

The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what's more important, they convey their characters' complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.

More unconventional and downright weird on a moment-to-moment basis than it is in overall design and intent, it's a singular work played out mostly in small rooms that harks back to psychological melodramas of the 1940s/50s but hits stylistic notes entirely its own.

With his fine cast and his gracefully restrained screenplay, Shults makes horror recognizable.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

Cannily interweaving its personal stories with a vivid depiction of an eco-system on the verge of collapse, Uncertain marks an outstanding feature debut for its documentarians.

On paper, neither character may seem terribly appealing, but on the screen they steal your heart away, but completely...Not only did that last reel include some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen, but it also provided an emotionally gratifying capstone to a picture that is truly an ode to the human spirit.

Putting the viewer into a men’s circle like no other, The Work is a remarkable piece of reportage.