Great movies: the best films in recent history

A formerly free man is kidnapped and sold as a slave in the 1840s American South in this searing drama; winner of multiple Oscars.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 134 minutes

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s gripping, somber German-language drama, based on actual events, examines the moments and aftermath of an attempted assassination of Hitler.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 110 minutes

Annette Bening gives a master class in film acting in this warmhearted film from Mike Mills ("Beginners"), in which her character creates a makeshift family in 1979 Santa Barbara.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

In this beautifully acted drama starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, a marriage lives and dies; we watch its agonized struggle, like a butterfly impaled on a pin.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 95 minutes

The latest installment in Michael Apted's fascinating, landmark documentary series checks in on a group of Brits every 7 years; they're now settling comfortably into middle age.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 144 minutes

The human cost of the 2008 economic meltdown is dramatically portrayed in this fictional story of a wicked Florida real-estate broker (an excellent Michael Shannon) who manipulates a desperate family on the verge of losing their home.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 112 minutes

Like a less-quirky cousin of Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," this sweet coming-of-age tale is about a young man burying himself in activities in an attempt to escape the pain of loss.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 88 minutes

This powerful, quiet depiction of Emily Dickinson's life features at its heart an incandescent performance by Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive, brilliant poet.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 126 minutes

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting movies are woven from the same gentle cloth: quiet, deceptively uncomplicated stories of families. This one, like the others, is filled with soft-pedaled revelations and fleeting poetry.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 117 minutes

It's impossible to watch this film — a joyrous, wide-reaching documentary about swing dance — without a tapping toe and a smile.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 84 minutes

J.C. Chandor's film features a solo sailor and almost no dialogue; it’s ultimately less about a nautical crisis than a man gradually realizing, in every sense of the word, that he is lost.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 107 minutes

Told in a whoosh of nylon shirts, yellowy light and disco music, David O. Russell’s film is the sort-of-based-on-fact story of the 1970s Abscam scandal, in which a con man and the FBI join forces.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 138 minutes

A long-married French couple faces illness together in a story that's wrenchingly sad, but not without joy.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 127 minutes

Asif Kapadia’s documentary about the short, tragic life of British retro soul singer Amy Winehouse is a heartbreaker, depicting a fresh, cheeky young woman full of life.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 128 minutes

A riveting and illuminating documentary about the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and how its shockingly mad and bloody legacy continues to impact Cambodia today.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 90 minutes

Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) possesses an artistic sensibility unlike any other filmmaker working today, and that sensibility informs every word and frame of “Anomalisa,” a haunting stop-motion animation tale of two lonely people.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 90 minutes

So much of the pleasure of Denis Villeneuve’s poignant science-fiction drama lies in watching Amy Adams figure things out; she plays a linguist recruited by the military to attempt communication with a mysterious spaceship, and we experience the movie through her perspective.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 116 minutes

Filmed at the University of California at Berkeley during the 2010 fall semester, Frederick Wiseman's documentary depicts — in small dabs — a vibrant, buzzing universe.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 244 minutes

Exactly what you want a summer movie to be, Edgar Wright's breathless action flick isn't quite a musical, but it's drenched in music. (Even the car crashes.)

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 113 minutes

An enjoyably lighthearted crowd-pleaser with a serious message at its core, "Battle of the Sexes" depicts the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs; a tale deliciously cast and swiftly told.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 121 minutes

Gorgeous and wildly over-the-top, this live-action remake of Disney's beloved animated feature finds the warm spirit of the original.

• 3.4 stars
• Rated PG
• 129 minutes

The final film in Richard Linklater's romantic trilogy; it's is often uncomfortable to watch, it’s never less than mesmerizing — and ultimately, a joy to walk with the prickly but fascinating Jesse and Celine again.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 108 minutes

This period drama about a mixed-race young heiress in 18th-century England is an old-fashioned movie with a very modern streak, centered by a vibrant star turn by Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

• stars
• Rated PG
• 105 minutes

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s multilayered film can be appreciated on many levels simultaneously: as a backstage-at-the-theater comedy; as a literate and literary character study; as a remarkable achievement in cinematography; as a comment on the nature of contemporary entertainment; as a showcase for one of the year’s finest ensemble casts; and as a surreal tale of a man seeking his soul.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 119 minutes

In terms of the imaginative ways it expands on the themes of the first movie, Denis Villeneuve's film is the rare sequel that is at least the equal of its iconic Ridley Scott original.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 160 minutes

It's Woody Allen, but this is no comedy — Cate Blanchett shines in a wrenching portrait of a woman whose life has fallen apart.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 98 minutes

Richard Linklater's award-winning drama, 12 years in the making, eloquently follows a young man's coming of age.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 165 minutes

Tom Hanks does some of the best work of his career in this Cold War drama about a real-life Soviet spy, directed by Steven Spielberg.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 142 minutes

In John Crowley’s lovely film, about an Irish immigrant making her way in 1950s America, Saoirse Ronan (“Atonement”) provides a master class in showing, not saying, what her character is thinking; the movie unfolds on her quiet face.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 113 minutes

This Irish drama unfolds as a murder mystery in reverse, serving as a marvelous showcase for Brendan Gleeson — a great old-lion actor with a face on which emotions play like waves on the beach.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 104 minutes

The title superhero's struggle to survive in a universe where conventional morality no longer holds sway gives this film a significantly higher quotient of substance than is usually found in a comic-book adaptation.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 136 minutes

A compelling and original take on the well-worn territory of family ties, with Viggo Mortensen’s tough yet vulnerable performance (as a widower raising his off-the-grid brood) among his career best.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

Tom Hanks, in one of his finest performances yet, plays the captain of a container ship hijacked by Somali pirates; the film feels utterly real and almost unbearably intense.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 134 minutes

Arising from the pages of Dav Pilkey’s incredibly popular series of children’s books, this animated movie captures the spirit and the unsophisticated visual style of the books with remarkable fidelity.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 89 minutes

Two women meet and fall in love in 1950s New York; together, director Todd Haynes, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, actors Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, cinematographer Edward Lachman and composer Carter Burwell immerse us — nearly drowning us, happily — in beauty and longing.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

Solid storytelling, a longtime strength of the best Pixar pictures, elevates “Cars 3” into the pantheon with the studio’s finest.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated G
• 100 minutes

Kelly Reichart’s engaging, quiet film isn't so much a single narrative feature as three gently overlapping short subjects set in or near Livingston, Montana, each with an introspective woman at its center.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 108 minutes

The plot of "Lysistrata" gets played out in contemporary, gun-ridden Chicago, and director Spike Lee makes it burst with vitality and purpose; it has the feel of a movie made by a young man, new to the craft and consumed by a mad joy in the sheer act of filmmaking.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 127 minutes

As Christine Chubbuck, a troubled young reporter at a local news station in 1974 Florida, Rebecca Hall's electric performance jolts Antonio Campos's thoughtful film; you see, watching her, the terrible weight of depression.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

In this timely, pressing and important documentary, Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land”) tells the story of Syrian citizen journalists taking on ISIS in their hometown.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 93 minutes

Dazzling visuals along with intricately structured and deeply moving storytelling are the hallmarks of the best of Pixar's movies. “Coco” has those in spades, which puts it right up there with “Up” and the “Toy Story” trilogy in the topmost ranks.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 109 minutes

This quietly stirring, exquisitely photographed film is an arthouse gem that beautifully illuminates not only the architecture of a small Indiana town, but also the characters that inhabit it. (And it reminds us that John Cho should be a leading man more often.)

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 100 minutes

This documentary tale of two long-married Brooklyn artists (whose cluttered loft seems encrusted with possessions) is told with style and wit.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 82 minutes

A group of working-class Brits breed and manage a champion racehorse in Louise Osmond's charming documentary, which could have been scripted by Hollywood — but wasn't.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 85 minutes

A smart, sexy satire about race, in which young writer/director Justin Simien announces himself as his generation's Preston Sturges.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 108 minutes

In this irresistible documentary, the viewer is introduced to Ricky Jay, one of the world's foremost sleight-of-hand artists.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 89 minutes

In this powerful, scary documentary, two filmmakers get to know an Afghan family profoundly affected by a secret American government operation carried out with drones.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 90 minutes

Mike Birbiglia's warmhearted comedy, about a close-knit improv-comedy troupe facing an uncertain future, ultimately becomes a gentle meditation on late-blooming coming-of-age.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 92 minutes

Based on a remarkable story from World War II, “Dunkirk” unfolds on land, on the sea and in the air. Christopher Nolan’s magificent film seems to be over in a flash — you disappear inside of it and it changes you, as all great movies do.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 106 minutes

Ron Howard's Beatles documentary is a thoroughly delightful, crisply edited film that takes viewers to Europe, Australia, the Far East and the U.S. where, between June 1962 and August 1966, the Fab Four played in 90 cities in 15 countries.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 99 minutes

A smart, funny, snappy romantic comedy for grown-ups, Nicole Holofcener’s film is a joy, marred only by the poignancy of seeing the late James Gandolfini (opposite a wonderful Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in one of his final screen appearances.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 92 minutes

Termed by writer/director Richard Linklater ("Boyhood") as the “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed,” this story of a group of 1980s college students is sunnier and funnier by far than its predecessor.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 116 minutes

Frederick Wiseman's film about the New York Public Library is a lovely, inspiring (and lengthy!) picture of a crucial institution.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 197 minutes

An exquisite, baffling puzzle box of a picture, with Alicia Vikander as a robot created by a wealthy genius scientist/entrepreneur (Oscar Isaac).

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 108 minutes

Wisely adapted by novelist David Nicholls, this Thomas Hardy drama set in 19th-century Dorset has the elegance of a Merchant-Ivory film, and yet feels utterly real.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 119 minutes

This wise, electric adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in 1950s Pittsburgh, wraps you and whirls you in a heady cyclone of words; Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (who won an Oscar for this role) give performances for the ages.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 139 minutes

For all its witty voices and great escapes (maybe one too many of the latter), this charming Pixar tale is ultimately a character story, and Ellen DeGeneres’ lovable, brave Dory swims right into our hearts.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 95 minutes

An engaging unravelling of a real-life mystery: the photographs left behind by a Chicago street photographer.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 88 minutes

Shot on location in Cambodia in the Khmer language, Angelina Jolie's drama is a family story, with the travails of a young woman and her parents and siblings serving as a microcosm of their nation’s anguish.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 136 minutes

Francois Ozon's eloquent black-and-white drama, set in a small German town in 1919, is a simple, moving story about love, loss and storytelling itself.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 115 minutes

Director Ryan Coogler's depiction of a real-life police shooting in 2009 is an eloquent memorial for a young man (Michael B. Jordan) who barely experienced life.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 84 minutes

Tate Taylor’s new film biography of James Brown, aka the Godfather of Soul, is unexpectedly buoyant; it skims over a life as if tunefully improvising, touching just the right note here and there.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 140 minutes

There are moments, in this remarkable documentary about a former football player facing an ALS diagnosis, where it’s very hard to look at the screen; moments so devastating you wonder how this couple, and those who love them, can bear it — but there’s also evidence of astonishing courage and miraculous love.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 110 minutes

David Fincher's movie deliciously fulfills the expectations set by Gillian Flynn's ice-in-its-veins novel of a troubled marriage; both book and movie are dark, creepy, and very good indeed.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 140 minutes

The longtime secretary to the Beatles, now a grandmother, tells her story in this delightful documentary.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 85 minutes

The bond between identical twins is the center around which the plot orbits in this moody, vastly disturbing horror picture by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 99 minutes

Short, tart, yet unexpectedly sweet, Paul Weitz’s dark comedy is a small-scale character study — and, because that character is played by the great Lily Tomlin, it’s mesmerizing, right up until its final frame.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 80 minutes

Whiz-bang, damn-the-torpedoes, high-octane good times roll in this superhero romp, in which five "guardians" (including a talking raccoon) band together to save the galaxy.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 121 minutes

In this boxing movie, Robert De Niro seems to come full circle: “Raging Bull” was and remains his career pinnacle, while his work here, as a trainer, ascends to near that rarefied height.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 105 minutes

Davis Guggenheim’s well-crafted and deeply affecting documentary digs below the iconography and the honors given to its title heroine, offering an illuminating portrait of the human being behind the image.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 88 minutes

Jeff Bridges’ voice, in David Mackenzie’s excellent contemporary Western, sounds choked with dust; his character, an aging Texas Ranger named Marcus, seems to have spent a lifetime in the kind of town where tumbleweeds just might roll down Main Street.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 101 minutes

A man (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with the voice of an operating system in Spike Jonze's unique rom-com.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 126 minutes

A crowd-pleaser of the very best kind, “Hidden Figures” introduces us to some heroes whose names we should already know: three mathematically gifted black women whose work became instrumental to NASA's early space program.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 127 minutes

The plot for this family-friendly sequel doesn’t matter in the slightest; young and old fans of the first movie will be lining up for the wit, for the inventiveness of the characters, for the breathtaking visuals — and just the sheer fun of it all.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 102 minutes

Laugh-out-loud funny one minute, achingly sad the next, Taika Waititi's film takes the audience on a rollicking yet poignant journey through the New Zealand backcountry in the company of a pair of engagingly eccentric characters.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 101 minutes

Raoul Peck’s searing, poetic documentary based on James Baldwin’s writings, “I Am Not Your Negro” is itself a journey of discovery; a path of words and images, taking us into the heart of the civil-rights movement.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 93 minutes

French filmmaker Francois Ozon crafts an intriguing story about storytelling: about what happens when an English teacher gets lost inside a life that isn't his.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 105 minutes

From the Coen brothers — a splendid, touching, darkly comic film about a 1960s Greenwich Village folk singer (Oscar Isaac) at a crossroads.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 105 minutes

Children will love this zippy, colorful Pixar adventure into an 11-year-old girl's brain; adults will find themselves unexpectedly moved, changed and dazzled.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 106 minutes

Pablo Lorrain's sort-of-biopic is a strange movie — it feels, like Natalie Portman’s haunting Jackie, like it might shatter if dropped — and yet it's mesmerizing; a familiar story told from an entirely different angle.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 100 minutes

This documentary about anthropologist Jane Goodall — using never-before-seen footage of Goodall with her beloved chimps — is a memorable portrait of a woman, both in youth and late life, who always knew what she wanted — and who, in doing so, helped make the world a better place.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 90 minutes

Delicately placed somewhere between melodrama, drama and loving homage, Pedro Almodovar's film is the gripping story of a mother and daughter, whom we first meet in a photograph torn into tiny pieces.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 99 minutes

Following strong work with “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls,” “Kubo” takes the Oregon-based studio LAIKA’s trademark stop-motion animation to a new level, using Japanese origami techniques to create a breathtaking fantasy world.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 101 minutes

Though “Kung Fu Panda 2” suffered from a mild case of sequelitis — overloud and overdone — the third installment is a total delight: gloriously colorful, very funny and, better yet, unexpectedly substantive and genuinely moving.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 95 minutes

This French-language drama, from Italian filmmaker Piero Messina, is a spare, elegant tale of heartbreak — of how a story untold lets a character clutch desperately to another story, one that isn’t true.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 100 minutes

Damien Chazelle's dreamy musical, in which an aspiring actress (Oscar winner Emma Stone) and a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) fall in love in a Technicolor Los Angeles, is a valentine to cinema, splashed with primary colors and velvety L.A. sunsets and wistful close-ups of beautiful faces.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 128 minutes

Greta Gerwig's delightful, poignant coming-of-age tale stars Saoirse Ronan as a Sacramento high-school senior and Laurie Metcalf as her loving, frustrated mother.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 93 minutes

William Oldroyd’s brooding, mesmerizing drama, set in 19th-century rural England, isn’t Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (it’s based on an 1865 Russian novella, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk”), but it explores a similar kind of ruthlessness.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 89 minutes

Set on the west coast of Denmark in May 1945, this Danish film (an Oscar nominee) is a mesmerizing tale of postwar rage and waste and indecisiveness.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 110 minutes

This beautifully acted tale of friendship showcases two actors finding an enchanting connection: Patricia Clarkson as a new divorcée learning how to drive for the first time; Ben Kingsley as the cabbie she hires to teach her.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 89 minutes

You don’t have to be a movie critic, or even particularly interested in movies, to be touched and enthralled by this documentary about Roger Ebert; it's a beautifully paced tribute to a life well-lived.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 120 minutes

Roger Ross Williams’ gentle, uplifting documentary is about storytelling: Specifically, Disney-movie storytelling, and how it helped an autistic young man make sense of the world.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 89 minutes

A gentle, nuanced drama from Japan in which two families cope with the news that their six-year-old sons were switched at birth.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 130 minutes

Garth Davis' heart-tugging movie has one of those plot lines that feels like a Hollywood screenplay — tiny child, separated from his family, searches for them decades later — except it actually happened. It's mesmerizingly told, particularly its vivid and nearly wordless first half.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 118 minutes

In its brief, intimate 85 minutes, Ira Sachs' film has much to say: about how a neighborhood, and an apartment, changes; how emotions in a family don’t always extend across generations; how money can enter a conversation and poison it, like a bad smell; and how a 13-year-old boy begins to step toward the person he might one day be.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 85 minutes

Steven Knight’s tight little drama is, without question, a stunt — it takes place almost entirely in the front seat of a BMW, during a late-night drive from Birmingham to London —and, for the most part, it works like gangbusters.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 85 minutes

This costume drama, based on Jane Austen's "Lady Susan" and featuring Kate Beckinsale as a scheming flirt, is both self-consciously mannered and merrily playful — a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 93 minutes

Starring John Cusack and Paul Dano, this story of the bizarre life of Beach Boy Brian Wilson is one of the most touching — and gripping — biopics you will ever see.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 120 minutes

Ira Sachs' gentle love story features John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a longtime couple who must separate due to real-estate troubles; the actors movingly depict the kind of partnership in which neither is complete without the other.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 93 minutes

Jeff Nichols' film, about a real-life interracial couple in the 1950/60s South, is a story of heroism and the right to love, told without stirring speeches; instead, it unfolds movingly in the tiny moments between Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga), two people who have, quite simply, found a home in each other.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 125 minutes

This unique film — shot in standard format, then every frame hand-painted over in the style of Vincent van Gogh — is a curious and often exquisite blend of two art forms.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 94 minutes

It's hard to imagine a better send-off for the the late actor Harry Dean Stanton than this final role, in which he portrays a cantankerous, Stantonesque codger, living in a tiny desert town, who must come to terms with his mortality.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 88 minutes

Justin Kurzel’s film is all blood and ice, a stirring, unflinching retelling of Shakespeare’s tale of a Scottish thane (Michael Fassbender), his ambitious wife (Marion Cotillard) and a terrible deed that haunts them, leaving their hands forever stained.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 110 minutes

The pace is delirious, the stunts are incredible, the acting impressive — put it all together, and you’ve got a rousing crowd-pleaser that hits on all fast-revving cylinders.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 120 minutes

Writer/director Rebecca Miller's contemporary rom-com, starring Greta Gerwig and an unexpectedly hilarious Julianne Moore, is a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 98 minutes

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, and starring Casey Affleck in an Oscar-winning performance, this New England drama is a movie of astonishing honesty, an exploration of the kind of grief that causes a man to disappear even as he’s standing in front of us.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 137 minutes

The courtroom drama is a genre that’s sadly gone out of fashion, but when it works — as it does with Reginald Hudlin’s film, which stars Chadwick Boseman as then-NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall — it can be enormously satisfying.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 118 minutes

Filmed in a rural Newfoundland region where time seems to have stood still, “Maudie” features Sally Hawkins in a remarkable performance as a disabled folk artist.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 115 minutes

A sweet and funny film -- and the big winner at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival — about a couple of movie-mad teenagers who can’t stop making low-budget imitations of classic movies.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 104 minutes

This sci-fi thriller, reminiscent of "The X-Files," is a long tease, artfully constructed and designed to keep the audience off balance and on edge until the very end.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 111 minutes

A quiet, gentle demonstration of how art can help souls heal, "Midsummer in Newtown" shows us a group of children from Newtown, Connecticut — just a year after gun violence devastated their town — putting on a Shakespeare play.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 81 minutes

A compelling and often genuinely exciting chronicle of the race to the moon, featuring a reunion of many of the men behind the 1969 Apollo landing.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 99 minutes

The greatest strength of this Disney musical adventure, about a Polynesian princess on an epic quest, is the verve in which the filmmakers move the action along and the sheer joyousness evident in every aspect of their storytelling.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 96 minutes

Watching this whimsical French love story, you marvel at how no one makes movies quite like Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Human Nature”) — and at how a dash of curlicued surrealism somehow makes the real world, in all its staidness, a happier place.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 94 minutes

Barry Jenkins' lyrical, poetic Oscar winner is a three-act drama unfolding over two decades, in which a gay black man (played by three different actors) comes of age in a tough Miami neighborhood.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 111 minutes

Mike Leigh's portrait of the artist J.M.W. Turner is made up of artful dabs and splotches, and it’s often — in the manner of a great painting — mesmerizing.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 149 minutes

Filmed in elegant black-and-white, with the cast in contemporary dress, Joss Whedon's updated take on Shakespeare is a merry, occasionally dark romp.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 109 minutes

One of the best music documentaries ever made, this utterly compelling film tells the story of a tiny, legendary recording studio in Alabama.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 111 minutes

Alexander Payne's wonderful not-quite-comedy/not-quite-drama is the story of a father and a son, and of how they come to understand each other, just a bit, on a Midwest road trip.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 110 minutes

A respectful — though hardly reverent — celebration of and homage to the camaraderie and courage of the men who shared a catastrophic fate on the fire lines in the summer of 2013.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 134 minutes

The Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda makes beautiful, quiet movies about families (“Nobody Knows,” “I Wish,” “Like Father Like Son”); this one focuses on a trio of 20-something siblings, living together in their family home in the seaside town of Kamakura.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 126 minutes

Edward Zwick’s tense, smart drama stars Tobey Maguire in a career-changing performance as the world’s most famous — and troubled — chess champion.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 116 minutes

An utterly charming combination of road-trip movie, odd-couple comedy and heart-touching true story that will leave few dry-eyed, this film stars the great Judi Dench as an elderly woman searching for her son.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 98 minutes

Hugh Jackman plays a desperate father searching for his kidnapped daughter in this dark examination of how loss can unhinge us.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 153 minutes

Angela Robinson’s fascinating and surprisingly sweet-natured film about the man who created Wonder Woman is a different sort of superhero origin story, and an appropriate bookend to the “Wonder Woman” film.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 108 minutes

Just try to resist the charms of Mira Nair’s delightful film; a triumph-of-the-human-spirit movie about a chess prodigy in the Ugandan slums that’s ultimately, well, triumphant.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 124 minutes

“Restless Creature” isn’t just a celebration of a great artist (Wendy Whelan, who danced with New York City Ballet for 30 years); it’s a moving portrait of what happens when that artist confronts the possibility of not being able to make that art any more.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 90 minutes

Lenny Abrahamson’s wondrous, devastating film, based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, is about a mother (Oscar-winner Brie Larson) and son imprisoned in a small room, who ultimately must save each other.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

This French-language drama reminds us that not everything broken can be fully mended — and that Marion Cotillard, as a character both steely and fragile, is one of the most mesmerizing actresses currently on screen.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 120 minutes

Both mesmerizing drama and timely history lesson, Ava DuVernay's depiction of a key moment in the civil-rights movement stays with you long after the theater lights have been raised. With David Oyelowo in a remarkable performance as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 127 minutes

Nobody speaks in this adorable British stop-motion-animation comedy from Aardman Animation; instead, they bleat, bark, grunt, squeal, quack, coo — or, if they’re human, mutter something unintelligible. And yet, the storytelling’s captivating.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 86 minutes

So much of Denis Villeneuve’s disturbing drama, set in the world of law enforcement and Mexican drug cartels, takes place on Emily Blunt’s face; as hardworking FBI agent Kate Macer, she’s constantly pausing, thinking, figuring things out.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 122 minutes

Being the third wheel on someone else’s first date is rarely as delightful as it is in Richard Tanne’s charming film about two 20-something lawyers — whose names happen to be Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson — spending some time together outside of the office in 1989 Chicago.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 84 minutes

This third time’s the charm in Marvel’s pantheon of Spider-Man portrayers. Tobey Maguire was pretty good, Andrew Garfield was so-so, but Tom Holland … Well, when you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 133 minutes

Tom McCarthy’s mesmerizing, Oscar-winning film is, quite simply, a story about storytelling; taking place over about a year at The Boston Globe, where a team of investigative reporters is piecing together the details of an explosive story about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of numerous predatory priests.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 128 minutes

Amanda Lipitz's compelling, inspiring and emotional film (just try not to cry in its final scenes) follows three young women at a Baltimore high school as they prepare for a step-dance competition — and, more importantly, for college.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 83 minutes

A hurricane of words pours from the screen in Danny Boyle's biopic about the software innovator, delivered with breathtaking intensity by Michael Fassbender in the title role.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 122 minutes

Bring a handkerchief, or possibly a bedsheet, to “Still Mine”; this fact-based drama about an elderly Canadian couple could wring tears from a brick.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 103 minutes

Past and present merge, in a continual and still-emerging story, as filmmaker Sarah Polley examines a long-held family secret.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 108 minutes

If Tom Hanks hadn’t existed to play the title role of heroic pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, director Clint Eastwood would have had to invent him: This is one of those cases where movie-star persona and real-life legend blend perfectly.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 91 minutes

Terence Davies' drama, set in World War I-era rural Scotland and based on a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, doesn't sentimentalize the difficult life of its heroine (lovely Agyness Deyn); but it’s breathtakingly shot, and it blooms with moments of astonishing beauty.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 135 minutes

Daniel Radcliffe gives the performance of a lifetime playing a flatulent corpse in this often hilarious, ultimately poignant and always bizarrely offbeat one-of-a-kind picture.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 95 minutes

Danny Boyle's sequel — 20 years later — to his first "Trainspotting" both continues and amplifies the themes of the original; with its characters older, wiser and scarred by life.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 118 minutes

Based on British writer Vera Brittain's memoir about her years as a World War I nurse, this beautifully composed film vividly depicts the horrors and losses of war.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 129 minutes

An eloquent war movie that takes place far from the battlefields, “Thank You for Your Service” follows a group of young soldiers returning from Iraq to lives forever changed.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 109 minutes

A horrifying yet mesmerizing work, Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary examines the history of Indonesian genocide.

• 4 stars
• Rated NR
• 115 minutes

Set in the the world of high finance as Wall Street faces a massive financial crisis, this film is all talk — which quickly becomes weirdly fascinating, made so by the caliber of the actors talking that talk (Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt) and the supercharged intensity they bring.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 130 minutes

Throw a coma into a rom-com, and suddenly you have something else. If you’re unlucky, it’s a soap opera; if you’re lucky, it’s “The Big Sick,” a charming genre-defying film with an unexpectedly big heart.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 119 minutes

This gentle tale of a bluegrass-loving Belgian couple unapologetically explores melodrama; these characters experience big, dramatic emotions, and the movie rides on those waves.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 112 minutes

James Wan’s haunted-house saga is well-crafted, convincingly acted, surprisingly restrained and scary as hell.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 112 minutes

In this captivating debut, writer/director Marielle Heller hits exactly the right tone for a complicated balancing act: a story of a teen in 1976 San Francisco who happily enters into a sexual relationship with her mother’s boyfriend. (Alexander Skarsgard).

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 101 minutes

Brit Marling gives a remarkable, thoughtful performance as a corporate spy sent to infiltrate a group of ecoterrorists.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 116 minutes

Essentially a Midwestern "My Dinner with Andre" set on a book tour, this film showcases a remarkable performance by Jason Segel, who seems to tie on David Foster Wallace’s trademark bandanna and disappear into the character.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 105 minutes

Watching Anna Rose Holmer's debut, inspired by stories of mass hysteria, is a disorienting experience, and it’s meant to be; its eerie soundtrack suits the strange time the film depicts: that brief, vivid moment when childhood and womanhood converge.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 72 minutes

A tale of childhood that's both enchanting and devastating, Sean Baker's film introdues us to 6-year-old Moonee (the irresistible Brooklynn Prince), who lives with her mother in a run-down motel just outside Disney World.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 115 minutes

The title character of Wes Anderson's enchanting film is an art-deco dream gone to seed. It’s the quiet hero of a story that takes place in three different time periods; a trio of tales like a set of tables, each fitting under the other.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 100 minutes

You've probably never seen a movie quite like Park Chan-wook’s period drama gone mad; a lavishly colorful, beautifully-filmed-erotic-revenge-crime thriller set in 1930s Korea and based on Sarah Waters' novel about a Victorian-era pickpocket.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 144 minutes

This gripping Danish drama, starring Mads Mikkelson, is the story of a lie, and how that lie changed a man and a town.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 111 minutes

As Alan Turing, the brilliant World War II codebreaker whose life blended astonishing triumph and cruel tragedy, Benedict Cumberbatch is both self-conscious (watch the careful way Turing holds his mouth), cutting and icy-cool, with a sadness behind his characteristic smirk.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 113 minutes

Set at a convent in wintry 1945 Warsaw and based on true incidents, Anne Fontaine’s drama is a moving study of what happens to the faithful when God’s plan suddenly seems impossible to follow.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 115 minutes

An elegantly told tale of a secret love affair, between author Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and his much-younger mistress, Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones).

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 111 minutes

Lorene Scafaria's charming film, about a mother (Susan Sarandon) who interferes in her grown daughter's life, is that rarity: The characters don’t seem like types chosen from a screenwriting manual, but like people we might know, with quirks and feelings and flaws and hearts.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 100 minutes

Not a single intelligible word is spoken in Michael Dudok de Wit’s poignant animated drama “The Red Turtle,” and after a while that silence becomes companionable; you find, in this film, a restful space.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG
• 80 minutes

Based on a novel about an actual 19th-century incident in the days of the Western fur trade and directed with formidable skill by Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“Birdman”), “The Revenant” is a tale of man in a state of nature — a nature, in the words of Tennyson, “red in tooth and claw.”

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 156 minutes

Winner of the 2017 Academy Award for best foreign film, Asghar Farhadi's drama centers on a troupe of actors presenting Arthur Miller’s tragic “Death of a Salesman” in Tehran.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 125 minutes

James Ponsoldt’s “The Spectacular Now,” based on the Tim Thorp novel, hits on something few movies do: an honest, believable depiction of teenagers, in love and out.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 95 minutes

This documentary, taking place over 24 hours in the emergency room of Oakland’s public Highland Hospital, emerges as a moving portrait of people doing their jobs — and doing them well — under very difficult circumstances.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 83 minutes

Much of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s summer-breeze comedy feels familiar, but in a good way, like a comfortably rumpled beach house you’re happy to return to year after year.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 103 minutes

“The Witch,” set in Puritan New England of 1630, feels like something new in horror — which is to say it feels like something old … authentically old.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 92 minutes

An utterly charming film, set in the film industry of World War II-era London, in which Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin demonstrate a pitch-perfect example of screen chemistry.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 117 minutes

In between the sometimes over-the-top action in Martin McDonagh's ultra-dark comedy, a quiet little actors’ movie unfolds, if you listen for it. Frances McDormand is searing as a mother bent on justice for her dead daughter; Woody Harrelson is the police chief on whom she targets her rage.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 115 minutes

This whimsical documentary is about many things — art history, technology, painting technique, beauty — but ultimately it’s a beguiling study of fascination, as an inventor attempts to re-create a famous Vermeer painting.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 80 minutes

Writer-director Maren Ade has created a father-daughter story, a profoundly complicated relationship and a uniquely bracing dark comedy of unusual depth of feeling.

• 4 stars
• Rated R
• 162 minutes

Using newsreel footage, rotoscoped animation and talking-head interviews, this documentary re-creates the events surrounding the 1966 Texas Tower massacre with a remarkable you-are-there immediacy.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 82 minutes

Marion Cotillard gives a devastatingly intimate performance as a Belgian factory worker struggling to save her job.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 95 minutes

You won’t easily shake off this strange, night-blooming science-fiction tale about a beautiful woman (Scarlett Johansson) who isn’t a woman at all.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 107 minutes

This impressionist biopic about French novelist Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) unfolds like a novel: divided into numbered and titled chapters and adding up to a satisfying whole.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 138 minutes

Stephen Fry examines his complex feelings toward Wagner and his music — and part of the pleasure of this film is seeing how the composer's art transforms him.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated NR
• 89 minutes

Alex Gibney’s thoughtful, well-researched documentary about the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks saga explores a complex moral problem: When does a whistle-blower become a traitor?

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 130 minutes

This documentary about disgraced former congressman/serial tweeter Anthony Weiner is a fascinating portrait of a politician — a man who, it seems, doesn’t feel that he exists unless someone’s looking at him.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 100 minutes

Based on a Henry James story, this beautifully acted contemporary tale of a divorcing couple has a child at its center — whom both parents use as a weapon.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 98 minutes

Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River” is a murder mystery set on a snowy Native American reservation in Wyoming, but it's less interested in examining the crime than in uncovering the icicle of grief at its core.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 107 minutes

The DC Comics heroine finally gets her own movie, and it’s everything fans and moviegoers would want it to be: smart, swift, sometimes funny, occasionally dazzling and surprisingly soulful.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated PG-13
• 141 minutes

This harrowing military drama from director Kathryn Bigelow, about the capture and death of Osama bin Laden, isn’t easy viewing — but just try to look away.

• 3.5 stars
• Rated R
• 157 minutes

This charming animated film from Disney follows a spunky bunny cop and a cunning con-artist fox trying to crack a case of mysterious disappearances in a colorfully vibrant animals-only world.

• 4 stars
• Rated PG
• 108 minutes