Night Moves

Clean, crackling, tensile, and mesmerically assured, Night Moves is a richly engrossing drama that’s aiming for the head, not the gut; a study of murky actions, fuzzy ideals, and wrong decisions for righteous reasons, offering more than what we expect and taking its time to deliver. It’s a cunning, if thin, piece of storytelling.

An Education

Bracingly perceptive and excitingly young, An Education is a distinctive story with universal appeal; a smart, moving, and accessible entry in the coming-of-age canon; and a deceptively restrained film that communicates with forthrightness and simmers with roiling emotions. The combination of an adroit cast, an economical style, and a literate script, achieves an alchemical feat: one of the best films of the year.

Blue Jasmine

Delightful, tonally sound, and uncomfortably hilarious, Blue Jasmine finds Woody Allen back in fine form after a schizophrenically inconsistent string of films that ran the gamut between amicably diverting (see: Midnight in Paris) and maddeningly sketchy (see: To Rome with Love).