Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
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For 977 reviews, this critic has graded:
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50% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.2 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Ann Hornaday's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 62 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 579 out of 977
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Mixed: 218 out of 977
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Negative: 180 out of 977
977
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Ann Hornaday 100
This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
When viewers are ultimately released from The Hurt Locker's exhilarating vice grip, they'll find themselves shaken, energized and, more than likely, eager to see it again. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Qualifies as the most painful, poetic and improbably beautiful film of the year. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The Princess and the Frog invite viewers to see the world as a lively, mixed-up, even confounding place, to recognize essential parts of ourselves in what we see, and to say: This is what we look like. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he's created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
See Killer of Sheep, and see it again and again. It's one of those truly rare movies that just get better and better. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
For filmgoers determined to see cinema not just as mass entertainment but as an art form, The Beaches of Agnes arrives like an exhilarating call to arms. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The result is a soaring, touching, funny and altogether buoyant movie that lives up to its title in spirit and in form. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Goodbye Solo is visually simple and stunning, especially the haunting nightscapes of Solo's perambulations. But more important, Goodbye Solo is driven by deep feeling and sensitivity. Don't miss it. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Working with his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Thanks to Marsh's sensitive storytelling, Man on Wire manages to put Petit's performance into another, more ineffable realm: What began as a caper turned into poetry, and poetry became a prayer. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Oropelled by memorable performances by mostly unknown actors. The most famous of the ensemble, Hanna Schygulla, delivers a by turns serene and shattering performance as a mother struggling with loss, conscience and the first glimmers of unexpected connection. She's only one essential and unforgettable part of a flawless whole. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Rarely has love at any age been depicted so honestly on screen. For such a fully realized portrait to be created by a 28-year-old first-time director is even more remarkable. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
This is an example of a writer and director working in perfect harness, with Reed smoothly ratcheting up the story's suspense and Greene speculating on his cardinal theme of moral ambiguity. They don't make movies like The Fallen Idol anymore, all the more reason to see it now while you can. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
In addition to being a study in great acting, this is a study in great directing. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Morgen plunges viewers completely into the anarchic, exhilarating, finally ambiguous world of 1968 America; his final stroke of genius is his choice of music, which includes a breathtaking use of Eminem's "Mosh." -
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Ann Hornaday 100
A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
What makes Milk extraordinary isn't just that it's a nuanced, stirring portrait of one of the 20th century's most pivotal figures, but that it's also a nuanced, stirring portrait of the thousands of people he energized. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
It's a funny, fearless, poignant, spectacular performance. Come to think of it, those words could well apply to the entirety of Tadpole. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The narrative is lean, the supporting performances are solid, and, perhaps most crucially, the emotional tone of the piece is spot-on. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The great joy of watching a Pixar production is how it rewards not only younger viewers but their older companions as well. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
The Social Network has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will. -
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Ann Hornaday 100
You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.- Posted Jun 9, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.- Posted Sep 22, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
Low-key, sleek and sophisticated, Drive provides the visceral pleasures of pulp without sacrificing art. It's cool and smart. Some critics might even call it European.- Posted Sep 15, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.- Posted Nov 17, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
In spirit, and sheer joie de vivre, it's everything the movie business should aspire to. Win Win exemplifies movies the way they oughtta be.- Posted Mar 24, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
A mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.- Posted May 19, 2011
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- Posted Oct 13, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece that refuses to follow the strictures of conventional cinematic structure, instead leading the audience on a circuitous journey down the myriad rabbit holes that comprise modern-day Manhattan.- Posted Apr 26, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.- Posted Dec 8, 2011
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Ann Hornaday 100
This invigoratingly fresh, optimistic film - which features the breathtaking debuts of director Dee Rees and leading lady Adepero Oduye - plunges the audience into a world that's both tough and tender, vivid and grim, drenched in poetry and music and pain and discovery.- Posted Jan 6, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
While Wright's self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic conjure comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson, he outstrips both those filmmakers in moral seriousness and maturity.- Posted Nov 15, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.- Posted Jan 10, 2013
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Ann Hornaday 100
Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.- Posted May 3, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.- Posted Apr 5, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
The Queen of Versailles turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.- Posted Jul 26, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
With grace, discretion and supreme tact, Nicks sweeps viewers to a climactic montage that wordlessly honors the best ways we care for one another. The Waiting Room bears poetic witness to an overlooked fact: America's health care system may be broken, but its people are anything but.- Posted Nov 30, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
Instead of a grand tableau vivant that lays out the great man and his great deeds like so many too-perfect pieces of waxed fruit, Spielberg brings the leader and viewers down to ground level.- Posted Nov 8, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.- Posted Nov 12, 2012
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Ann Hornaday 100
Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.- Posted Dec 20, 2012
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- Posted Jan 10, 2013
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Ann Hornaday 100
With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.- Posted May 16, 2013
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Ann Hornaday 90
Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes! -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The heart of Million Dollar Baby lies in the core relationships among Frankie, Maggie and Scrap, friendships so pure, so genuine, so authentic that it takes actors of Eastwood's, Swank's and Freeman's caliber to sell them in this otherwise cynical world. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
United 93 unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a modern-day "Battle of Algiers," with Greengrass exerting superb control of tone, structure and pace...United 93 may be the best movie I ever hated. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The performances are accomplished, but the real star of Hustle & Flow is Brewer, a playwright who has written and directed a few other movies but who is effectively making a breathtaking national debut here. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Despite all of Van Sant's narrative feints and coy protestations, the audience is left with one searing memory after seeing Last Days, and that memory is of Cobain. Was he, as Gordon's character suggests at one point, simply a rock-and-roll cliche? Or was he a visionary genius, as the name of Pitt's character implies? -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Manages to be one of the genuinely fresh discoveries of the summer, a little gem that deserves to become a big sleeper hit. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Gromit's every facial move -- every grimace, scowl, eye-roll and glance askance -- is sublime. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
A small, self-contained gem of incisive writing, superb acting and rich, expressive visuals. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Koltai is an accomplished, Oscar-nominated cinematographer (for 2000's "Malena"), and Fateless is meticulously composed and shot. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Extraordinary on many levels...because Mountain Patrol instead becomes what might be the first Chinese conservationist spaghetti western ever made. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Shot through with cheeky wit and hilarious musical numbers by the aforementioned slugs, Flushed Away features an eye-popping boat chase through London's watery nether regions, as well as the winning vocal talent of Kate Winslet, Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet. Well done! -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The news is good for Bridge to Terabithia fans. The beloved children's book has not just survived but thrived in its adaptation to the screen. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
As he has done in all his movies, from creature features such as "Mimic" to serious dramas such as "Pan's Labyrinth," del Toro creates unforgettable images, filled with color, texture, lyricism and horror. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Outstanding entertainment for little ones but just as rewarding for their adult companions. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
As much as any earnest historical drama, Secret Ballot serves as an eloquent argument for civic life, showing its human elements to be no less flawed for being so necessary. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
A wonderful thing to snuggle into, as full of heart and pep and innocence as the title character himself. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Searing dramatization of a story of remarkable courage, stamina and spirit. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Small, quiet movie that imperceptibly takes its viewers by their throats and doesn't let go -
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Ann Hornaday 90
Has Blanchett and Jones to its credit. To watch them is to take in two of the screen's greatest natural wonders. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The movie, a lyrical blend of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques, offers a bold example of the rewards of crossing boundaries -- stylistic, cultural, temporal and even commercial. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go. -
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Ann Hornaday 90
A stirring, emotionally galvanizing film, not only due to its shattering subject matter but thanks to Mullan's spot-on eye for casting and fluid, uncoercive style. -
