The real star in La La Land is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the Singin’ in the Rain era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave…while commenting on them from the sidelines.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.

But this is also his funniest, nimblest picture: There are long stretches in it that could pass for a comedy.

The screenplay’s enigmatic nature holds one’s interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.

Sometimes, the simplest, smallest things require the greatest courage. Moonlight is Miami’s first bonafide movie masterpiece.

We know Cathy is in pain — we just do, from Manville’s tender, nuanced, wry performance — but such is her warmth she must attend to everyone else before getting round to herself.