Alison Willmore

Across the Spider-Verse looks incredible, even better than the groundbreaking first installment, but what’s truly impressive about it is how willing it is to entrust its storytelling to its animation.

Of the many things that make Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of World exhilarating, from its egalitarian mix of high and low references to its delightful profanity, what stands out is its willingness to acknowledge the general horror of modern existence, and then to suggest the only reasonable response is to laugh.

The film is not just a means of trying to understand if there was some better possible outcome but also a fantasy of opening up the past and slipping back inside it to see what you missed when you were there.

Showing Up is more than worth surrendering to. It’s one of Reichardt’s best — warm as one of the sunny Portland, Oregon, afternoons Lizzy’s perpetually fretting her way through and an affectionate rumination on the relationship between art and all the day-to-day stuff of life that can get in the way of making it.

Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character.

Reality is filled with the sickening tension of a thriller, but it really plays like a tragedy, given that we already know what happened to its subject next.

It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.

Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run.

In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies.

It’s a total knockout, both austere and dryly hilarious, and its quality is impossible to consider separately from its colossal lead performance.

The mechanics of Sciamma’s film are simple, but they’re realized so delicately, and with the help of such unaffected child performances, that they feel miraculous.

After Yang has the structure of a subdued mystery, though at its core it has no answers to these, or any, questions. Instead, it provides a slowly dawning and utterly devastating understanding of the hidden richness of its title character’s existence.

The marvel of Tótem is that it feels so organic though it’s clearly the result of an enormous amount of preparation and precision, the camera winding its way through crowded spaces to catch the most delicate of interactions. It overflows with love and pain, sometimes both intertwined, and it’s openhearted about death existing alongside life in a way that feels rewardingly mature, even if its protagonist is a child.

For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.

Union is a rare thing — a documentary that is undeniably political in its focus while being artful and observational in its approach.

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

The Boy and the Heron is irresistible in its dream logic, straddling the adorable (white blob creatures called Warawara that inflate like balloons) and the dark (parakeet soldiers that are on the search for fresh meat). But what makes it most compelling are the ways in which the real and the magical are equal presences.

There is something exquisitely grown-up about Both Sides of the Blade, which works its way up into a series of excruciating fights between Jean and Sara in which they talk and talk and wound one another terribly while failing to ever say what they really mean.

It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

That unnatural quality of drone footage, its ability to pull up off the ground and pivot as if you’re fiddling with Google Earth, is something Martel turns into an asset throughout the film,.

The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.

Suzume may be a less effective romance than something like Your Name — it’s tough when half of your main pairing is a piece of furniture — but that’s because its real love story is with the stuff of everyday life, making it almost unbearably inviting and worth fighting for.

Miroirs No. 3 has nothing on Phoenix, Petzold’s post–World War II masterpiece about a woman haunting her own life, but it is entrancing. The key to its unsettling pleasures is the way it acknowledges that what is happening is disturbing only if one of its characters says it is.

Villeneuve’s facility with this stuff doesn’t just come from his talent for spectacle, though there are set pieces in Dune: Part Two that aim to blow the top of your skull off.

Splitsville is a comedy that’s grounded in its characters, but also has a downright old-fashioned devotion to the visual, to the ways in which the farcical sight of four guys crammed onto a sofa can be just as capable of generating laughs as a good line.

The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.