Alissa Wilkinson

Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge.

Pay attention to the shadows in Perfect Days. Pay attention also to the trees, to the ways Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) looks at them. They’re as much a character in the story as he is.

Morris’s film is less a takedown of its subject, and more a Rorschach test for its viewers. What you’ll see is precisely what you’re primed to see — and that, not Bannon’s ideas themselves, is the point.

Where the film really sings — aside from its often darkly funny writing and surprisingly thrilling take on what could have been a dull bureaucratic scandal — is in tracing the effects of the pressures placed on administrators and faculty.

In the end, Great Absence contains the grace that arises from a great struggle.

The Old Man & the Gun — which, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is based on real characters — is a natural fit for both star and director, and in Lowery’s hands, it feels like both an homage to the past and a gentle step toward the future.

The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.

War for the Planet of the Apes is the rare blockbuster that’s both entertaining and full of complexity.

This isn’t just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness. Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.

Judas and the Black Messiah is galvanizing, with an intoxicating energy that makes the story beats land with a jolt.

Though Seeds is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.

Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk is not just a document of a life and a hope extinguished. It is also the best way to hear from Hassouna. And it’s a film about crossing borders; we get to see just a little of what she saw.

Eileen is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.

It’s a mesmerizing, fascinating story that also feels like an attempt, on Tan’s part, to reclaim the film from Cardona, putting it back in the hands of its rightful owners: herself and her friends. In that way, the new Shirkers is a kind of punk feminist project — a deeply personal, fabulously engrossing, visually assured bit of first-person creative nonfiction filmmaking.

The film moves slowly at times, and that’s entirely on purpose. Cinema is primarily a visual medium, and Dune provides a terrific opportunity to lean in and experience what that really means.

I have rarely enjoyed watching two actors’ rapport the way I loved watching McKellen and Coel; it could have gone on forever and not been long enough.

Education becomes a portrait of a community disappointed by the country they came to with eagerness — and determined to make something of themselves, and their culture, in spite of it.

Art for Everybody — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters.

Goldman is at the center, and Worthalter gives a hypnotizing performance.

For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering.

It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.

Apolonia, Apolonia is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet.

The Death of Stalin is Iannucci’s most complex and almost nihilistic rendering of what politics is: A team of bumbling and weak-minded people who lack any real conviction other than a desire for power and position.

It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.

The break between Colm and Pádraic works on its own terms, but it’s also a startlingly violent fight between men who are basically brothers, a fight that has a logic to it and yet is heartbreaking precisely because of the depth of history between them. It’s the conflict in microcosm.

Weeks after I saw it, I cannot quite decide if Babylon is a good film. But I’m entranced, and moved, and frustrated, and transported — which is what Hollywood has built its business on accomplishing from the very beginning.

The only thing that can conquer fear is love, and Wolfwalkers loves its characters, their world, and the stunning beauty of human life. But most of all, it loves the truth that is buried within the myth.

Soul wasn’t made for a world that’s just gone through the nightmares of 2020, but coming out at the end of this harrowing year, it couldn’t feel more poignant. It’s funny, and it’s imaginative, but it’s also just very, very real.

By the end, Another Round is a truly wonderful movie about trying to come to grips with life, anchored by terrific performances, infectious music, and a real understanding of the humming discontentment that all adults must learn to navigate in their own ways. It’s the sort of comedy fused with tragedy that may just best represent what life really is: a melancholy, glorious, slightly off-kilter dance.

DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.

The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America.

The result is cool, elegant, and devastating, a film as tightly woven and plaintive as the source novel itself. It’s an artifact of its time, both 1929 and in 2021, when the questions around identity have morphed and shifted but are still relevant as ever.

Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.

This film invites us into Rogers’ philosophy that adults would be better people if they tried to remember what it was like to be children. It gently coaxes the audience to filter some very adult emotions through the familiar characters and songs and stories of Rogers’ world. The result is unexpected and unlike any film of its kind, and a testimony to Rogers’ enduring influence, too.

It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.

As a film, The Beguiled is thrilling, delicious, wicked fun.

By the end, Holding Back the Tide feels like both an elegy and a prophecy, looking toward both past and future to imagine what kind of possibilities oysters represent.

In About Dry Grasses, Ceylan is asking a vital question of himself as well as the audience: What does it mean to be engaged in the world? And if you choose to back away and watch, rather than become involved, is it self-protection, superiority or just cowardice?

The Arc of Oblivion is a documentary, which means it captures something about life right now, archiving it for the future. But Cheney is also exploring the meaning of archiving itself.

Art Talent Show is itself provocative but also hilarious, both a sendup and a tribute to the complexity of contemporary art.

Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us.

You get the sense watching Didi that this is a bit of an apology from Wang to his own mother for not seeing her as a real person when he was young. But that isn’t all it is: It’s a funny, heartfelt movie, tapping into the audience’s latent memories as well as our great relief at no longer being 13.

As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.

The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.

There’s horror and gaslighting and high-on-helium-style comedy and bits of Freud scattered about; in essence, it’s a pile of things that don’t add up to any one thing but do leave you feeling both elated and creeped out.

It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral.

Each small humiliation, taken alone, will raise your blood pressure a little. But put them all together, and more seismic reverberations may finally rattle a society to its core.

The way to enjoy Blue Moon — and I think it’s terrifically enjoyable, despite the bright thread of melancholy running down the middle — is to settle into the theatricality, especially Hawke’s performance.

The film works on two levels: one is about the massacre; the other is about the psychology employed not only by perpetrators, but by the powerful forces that back them up.

[Arlyck’s] doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.

It is a sober, clear-eyed, and haunting work of art.

Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.

Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society, and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide, is a bold move, and The Teachers’ Lounge pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller.

It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.

Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.

If you can adjust to the idea that you’re not meant to sympathize with anyone, Lady Macbeth is quite a film.

The best part of Logan Lucky is that from the get-go you know you’re in confident hands, and whatever’s about to happen, it’s going to be great.

It’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

Paint Me a Road Out Of Here is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life.

South Mountain suggests that the moments that break us can also give us the space and excuse to grow and re-mold ourselves in new ways. There’s joy in those broken spaces.

The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.

The combative camaraderie that Pink and Kinzinger demonstrate respects both of them as humans — without softening their stances one bit. I hope to see more films like this one in the years to come.

Del Toro always renders his films’ social critiques in fantastical and imaginative images, and The Shape of Water is among his best, with a creature that’s both fully reptilian and strangely human.

The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive.

It’s a subversive and powerful way to retell the Bonnie and Clyde myth for a new era — but also to reexamine what that myth has meant (something that Thelma and Louise’s feminist retelling did as well).

This new Emma doesn’t play too fast and loose with the story or its most familiar beats, but it digs out the absurdities of being wealthy (or adjacent to wealth) around the turn of the 19th century — the affectations, the frills that cover up the crudeness of real life, and above all, the vast, unmitigated boredom.

The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters.

It’s a compelling history, one that’s especially vital in a time when irony and satire can be hard to pin down. Oliphant is the vehicle for the story, but there’s a bigger point here: that American politics, in particular, are built on a rich heritage of protest, of challenging authority, and that cartooning has been a part of that from the start.

It’s a useful framework for understanding leaders around the world, and Baranov is the ideal cipher, someone who intimately understands how easily people’s minds are swayed and molded.

Occasionally the movie feels like it’s lost its direction, stuffing a little too much into its story and deflating the ferocity of its central metaphor. But there’s a great sense of humor in Tiger Stripes, particularly in Zairizal’s impish performance, and the swing between fear and hilarity make for an engrossing ride.

The movie's arguments and implications for policy are a matter of life and death, and yet it’s the images that stayed with me after 13th.

Surprisingly, the film goes much further than expected. Streaming services are loaded with documentaries about scammy internet-era companies, but “MoviePass, MovieCrash” finds the barely told story in all the juicy facts.

It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope, but pays off beautifully.

Deaf President Now! skillfully draws the lines for all viewers. It’s not just a story about a moment in history: It’s also about the ways the movement for deaf education led to the broader disability rights arguments, and how everyone’s rights depend on everyone else’s.

It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.

The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.

Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.

There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.

We’re drawn into their world, and that’s what makes the “Youth” movies so appealing: the takes are very long, and we get to dwell inside the frame.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is mysterious and elegiac, a tale of warning about a collapsing ecosystem and about deep family wounds.

Every performance in this movie acknowledges that while tragedy is what prompted the film’s events, its contours, characters, and conversations are pure, inky black comedy. Absurdity makes for good humor, and the screwed-up world in which these characters live is nothing if not absurd.

A quintessentially Aardman-esque stew of slapstick, homage, and wordplay so wry it barely (but always) misses being groan-worthy, Early Man is a gentle and modest reflection on how we have, from the very beginning, always needed to treat one another with kindness in order to survive.

There are many obvious reasons why Red, White and Blue feels timely, but perhaps the greatest one is that it depicts the tricky dynamics Leroy experiences among his superiors.

By its enigmatic end, Suspiria is troubling and grim and yet strangely mirthful, having opened wounds without much interest in closing them. This is not a film you untangle; it’s a movie you feel. That will drive some mad. For others, it will feel something like ecstasy.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise.

The film has the feel of theater, focusing on conversation and subtle power dynamics rather than a lot of movement and action. But some nimble staging and stunning performances from all four of its lead actors make One Night in Miami pulse with energy.

What might be best about I Am Greta is a related theme woven throughout the film. She speaks to the camera frequently, frankly, and without embarrassment about her experience of having Asperger syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder she refreshingly sees as a positive rather than a negative.

This is what The Plague does best: Its storytelling inhabits a world so heated and confusing to its characters — that is, burgeoning adolescence — that it’s sometimes unclear whether things are actually happening or just in Ben’s head.

The movie gets dangerously close to being overwrought. But Ronan’s restraint keeps it truthful, even when she’s screaming, or crying, or blacking out. In the end, it mostly aches, and aches, and aches.

Some scenes are remarkably intimate — Nikola in his house on a stormy night drying off the stork, who falls asleep on his shoulder — and some are sweeping, which makes it an amazing portrait of a place on many scales.

The film’s revelations are two-pronged: They uncover much about the Hasidic community, while also more broadly exposing how insular groups keep people in and everyone else out. It’s hard to leave, even when staying is impossible too.

It’s surprisingly moving, more a testament to the human drive toward community and connection in even the most unexpected of spaces.

It might be the most perfect Hollywood summer blockbuster ever made. Not the best, mind you.

A Quiet Place is the best kind of horror movie. It toys with how we hear the world around us, in ways that are startling and creative and tense.

Elegiac and lovingly wrought, If Beale Street Could Talk is darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it first was told.

Directed by Natalia Almada and scored by the Kronos Quartet, the film feels a little symphonic, a mesmerizing exploration of how technology is transforming the ways we relate to the natural world.

It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable. And it feels real and lived-in, right to the bone.

Marwencol brings you into Hogancamp’s world as a guest, and as his story slowly unfolds, you come to understand what these stories really mean to him and to his mental health. It’s a quiet, extraordinary film.