Alissa Wilkinson

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.

The film is a beautifully empathetic work of art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Private Life is an accessible and complex portrait of two people whose ardent shared desire for a child leads them in some unconventional directions, and it’s a joy to watch whether or not you’ve shared their experience.

BlacKkKlansman isn’t wrong about the evils of white supremacy. But it’s pretty sure you, out in the audience, aren’t going to get it unless it spells out the message in blinking neon lights. And even then, the film seems to fear you might miss the point.

Janet Planet is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.

If Hollywood is going to make “now more than ever” movies, this is the way to do it: with a marvelous cast, pitch-perfect design, and a story that feels like the work of latter-day Frank Capra. The Post is an act of goodwill and faith in American institutions, but it’s also aware of how fragile those institutions are, how dependent on their participants they are for their survival, and how much is at stake when press freedom is threatened.

Zinging between humor and poignance with a lot of charm, it achieves in its most insightful moments what comedy does best: Let us laugh at the world a little, by way of learning something about ourselves.

Driveways is surprising at every turn. It’s a modest and gentle story about a boy who feels out of place, and the weak ties he forms that gradually become strong ones.

It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.

A film like Anselm is another level of preservation as well as a contemplative experience, in which the past and the future meet, in a way we can feel as much as see.

It’s radiant and loose and confident, the kind of movie that you can just tell was a blast to make, which makes it a blast to watch. As our overstuffed big-budget era starts to falter, let’s hope they start making movies like this again.

It’s a gentle story, full of tender moments, and knowing that the parents and daughter in the main cast are a family in real life increases the warmth.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker.

It’s the most finely tuned version of a murder mystery you could hope for, with joyous performances and style in spades.

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.

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

Most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter — not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.

Isle of Dogs, though carefully crafted, doesn’t have much to say — and that’s what’s frustrating about the movie. Anderson has always been one of the most stylistically distinctive American directors, but at times it’s felt as if his fussiness was a way to wallpaper over a lack of new narrative ideas. Isle of Dogs doesn’t suggest an evolution.

Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.

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.

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.

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

It’s not mere fan service; the film tries very hard to sustain interest with new characters and developments that draw on the past without being handcuffed to it, throughout its sometimes ponderous 163-minute runtime. But far too often that attempt to be interesting fails.

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.

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.

What’s most interesting about Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t the movie itself — it’s how the cause of the impending apocalypse has evolved from the first to the second film, and how that maps onto apocalyptic stories more generally.

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.

While Coco brings a lot of sweetness and light with it (and, undoubtedly, a lot of happy tears), not one story beat includes something to startle the adults in the audience into realizing something new. No movie has to do that. But Pixar once was reliably in the business of making indelible cinematic crowd pleasers — and now it feels like it’s settling into something much more routine.

Us is more intuitive than explicatory, more visceral than diagrammatic; it’s horrific in a way that hangs onto your gut when it’s all over.

While the film often feels like a slow-motion real-world horror story, it’s not without hope. For Brazil, liberty once existed. Can it exist again? And what does that mean for the rest of the world?

The world that Elliot creates is so strangely beautiful that it’s fun to look at. Plus, the end of “Memoir of a Snail” redeems its flights into tedium by giving us a reason to have watched them.

It strikes a perfect balance between being a coming-of-age story nestled in a family narrative on the one hand, and a social drama on the other. And in never sacrificing either of those two interests, it becomes a strong example of both.

Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.

The irony of My First Film is its two layers: It’s not Anger’s first film, nor is it Vita’s, but it tells the story of one that never quite made it into the world. But really, it’s a movie about learning to have compassion for your younger self, for her dreams and foibles and failures.

The joy of Glass Onion is that you can read into it, or just let it flow over you and enjoy the ride.

Yes, there are tricks of the camera and computer going on. But Tom Cruise is actually driving a motorcycle off a cliff and then plummeting down. That’s real — real enough to gasp and hold your breath and get a little shaky. It’s as much a mainstay of the movie as the mask trickery, and that subtle play with what we’re seeing, with the real and the unreal, suggests the movies might be doing this very much on purpose.

What does love really mean? Skin Deep gives an answer: that real love is an act of radical imagination, of working to understand what it feels like to be another person. In reality, we can’t just swap bodies to find out — but love beckons us to try anyhow.

The Nest isn’t a haunted house movie, per se, but it draws on some of the visual tropes of the genre. It frequently feels as if something sinister is lurking around every corner.

Lo’s construction of each person’s story grants them dignity and compassion. And their agreement at the end speaks volumes about what they saw in the film, too.

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.

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

Waves earns its grace-filled ending by asking us to live alongside a trial by fire. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: You walk out with a weary, cleansed soul.

What really makes Wake Up Dead Man work is that Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks.

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.

That it may not be to everyone’s taste, or to yours, feels almost besides the point. When an artist takes a swing this colossal and stays true to their vision in every way, the resulting work deserves respect, and is always worth seeing.

Knock Down the House is the rare documentary about today’s American political landscape that might make you shed happy tears.

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.

While writer-director Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 is undeniably a good time at the movies for the whole family, it’s the rare superhero movie that may have too many ideas knocking around in its noggin, none of which seem terribly coherent. And that, in the end, makes the film less than it clearly wants to be.

Ad Astra is beautiful, contemplative, and loaded with meaning — not an action movie, but one that leaves you with plenty to ponder.

Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.

With In the Blink of an Eye, Stanton is juggling quite a bit, including many landscapes to create and a lot of imagination for exploration. While the visuals are not exactly eye-popping, the movie is plenty serviceable.

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

We rarely get to see Sandler do this kind of straight-faced comedy, and he's so good in The Meyerowitz Stories that he deserves the chance to do more.

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.

Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing.

There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look.

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 Other Side of the Wind is best viewed as a meta-drama about Welles, laced with a barbed wit.

It’s a very good movie, tight and layered and complex. And though it could feel chilly — and I understand that reaction — I found it quite moving.

It’s a beautiful and haunting film, and another examination of what makes us human from Garland.

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.

Of course, you could argue that any documentary tells its story as much with what it omits as with what it includes. But by letting the news footage, speech clips and documents “speak,” the transformation of the rhetoric is undeniable, as are some of the causes. The tale is not flattering, but it is illuminating.

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.

There are no easy answers, but Simon Lereng Wilmont’s careful camerawork and clear rapport with the children lead to uncommonly candid footage and, occasionally, a sense of hope.

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

Copa 71 is engrossing, but it struck me that like another documentary about a forgotten moment in history — the Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul” (2021) — this movie reveals the power of recording history for future generations.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a tall tale about death, a murder ballad about us, trapped in a universe that is mostly unreasonable and nonsensical. And at the end of the journey we’re left laughing through the lump in our throat.

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.

It’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020.

Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.

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.

Coppola’s talent is in taking this story — much harder-edged when translated to Versailles — and giving it the rosy sheen of a girl’s memory, of feeling the intensity of a star’s rays on her so keenly that there’s nothing to do but bask in it, at least for a while.

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.

By the time the breathtaking final moment arrives, we have learned, a little better, how to really look at the world, as a lover of both beauty and the strange bits of ourselves that make us really human.

It takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart.

There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.

Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.

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.

In resisting the urge to paint its subject as a saint, Roadrunner gives us something better: a human.

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.

Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region.

Damsel is evidence that studios still don’t realize that a “strong female lead” is not enough to make a movie good. More is required: a strong set of supporting characters, a strong plot, a strong sense of what makes a movie interesting to an audience.

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.

A rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.

Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters.

Careening from office comedy to something like horror, Sorry to Bother You is weird and funny and unsettling, and not quite like anything I’ve seen before.

The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves.