Alissa Wilkinson

To watch Tár properly requires mental recursion. The surface of each scene is perfectly legible, but the full import of what you’re watching is elusive till the end of the scene, or even the sequence. The end of the film recasts everything that’s come before it. It’s like Kierkegaard’s old saw, embodied: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just “important” or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.

“2000 Meters” is bruisingly intimate nonfiction.

Its connective tissue is an idea, an exploration, and it’s designed to be more absorbed than understood. But for the patient audience, it’s richly illuminating.

The movie captures the spirit of the novel well. It’s suspenseful, but it’s not a thriller; there are elements of obsession and eroticism, but they never quite go where you expect. The end is deeply ambiguous, neither punishing nor condoning its characters’ behavior. It simply asks us to sit with them — to pay them the respect of attention, and learn something about ourselves in the process.

Dick Johnson Is Dead suggests that learning to confront reminders of death, to even conjure them for yourself and examine them closely, takes some of the sting out of death and replaces it with love. To love someone is to accept that one day, death will part the two of you. The pain of knowing that is built into the act of loving. But we go on loving anyway.

It’s a remarkable addition to the small but growing canon of American films that aren’t afraid to stare straight into an abyss with all of the implications — moral, ethical, political, and religious — that are required for this moment in our history. First Reformed is a confounding stunner of a movie and richly deserves our full, serious attention.

The Souvenir clearly stands out as one of the year’s best films: pointedly personal art that somehow manages, in its specificity, to hit on something universal.

This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.

For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience. But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation.

Lady Bird is the rare movie that manages to be affectionate, entertaining, hilarious, witty, and confident; it’s one of the best films of 2017, and certainly my favorite.

There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But Daughters is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality.

Emotional and lyrical, All of Us Strangers is a meditation on what it means to really be a human.

Terrific concert documentary...The film that resulted — a roughly though not strictly chronological document of the much-publicized event — is an outstanding documentary, a joyful musical experience and a playful artifact of an era. [2019]

Watching Lovers Rock is like being at the party at which the film takes place.

Showing Up is a knowing nod at everyone who finds making creative work a nearly impossible task amid the mundane distractions of ordinary life.

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.

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

In a phenomenological way, The Taste of Things captures the joy of variety injected into mere existence: savory and sweet, hot and sour, juice and cream and astringency are not required for pure subsistence, but the rich range of taste we have created in our daily meals says something about human longings not easily put into words.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer barely qualifies as a biopic, at least not the thudding Hollywood variety. Instead it’s a movie — a masterful one, among his best — investigating the nature of power: how it is created, how it is kept in balance, and how it leads people into murky quandaries that refuse simplistic answers.

Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.

The result of all this careful questioning is stunning. To say Scorsese has made a great movie is to announce that water is wet, but there’s a kind of unfolding grief to Killers’ tone, a steady feeling of dread and sorrow, that only works in the hands of a master. You aren’t told how to feel so much as you’re made to feel it and then, in the end, be walloped with indignance over what happened to the story of the murders and many stories like them.

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

The film, which is structured as a series of set pieces that Alana and Gary stumble into and out of, is far too strange and specific and sometimes cringey to simply be made up, even by someone with as fertile an imagination as Anderson.

It summons an erotic orientation toward the world with all its power, and then pours it onto the audience. It is, undoubtedly, Guadagnino’s masterpiece.

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 gorgeous film, and Chou’s camera moves in a way that frames and heightens Freddie’s emotion. This is a mood piece, at times one with almost abstract aims, and it’s a joy to be swept away in it.

Emotional complexity, the manifold feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us to do anything like that.

Its subject — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — couldn’t be more consequential, and its approach, which includes a directorial team of two Israelis and two Palestinians, feels genuinely daring and bold.

What’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable.

In Asteroid City, Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble.

Glazer – whose previous film was the brilliantly unsettling Under the Skin – replicates the characters' internal distance through the movie's images and sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme.

An exquisite debut feature.

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.

A Ghost Story isn’t all sorrow and grief. There’s a kind of deadpan humor throughout — the sheet ghost is comical, and there’s no getting around it — that complicates the film and rewards a rewatch.

One of 2021’s best movies.

Its rough-hewn, side-glancing characters are full of secrets and unspoken intentions, thinking thoughts it didn’t even occur to you to imagine are in their heads. It’s a gothic thriller wrapped in a Western. It’s outstanding.

In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.

It’s not just a blast to watch — and it truly is a blast. It’s another tiny step in reclaiming the full history of America, expanding the context of our present not just for people who remember the past, but people who never knew about it in the first place. We’re fools if we don’t think burying the era-changing import of events like these is as much a part of American history as the events themselves — and movies like Summer of Soul fight back bringing the past vibrantly to life.

It’s an altogether extraordinary film, one I’ve thought about often since I first saw it, and I’m delighted that it’s playing in theaters — the immersive nature of the sounds, music and landscapes are worth experiencing with the full concentration a cinema affords.

I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful.

I’m Still Here does not present as a simple polemic about a historical and political situation, and that’s the secret to its global appeal. It’s also a moving portrait of how politics disrupts and reshapes the domestic sphere, and how solidarity, community and love are the only viable path toward living in tragedy. And it warns us to mistrust anyone who tries to erase or rewrite the past.

In letting them retell those stories their way, and asking us to watch, Procession dares its audience to not look away. It calls us, in other words, to join the healing community, not just with vague aspirations but with our actual eyes. To play our roles as audience members and then take what we learn and bring it to others.

It’s hard to imagine Past Lives not being one of 2023’s most talked-about films, and it richly deserves the honor.

It’s hard to imagine anyone but Edgerton in this role. Though he’s a prolific actor, he’s still underestimated; he’s at his most superb when his manner is gentle, and he’s capable of doing so much with so little.

By the end, it seems telling his story — saying it out loud in a safe space, at last — may have helped Amin heal a bit more. Perhaps sharing it with audiences opens the same space for others, too.

The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.

Parasite is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality.

Marriage Story sees the end of a marriage as cause for both mourning and bittersweet comedy. The relationship is changing, but not ending. And the evolution is something to behold. To get a story like this right requires a sense of the comical and the absurd along with the devastating — and Marriage Story delivers.

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.

It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps.

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.

The movie lingers in the mind and sits like a lump in the soul. And it’s deliciously twisted along the way. Hereditary has nightmare fodder to spare, and nobody, in the end, gets to escape.

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.

Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place.

What makes The Royal Hotel brilliant, besides its heart-pounding performances, is how it illuminates the many ways in which men acting in socially acceptable, ordinary ways — playful catcalling, persistent passes, flexing power to be impressive — forms its own kind of horror house of mirrors in which it’s impossible to tell what’s truly sinister and what’s just someone acting like a guy they saw once in a Western.

Not only is The Sheep Detectives delightful, but it’s funny and emotionally complex and, dare I say, unusually deferential toward the noble sheep, frequently cast as brain-dead losers in cinema’s barnyards (Shaun notwithstanding).

The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks us to enter a family’s story, but also to acknowledge that we are part of it. We’re extras in the background, no matter how far away we are. For Rasoulof, the world he’s created is far from theoretical. The consequences have been, too.

Leave No Trace is the story of a bond between a teenage daughter and her veteran father, but in the background is another kind of bond, something that keeps the world from spinning apart. That’s Granik’s subject, and Leave No Trace explores it simply but unforgettably.

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

Visages, Villages is quite a moving film, and speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life.

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.

Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.

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.

Mother! is a mad fantasia of fire and water and insanity, a spinning, flaming plume that is not here to make you like it, though it wouldn’t mind if you decided to just bow down in worship.

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

The End is about one version of the end of the world, and about how the people who could have prevented it might feel when they get there. But to watch it is to think about yourself, at least if you have a conscience, and to ponder the sort of cognitive dissonance you live with every day.

Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word.

The film boasts a stellar cast led by Letitia Wright (Black Panther), who plays Altheia Jones-LeCointe, the leader of the British Black Panther movement.

The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.

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.

What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.

It’s a work of unspeakable beauty, one that doesn’t leave you when the film ends, and its deceptively simple focus on a love story can’t mask its cinematic achievement.

Dunkirk wants us to sense what made this moment so pivotal without reducing it to an individual tale. And at that, it succeeds richly.

In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, The Old Oak serves up something harder: a meditation on hope.

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.

Good One is the writer and director India Donaldson’s feature debut, and an astounding one, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience.

Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature.

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.

It’s funny and beautiful and lively.

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.

There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.

Pham manages to float existential and spiritual questions into Thien’s consciousness and ours without trying to offer solutions, at least in language.

American Factory tackles the challenges of globalization with much more depth and nuance than most reporting on the topic, precisely because it steps back to watch a story unfold over time and resists easy generalizations. It’s both soberly instructive and fascinating.

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.

Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly.

It’s a pensive meditation in an era of displacement, even if the film never tries to make a big point. The mood is palpable, and the meditation legible, even if Winnipeg and Iranian cinema are to you as remote as a chilly winter moon.

It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.

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.

It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick.

The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.

Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day. It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it. But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention.

The movie has the maturity of an older man’s perspective, an eye cast backward on a full life. It is lively and wry and very funny, but at times it also feels like a confession, a plea for grace, not just from its protagonist but from the filmmaker himself.

There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that’s short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.

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.

The Big Sick feels authentic because it isn’t afraid of complexity.