Alissa Wilkinson

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.

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.

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.