Alonso Duralde

It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.

This small package stands alongside the exemplary feature-length work in one of this generation’s foremost filmographies.

Hardy might be past needing a star-making performance, but this is the kind of work that raises him to highest echelon of actors working in film today. He and Knight remind us that artists can astonish with the simplest of methods.

It’s particularly resonant, packed with emotion and insight that will move the director’s admirers (who should consider watching it alongside their own children) and probably garner her some new ones.

Whether it's the closest you'll get to the beach this year, or you have to tear yourself away from the dunes to enjoy it, it's an essential part of any movie-lover's summer.

Advocacy meets suspense in Welcome to Chechnya, a chilling examination of both the brutality that the Chechen LGBT community is forced to face on a daily basis and the difficulty of leaving the country for peace and safety.

You don't have to like punk rock to fall in love with We Are the Best!; if a more joyous film comes along in 2014, then it's a good year indeed.

First love is as much about hesitancy as it is about exuberance – maybe even more so – and Ivory and Guadagnino perfectly capture that sweet turmoil, aided by a gifted ensemble. This isn’t just an instant LGBT classic; this is one of the great movie love stories, for audiences of all stripes.

In an era in which sentimentality is a seasoning that filmmakers either shun entirely or employ with too heavy a hand, Gerwig crafts a work about love and family and devotion and empathy that is moving without being manipulative. This is a Little Women for the ages.

As he has throughout his career, from “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” to the lovely “Bernie” to the “Before” trilogy, Linklater proves himself as a filmmaker unconcerned with flash and dazzle but thoroughly compassionate and empathetic to a wide range of characters.

The film rides upon the shoulders of first-timers Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), and they’re both thoroughly engaging.

As with Lanthimos’ previous films, Poor Things never allows viewers to get too comfortable or too acclimated to their surroundings; it’s a film that’s constantly throwing set pieces and absurdist humor and over-the-top outfits at the audience, but the effect is exhilarating rather than enervating.

Grandma is both smart and sweet, mature and bawdy, knowing its characters’ flaws yet open to the possibilities of people acting upon their best instincts. It is without a doubt one of the year’s best films.

Nolan has crafted a film that’s sensational in every sense of the word; it aims for both the heart and the head, to be sure, but arrives there via the central nervous system.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers.

Writer-director Tobias Lindholm knows how to keep a human perspective in his storytelling, no matter how outsized the drama or the dilemmas facing his characters.

Jones and Murray (who previously teamed on Coppola’s “A Very Murray Christmas” special) achieve the kind of effortless rapport that spawns “I want them to go solve mysteries” memes, and the key ingredient of that chemistry is that Jones never allows Murray to steal the show.

If good intentions or even pragmatism aren’t enough to make the wealthy and powerful think about income inequality, New Order suggests, there’s always fear.

Both haunting and sweeping, Carol represents another masterwork from one of this generation’s great filmmakers.

It’s an exciting ride, but with a wallop of genuine feeling underneath that makes it one of this year’s best films.

It’s a consistently powerful ensemble, with Wright reminding us yet again that she has that indefinable something that makes a character actress a movie star.

This is a movie that’s rife with characters, with incidents, with ideas, with history, and as such, it will benefit from multiple viewings. But even after the first watch, The Irishman hits hard, and it’s a reminder that nearly 30 years after “GoodFellas,” Martin Scorsese still has fascinating mob tales to tell, and fascinating ways to tell them.

Spotlight is that rare journalistic procedural that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as “All the President’s Men,” and while the movie never glamorizes or makes saints of its hard-working newsgatherers, it does stand as a reminder of the power and importance of a free press, particularly in ferreting out local corruption and malfeasance.

Babygirl is the rare adult drama that understands that complicated characters can be likable, even if their behavior is sometimes decidedly unlikable; it addresses power and gender dynamics in ways that avoid easy, post-#metoo buzzwords; and it’s going to lead to some really interesting post-screening date-night discussions.

It handles real-life issues from a place of real compassion and understanding without reducing its characters to mere metaphor.

Gerwig and Baumbach come out on the side of the power of the imagination but never discount the criticisms of this iconic American object. What the film does best, perhaps, is to understand and explain why people make up worlds, be they real systems of oppression or imaginary playsets.

Their Finest delivers in a way that would please the Ministry of Information: it’s rousing and emotional, there are laughs and tears, and it portrays people trying and, mostly, succeeding at being their best selves in the service of their country.

Unlike the “memberberries” school of nostalgia that can reduce itself to “I had that lunch box!” Linklater gets granular and specific (and thus universal) about his memories and his perceptions of the world at that time.

The Sisters Brothers gallops on screen with a lot of ambitions, and it fulfills them all. It’s a sprawling Western that’s also an intimate character piece; it has moments of wit but also devastating tragedy; it delves into larger themes like the impact of fathers upon sons, and how greed and industrialization lead to environmental devastation, and yet it offers the hope of redemption.

There’s something here for lovers of all kinds of movies — even silents and musicals — but the director transcends mere pastiche to craft a work that feels like the product of our collective film-going subconscious.

Pixar could easily retire this series with a clean sweep of films that have been lovely to look at and moving and funny to watch. But if they can maintain this level of wonderful, keep ‘em coming.

Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny spin intrigues, break hearts and flirt with scandal just as effectively in the 1790s setting of “Love” as they did in “Disco,” which took place in the early 1980s.

Gerwig has an eye for every step of this character’s journey, and in so doing, sets out on her own path toward what promises to be an exciting directorial career.

Where Fury Road stands apart from so much of today’s action cinema is that the human element remains front and center.

Seligman and Sennott, reteaming after Shiva Baby, clearly know the beats and tropes of the teen comedy while taking every opportunity to subvert the formula. Bottoms always opts for the weirdest choices and least expected outcomes.

McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons capture that sense that the children of immigrants often have of living with one foot in their adopted country and one in their parents’ homeland.

Is God Is shrewdly combines its genre thrills — it’s a violent road trip of murder and revenge — with arthouse aesthetics and thought-provoking writing, which gives Aleshea Harris a career path that’s as hard to predict as Racine and Anaia’s literal one. But I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Fast and funny, filled with memorable characters, and able to balance slapstick and violence without spilling too far in either direction, this frenetic R-rated farce is that rare comic gem that lands on all the spaces without ever going to jail.

Alfonso Cuarón has created a heartfelt masterpiece of mood and nostalgia, one that reminds us that his gifts as a storyteller and an interpreter of the human experience are not dictated by scale of production.

It’s powerful, provocative and devastating, blending the incisive power of dramatic emotion with the immediacy of the evening news.

Wild Tales represents the work of an exceedingly skillful storyteller.

An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is as much about the director’s love of arch humor, fourth-wall shattering, and aggressive art direction as it a redemption saga about a rich man who finds purpose in his life.

The only agenda of this scruffy and urbane comedy, about a young comic contemplating abortion, is to be true and funny.

Like so many memorable yet hard-to-describe movies, Why Don't You Play in Hell? takes a ridiculous concept and commits to it fully. You might laugh with surprise or shriek in horror — both, most likely — but you certainly won't dismiss it.

The characters in The Whistlers turn language into music; Porumboiu does something very similar with criminality and corruption.

Farce and tragedy, the personal and the political, revolutionaries and the establishment, the intimate and the epic, character study and zeitgeist metaphor — opposing forces clash thematically, aesthetically, and brilliantly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and audacious One Battle After Another.

Assayas clearly loves actresses — their spontaneity and their self-doubt, and the mercurial way they can switch from one to the other — and Clouds of Sils Maria offers both a compassionate exploration of their lives and a powerful showcase for three of them to do some of their best work to date.

The pacing, the performances (Albert Brooks is a stand-out as Abel's lawyer), and every facet of the production serves the story and the film's larger ideas.

The chasm of the wealth gap and the slow destruction of the middle class should matter to us all, and films like Two Days, One Night remind us of the human faces affected by corporate greed.

There are plenty of laughs — and nothing that goes over a kid’s head to an adult funny bone is smutty or smarmy — and the sentiment never feels strained or artificial.

The buoyancy and electricity of Give Me Future will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there’s a good beat, and you can dance to it.

The musical is as malleable and eclectic a genre as any other, and Chazelle reminds us how effectively it can be applied to intimate moments as well as huge ones.

It’s bright and witty and packed with laughs, but those laughs stem from real empathy and understanding of its characters.

It’s a slower burn than those other two “Small Axe” entries, but it builds to a final scene between Boyega and Toussaint that’s quiet but shattering.

Ferrari emerges as that rarest of films: the complex, complicated biopic. Like his subject, Mann appreciates beauty and power while never forgetting that beauty can wither and power can destroy; within that matrix of messy contradictions, he creates haunting drama.

Delicate and restrained, the film offers the messages of redemption and renewal we so often crave from a Christmas movie without wrapping its themes and characters in tinsel.

Spielberg and Kushner clearly revere that history, but they’re also not intimidated by it; there are any number of instances where viewers can point to this song placement or that bit of character backstory as a new idea that the two have brought to the property, but this is a take on “West Side Story” that’s both reverent and exciting.

Kore-eda’s first film made outside his native Japan, it’s a fascinating exploration of the fallibility of memory and of how the truths we tell ourselves so frequently outweigh an empirical certainty.

Between the camerawork and the subtle performances, Lizzie could very easily have been a silent film while still telling its story as effectively. But Kass’ dialogue is terrific.

Luca is sweet and affecting, capturing the bond that strangers can build over a summer, and how that friendship can endure. And like its shape-shifting protagonists, it’s got plenty going on beneath the surface.

Take Me to the River isn’t a horror movie, but then it’s not not a horror movie, either. It’s a slowly tightening vise, all about suspicion and hostility and resentments and what people aren’t talking about when they talk to each other. A stunning debut feature from writer-director Matt Sobel, Take Me to the River is Polanski, with cicadas.

If Personal Shopper doesn’t spell everything out for its viewers, it’s no more accommodating to Maureen; she, like us, must use her skills to intuit what’s happening around her and what the future will hold. It’s a captivating swirl for all involved.

Even people who felt nervous about stepping into a bathtub after “Jaws” might find themselves giving these denizens of the deep the benefit of the doubt, thanks both to Taylor’s decades of advocacy and Aitken’s moving portrait of grace and compassion in and out of the water.

The director has wisely assembled an ensemble of performers who know how to handle a long take; this will certainly rank among Keaton's career highlights — in a role that allows him to completely dump out his paintbox and show a vast range of emotion — but everyone shines.

Vinterberg and Lindholm take a substantive look at substance abuse, placing it in character context and avoiding dramatic hysterics. Another Round is a film of more quiet desperation and a more thoughtful morality, and it goes down with a kick.

Even as its lead character endures physical and psychological torment at the hands of authorities, the film is very much of a piece with the ebullience of “Small Axe,” as the ongoing themes of community, music and defiance play a huge role in the story.

This new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.

Jordan Peele has made an extraordinary leap in genre here, and he’s also crafted a horror film that has more blistering observations about race than half a dozen well-intentioned Oscar-bait dramas.

It’s a daring mix of genres, but it works, as though Noah Baumbach had been called in to do a rewrite on “How to Steal a Million.” Steven Knight wrote and directed one of the best (“Locke”) and worst (“Serenity”) films of the last decade, but when he is good, he is very, very good, and his skillful handing of relationships and claustrophobia and corporate-speak is matched by Liman’s ability to bring all of this to fruition.

You don’t have to love De Palma’s movies to find De Palma a fascinating look at a vital period of American film history, through the eyes of a controversial artist.

The Father is an unsettling film, but it’s also a compassionate one; family members of those suffering with dementia can turn to it for an empathetic portrait of how that disorientation must feel on the inside. It’s one of the most disturbing films in recent memory, but it’s both understanding and unforgettable.

Violent Night is one of the Yuletide season’s most delightful surprises, not just for what it gets right but also for the many ways the whole production could have gone very, very wrong.

Gurrola and Alzati throw themselves into their performances, completely unafraid to explore the full range of physical and emotional characteristics of the people they’re playing.

Perhaps most importantly, not only does the film stress the importance of using math and physics and botany and chemistry to solve problems, but it also makes a plot based on scientific inquiry and audacity just as exciting and even more unpredictable as the movies’ usual brand of problem-solving, the kind that involves punching everyone and then blowing everything up.

Star and co-writer Billy Eichner spins a lot of plates here, crafting a hilarious and heartfelt film that also acknowledges the challenging and often hidden history of queer people in American society.

It’s a film that hits hard, but it also nails its targets with precision.

This is an intelligently made film about an intelligent woman, but it’s also emotionally engaging.

If The Boy and the Heron does wind up being his farewell to cinema, Miyazaki will be leaving behind a beacon of encouragement, a guidepost to remind the world that even when all seems lost, courage and compassion can forge a new path.

This isn’t a story of rock music and stage theatrics; it’s about the woman who waited, in a home she was forbidden to leave, for the musician to come and deliver the love he promised. And it’s about the day she decided to stop waiting for it.

No movie is going to fix the world, but films like I Am Not Your Negro demand accountability from its audience, both on a personal level and as a community of human beings.

Cooper and Lady Gaga are dynamite together; this is a story that lives and dies by the central relationship and the instant chemistry that must blossom between them, and these two have it in spades.

Whiplash redefines the teacher movie (to say nothing of the young-musician movie) with a brutal energy and no easy resolutions. It's a challenging tune that will nonetheless get stuck in your head.

The Naked Gun comes in at a lean 85 minutes, but stay seated for the whole thing, as even the closing credits become a vehicle for jokes on top of jokes.

McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland, working with a talented cast and crew, bring us in so close that we can smell the smoke and the sweat, and swoon over the sensuality of slow dancing.

The Northman is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining. An examination of the way that violence begets violence, and a study of how a life devoted to single-minded hatred and vengeance can lead to uncomfortable truths, this is a movie that lives up to every saga comic books and metal bands ever spun about the brutal conquerors of yore.

Citizenfour finds its strength in both the story and the telling: The information about government spying is chilling, of course, but the movie also gives us the opportunity to get to know the elusive Snowden.

At a brisk 86 minutes, What We Do in the Shadows never sags or drags, delivering its comic punches with surgical precision and then getting off the stage. Being immortal doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of timing.

The movie really belongs to Mortensen, who allows Ben to be exasperating, arrogant and impatient but also warm, loving and caring. He’s a tough but adoring father, a grieving widower and an angry defender of his wife’s final wishes, and Mortensen plays all these notes and more with subtlety and grace.

In the recent flood of superhero movies, several have managed to be quite good — but Wonder Woman ranks as one of the few great ones.

It’s a film with a lot on its mind and plenty of plot and character plates to spin, but the results are both impressive and exciting.

This is a film that dares to be about something while still delivering as a piece of straightforward entertainment.

One of this generation’s most interesting filmmakers still has plenty to say and an impressive dexterity at saying it.

What makes Mistress America so lovely — and so of a piece with “Frances Ha,” my favorite film of 2013 — is its balance of compassion and scrutiny: Baumbach and Gerwig don’t let these characters get away with their shortcomings, but neither does the film condemn these people or present them as irredeemable.

The act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph.

Bathtubs Over Broadway is pure pleasure, both in its exploration of a hidden and uniquely American corner of show business and its portrait of the charmingly nerdy Young and his singular path toward rescuing this sub-sub-sub-genre while many of its executors are still alive to tell their stories.

The miracle of Superman is that, in 2025, it’s a superhero movie that inspires genuine delight.

This is a documentary that feels confident and intentional at every turn. It’s a story we need to know now, and it’s an essential warning for future generations.

Hers is a lot of life to try to capture in one movie, but Jane Fonda in Five Acts certainly covers her emotional arc with thoroughness and compassion.