Andrew Crump

Scorsese’s gangster movies indulge the genre’s pleasures, of course, but in each of them—all seven of them—he’s looking for spirituality and for humanity. In The Irishman, he’s in self-reflection mode, glancing at his career-long search for God while pondering his own age.

The explosive fury of Bacurau’s slow-burn climax is a gratifying payoff to the film’s suspense, but without the deliberate measures taken to make the rest of the story count, it’d ring hollow.

McQueen has made a textured, warm, breathtaking and heartbreaking portrait of Black experience, condensed economically into slightly over an hour of runtime. It’s exhilarating. It’s gorgeous. It’s moving. It’s also dangerous.

Think better of art’s power, Ree’s filmmaking tells us, but especially think better of each other, too.

Twomey gives The Breadwinner ballast, binding it to the real-world history that serves as its basis, and elevates it to realms of imagination at the same time. It’s a collision of truth and fantasy.

Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself.

She Dies Tomorrow is both the perfect film for this moment and also the worst viewing choice possible considering the circumstances.

Pawlikowski leaves it to the viewer to determine for themselves the fate of his Cold War proxy parents, and to glean purpose from the film’s gaps in time, its reticence, and even its black-and-white palette. Married with the Academy ratio, the color scheme makes the film feel classic, but Pawlikowski’s desire to plumb his past makes it timeless.

As the argument expands, all of these men start to look less like icons and more like, well, men: Regular people with regular concerns and everyday flaws. They’re mortal and imperfect, and to witness their mortal imperfection is One Night in Miami’s greatest joy.

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.

The blend of artistry and genre is breezy and dense at the same time, a film worth enjoying for its surface charms and studied for its deeply personal reflections on intimacy. You may delight in its lively, buoyant filmmaking, but you’ll be awed by the breadth of its insight.

Loach knows there are heavy restraints on art to affect meaningful change in the world. But he’s also aware of the kinship between art and activism: How art can educate people, and agitate them, and perhaps lead them to make more responsible choices in their personal lives.

Above all else, Birdman is tender, raucously funny and deeply tragic.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

It takes a deft hand and a rare talent to make tyranny and state sanctioned torture so funny.

For all of its cosmic implications, the film remains steadfast in its human devotions.

Guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.

It’s a journey jammed with pleasures we can all appreciate, and canopied by questions we all ask.

The places and things Kogonada includes in his frame are important for drawing us into Columbus’s world, but it’s Richardson who gives that world its shape, supplying her director’s clean, static compositions, captured in long shots, with aching humanity molded by doubt and disappointment.

Son of the White Mare must be seen to be believed, but mostly it just needs to be seen.

It’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

Shoplifters is held up by the strength of its ensemble and Kore-eda’s gifts as a storyteller, which gain with every movie he makes—even in the same year.

It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos (even if only just), and in the chaos there’s absolute joy.

Ghostlight is a comedy in a loose sense, a tragedy in another, and a redemption song in yet one more. More succinctly, it’s a Thompson film, meaning it gently, tenderly unpacks and embodies every single feeling its characters might have about their situation at hand.

Comedy is a welcome release for the genuine harms couched in Gibberitia’s philistine precepts. Authoritarians are self-important, humorless fools. We should make fun of them and laugh at them. Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia encourages viewers to join in the mockery, but not at the expense of its central motif, because ripping on autocrats alone isn’t enough.

Mitchell narrates in his rich baritone, taking his own audience back through the past, not only to appreciate the circumstances and struggle Black cinema has come from (and appreciate where it’s at in 2022), but to witness the incontrovertible proof of its appropriation by the movie industry through the decades.