Andrew Crump

The genuinely revelatory combined effect of the interviews, concert footage, and pure elation aside, there remains an undercurrent of bristling frustration bubbling beneath the film’s surface. 52 years? That’s how long “Summer of Soul” sat unseen, hidden from the public? If work this important can be squirreled away from view for this long, and if we let our imaginations run wild, then who knows how many other stories lie buried in anonymity, or where.

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.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

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

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.

Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.

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.

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

Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other.

Before We Vanish is almost too much of a stretch for Kurosawa, veering from gory sci-fi horror to screwball comedy to marital drama to alien conspiracy potboiler without the necessary connective tissue to give his genre cocktail equilibrium.

Yes, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is constitutionally sad. It’s also angry, restrained, abandoned, exuberant when cracks open between its downward facing emotions, and, above all else, impeccably constructed.

[Anderson's] unobtrusive aesthetic, calibrated to highlight his actors and, of course, the fashion, belies its deceptive luxuriousness. This is a movie you’ll want to live in for the pure joy of reveling in Anderson’s effortless mastery.

At its best, The Perfection is an homage to 1970s horror movies and 1980s thrillers, a glorious, multi-hewed mind screw.

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 sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

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

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.

Crime + Punishment isn’t without hope, but it anchors that hope to the unflattering realities of American policing.

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

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

Similar to how the characters are there to serve Anthony, Colman, Gatiss, Sewell and Poots are there to serve Hopkins. The stage belongs to him. What he does with it is something special, an unmissable performance from an actor with a filmography loaded with them.

Filho is self-reflective, not self-obsessed, and his clear-eyed stance is crucial to the anti-vanity he brings to his examination of his childhood home and youthful obsession.

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

Every detail here, every flourish, has a purpose, whether splashes of red on flower petals, soft edges around dusk-lit trees, or three-panel split screen sequences that read like the pages of illuminated manuscripts brought to life.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl details the ways tradition is exploited and warped, and to whom’s favor, gently at times, and with a steely edge at others.

To the Erwins’ credit, they make an effort at taking their movie somewhere interesting and, at least for a Jesus-y football picture, new.

Del Toro weaves together his influences so finely, so delicately, that the product of his handiwork feels entirely new: We recognize the pieces, and we cannot mistake the author, but cast in the warm, beryl glow of Dan Laustsen’s gorgeous cinematography, we feel as if we’re seeing them afresh. That’s the magic of the movies, and, more importantly, the magic of del Toro.

As the crimes of the deportation haunts Bisbee and its inhabitants, so, too, are we haunted by them through the filter of Greene’s lens. But that experience, the experience of being haunted, proves vital. Maybe it’s necessary to let history haunt us. If we don’t, we’ll never be able to move beyond it.