Ann Hornaday

Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss.

Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.

As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.

If the film has an MVP, it’s Bob Odenkirk, who does a splendid and quietly amusing job of playing The Post’s unsung Pentagon Papers hero, assistant managing editor Ben Bagdikian.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening unspools like a not-so-minor miracle. It’s a work of poetry, power and ruminative grace.

Gracefully moving between the infinite and the practical, the celestial and the implacably grounded, Guzman has created a sensitive, richly textured portrait of time and place that transcends both those conceits.

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.

Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.

Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.

As a slice of life spiked with mordant, uncynical humor, it’s deliciously entertaining. In other words, it’s another Holofcener movie, which means it’s perilously close to perfect.

Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.

As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back. But it also lifts us up on a wave of openhearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life.

That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.

With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.

The Father, ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.

Smart, funny and often viciously cruel, this is a romantic comedy for people who are too old to believe in fairyales but wise enough to accept a happy ending when that's what life gives them.

Hours, even days later, they may find themselves thinking of Adèle and wondering how she’s doing — only then realizing how completely this fictional but very real creation has winnowed her way into their hearts and minds. That’s great acting. It’s great art. And that’s why Blue Is the Warmest Color is a great movie.

Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.

Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .

The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

A wonderful thing to snuggle into, as full of heart and pep and innocence as the title character himself.

Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.