Barry Hertz

A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.

Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson’s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless.

Sharply subverting the male gaze at every turn, Sciamma has created an unforgettable treatise on thwarted desire. It is so very easy to label a film incendiary, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire deserves the scalding honour. It will ignite every flame you might have.

In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.

Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.

Aftersun cuts you in two with such emotional intensity, such impressive dramatic force, that I could only sit and fight back the inevitable tears.

Rarely, though, has cinema been so devoted to idealizing the importance of journalism than in Collective.

It is glorious.

This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.

Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.

This is hilarious, heartbreaking cinema – a work that will make you burst out laughing one moment, and leave you tearing your hair out the next.

Utterly magnificent and intoxicating.

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

There is no rookie-film handicap required in grading the excellence on display. There are no fireworks or twists or unnecessary frills here, nor should there be – this is simply perfect filmmaking from a voice that demands to be heard. The fall movie season is saved. Thank you, Greta Gerwig.

From its joyful and exuberant opening half to a late-game moment of deep and sombre introspection, Lee’s version of American Utopia is thoughtful pop performance art captured with the propulsive power of cinema.

Whatever praise heads toward Sandler should be tripled in the direction of the Safdies.

An engrossing and stylistically exacting work of cinema, Tár teases our political (as in: identity) sentiments with such a ferocious artistic confidence that you will leave the theatre with questions, arguments, demands – but most of all a supremely fulfilling sense of satisfaction. Here is a film that not only starts a debate but almost ends it, too.

If watching a Jafar Panahi film is something of a political act, then it is also a soul-nourishing one.

Spotlight is not about fiery performances or thrilling set-pieces – it’s simply a tight and captivating look at professionals who excel at their jobs, and who legitimately care about making a difference. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

Baker mostly crafts a tiny adventure of absorbing wonder.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.

The director’s semi-autobiographical, 1980s-set story may be small – it mostly focuses on the turbulent relationship between Julie and Anthony as the former struggles to find her artistic voice and the latter battles various addictions – but her impulses and vision are grand.

The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.

As it dips into murder-mystery territory, then something more quiet and philosophical, Chang-dong writes a story both expected and surprising.

Take three hours out of your life, and enjoy one of the most fulfilling cinematic rides of the year.

A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.

Whether, in making Saint Omer, Diop has found the answers that she’s been searching for since 2016 remains an open question. But the truth of the film is that she has certainly compelled her audience to take a complicated, fraught, and harrowing journey of their own.

It is tender, true and – depending on your interpretation, or understanding, of the finale – intensely heartbreaking.

The director wisely dives with her whole heart and soul into Goldin’s life, which makes seeing her almost destroyed by an addiction to painkillers so painful. And then, when Goldin resurrects her energies into waging a David versus Goliath war, there is a distinct sense of against-all-odds triumph that hits hard, and lingers long.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

Yet for a number of reasons, The Favourite is the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that puts the director’s bitter instincts to good use. It’s not only his most tolerable film, it’s his most insightful, too. It even approaches, well, fun.

The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

A comedy, a drama, a romance, a memory, Licorice Pizza is the director’s warmest and fuzziest creation.

As audiences, we lean toward demanding a near-constant auditory assault – that if we’re not hearing something, we’re missing something. Director Kelly Reichardt has no qualms with upending this, and other pieces of conventional cinematic wisdom with First Cow, a film that takes great care to remind us of the whisper-quiet bones of America’s history – a time when there wasn’t much to hear except what nature was telling us.

Director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Lean on Pete) knows how to build towering moments of human drama from the tiniest foundations. And he mostly pulls off such a feat again in this tale of grief and generational pain.

Perhaps this is Anderson's version of a parlour game – walk into Phantom Thread expecting a portrait of a testy male genius as portrayed by another testy male genius, but be gifted with a stealth drama about the hidden lives of the women who suffer in his shadow.

Most everyone who watches The Perfection will instead be staring at the screen slack-jawed, dumbfounded at the gory silliness they endured.

In just her second feature, Schilinski creates a true art-house epic, haunting and lyrical.

If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.

Once it clicks – and it will – the film burns hard, fast and blindingly bright.

This is a master artist putting a stamp on not only his own career, but also the entirety of American cinema and, why not, American history, too.

Unlike "Crazy Rich Asians," which had eyes for narrative substance but shamelessly flirted with the superficial, The Farewell is a more substantive, engrossing and ultimately deeper work about the bonds that hold and strengthen us.

Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

The only truly shocking thing about this new work, though, is the fact it took this long for von Trier to make a movie about a serial killer. For a man who loves blunt provocation, the subject should’ve been first on his hit list.

You’re unlikely to any time soon encounter a more thorough and energetic dive into the art of letting go. I look forward to Johnson’s next act, whilst I look over my shoulder.

Yes, the filmmaker and co-director Duke Johnson laboured for years over this project, and their set design is often astonishing. But that doesn’t mean the film is a masterpiece, or even half a masterpiece.

Puzzling out the reality and meaning of Long Day’s Journey into Night’s second half is as involving and absorbing an experience as watching the thing itself. And by the time Luo makes his way to what seems like the end of his journey, it is hard to not similarly feel transformed, or at the very least shaken.

Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.

There is no grand narrative or point to be hammered home; instead, Olshefski delivers a subtle, sincere and honest portrait of barely making ends meet in modern America.

Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.

This is a tremendously entertaining trip through the births of both America and the musical form, with each institution given a lightly revisionist torque by Miranda, who approaches the material with a scholar’s dedication to detail and a showman’s slick wit.

In some ways, it’s almost a silent film – characters only speak when necessary, with Foster and McKenzie (a remarkable find, who is bound to generate Lawrence comparisons) telling the story with their eyes. But Granik’s attention to family dynamics, and the pained feelings of those living outside America’s rigid expectations, speak louder than words.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

So much of Poor Things, both in its conception and maturation, feels self-satisfyingly provocative instead of imaginatively profound.

For Napoleon, Scott gives every last little slice of himself – the dramatist, the set-piece strategist, even, and especially, the comedian – to deliver what just might be his late-career masterpiece.

Black Panther fights constantly and bitterly against the familiar constraints of Disney's superhero industrial complex. At every turn, the expectations of the genre, the bland sameness that breeds cinematic comfort for the millions who line up to fill Marvel's coffers, are met by the director with resistance and creative intensity.

For all the behind-the-scenes footage and ostensible opportunities to grill Michaels about everything and anything, Neville’s film walks away with the impression and insight that anyone paying even half-attention to network television over the past few decades already knows.

The drama is an intricately constructed and intensely felt work that transcends the easy “coming-of-age” genre label that is so tempting to slap onto it.

Return to Seoul is not a dour, sombre thing – it is intense, electric and confrontational.

Unlike many of his action-cinema contemporaries, McQuarrie excels at creating clear lines of sight for his set pieces, and cutting them together to ensure maximum tension.

Simply but smoothly animated, and featuring no dialogue whatsoever, director Pablo Berger’s film is a charming fable that rides the line between sentimentality and schmaltz just right.

The entire production entertainingly coalesces into part concert doc, part cultural artifact, part “gotcha!” stunt, and part meditation on the fickle, fleeting nature of creativity.

A portrait of America that is devastating and freeing, bursting with sorrow and empathy.

Director Maria Sodahl tracks the couple’s story over the course of only one Christmas break, but the film is more a chronicle of one family’s entire existence. Skarsgard, by the way, is typically excellent – it’s just that he mostly, and graciously, cedes the screen to Hovig, who is given much more to do and handles it with aplomb.

A terrifying, pitch-black kind of horror movie that takes up residence in your mind for days, even weeks later – but it is also a family film.

Might be the best Spider-Man film ever made.

There is as much wit as there is wretchedness, the director having no trouble finding the human comedy scratching beneath the title tragedy.

As much as The Shape of Water's disparate parts shouldn't work – and as much as its "originality" is sourced from the thousands of other fables del Toro has consumed over his lifetime – it does, in the end.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.

The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.

The reason Diane (the film) exists is not to propose and then solve a mystery, but to engage with Diane (the person).

Room is a film of tiny little miracles.

Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.

It is at once a singular piece of pop-cult art, delivered with the brash confidence of a filmmaker who has either been told “no” too many times or not enough, and a film that could not exist without the contributions of Cronenberg and a dozen of his contemporaries and acolytes (including Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly), their midnight visions co-opted by Schoenbrun into one slickly nostalgic neon-lit nightmare.

This is a juicy, outré exercise that gets its kicks from booting its audience into deliberately uncomfortable corners and then leaving them there to stew.

Here’s a layered, nuanced film whose only goal is to tell a story of real people and real heartache, not to act as a crass marketing plank for a series of hopeful sequels and spinoffs (hi and bye, Baywatch and CHIPS).

There are so many elements that seduce and beguile – including the rusted-out Brutalism of the Li Tolqan prison where the cloning procedure takes place, and Goth’s supremely unhinged work as James’s seductress, a performance more Looney Tunes than human – that the entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

Each of the three short stories making up Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy could stand on its own as a work of top-tier drama. Yet when stitched together, with the themes of coincidence and kindness being the only real connective tissue, the narratives spin themselves into something just shy of cinematic profundity.

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

From beat to beat, it is impossible to predict where Park is going with this film. Best to just turn up the volume, and trust in the rhythm that Park has set for himself. Let him lead the dance.

A sensual and heady stew of romance, family drama, police procedural, political polemic and ghost story, Atlantics marks the debut of a ferocious talent in Diop.

The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession.

Here is a glorious and genuine movie-movie: a vivid, sweeping, beautiful piece of top-tier pop-art. You will leave the theatre swooning, in love with the biggest kind of big picture.

The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way

Entire passages stretch along at a too-leisurely pace, allowing whatever anger Jia is surely carrying to too frequently cool off. Still, by the film’s New Year’s Eve-set finale, there’s little doubt Jia can create masterful cinematic moments when he so desires.

Moreno avoids putting too fine a point on just why he’s playing around with such matters of multiplicity. His film is both a provocation and a shrug – make of it what you will.

Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.

Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.

If you can appreciate the simple concept of nourishment – of the stomach, and of the soul – then you will walk away delightfully stuffed.

The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

This is meticulous, beautiful filmmaking that is rich in meaning and fat with detail. Surrender to Park’s smoky, dangerous romance – vengeance can wait.

The Fabelmans contains reels’ worth of beauty and wit, all delivered with the honest and enthusiastic drive to entertain that has become Spielberg’s signature. But you will learn more about Steven Spielberg by watching almost any other Steven Spielberg film.

Balagov displays the cinematic skills of an auteur at least twice his age, and both lead actresses are captivating – an especially remarkable feat given that neither had acted on-screen before. Yet as Balagov peels back the layers of Iya and Masha’s stories, Beanpole feels less like a deep cut and more like a scratch.

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.