Ben Croll

Shrouded in grief and chilly to the core, Andrew Dominik’s mournful documentary One More Time With Feeling is at once sobering in tone and intoxicating in style.

The craft is meticulous and the level of detail elaborate, but the story itself is simple as can be.

Not only is Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri the director’s most accomplished film yet, it’s also his most compassionate.

Despite the sound of gunfire off in the distance, Notturno is less a film about life during wartime than the life that subsequently follows it, as those damaged by the violence try to move forward.

Anchored by Natalie Portman’s achy-eyed performance, Jackie is, despite a few wrinkles at the end, about the best version of this story you can get.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

Nocturnal Animals is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.

Bong delivers a stunning return to form with this newest venture, which takes bold leaps between tenors and tone, but holds together beautifully thanks to the director’s unparalleled visual/spatial sophistication, and his unsparing social indictment.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same.

The film is riotously funny, and Isabelle Huppert has never been better.

Visually ravishing ... [A] piercingly intelligent treatise on art, agency and queer love in the 18th century.

If Panahi makes us understand Jafar, he also recognizes the rippling effect of his choices. Such is the dense and intricate layering of this deceptively simple film, which has a no-budget aesthetic and a novelistic sprawl.

A peak-performance engine running wholly on charisma, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man revives and revitalizes a genre in awfully short supply.

Neither provocation nor counter-point, The Zone of Interest is instead a furtherance, a new take on an ungraspable madness we must never let ourselves forget.

That the film remains witty and wise throughout its most lurid stretches makes the Venice Golden Lion contender one of the year’s most unexpected heart-warmers. That the filmmakers lavish commensurate attention on all those bawdy embellishments also guarantees you a bloody good time along the way.

You can’t call a film as lurid and alive as Benedetta a closing statement, but there is something valedictory about the erotic religious drama, which finds time to explore questions of voyeurism, sadism, masochism, systems of power, perversion, repression, rebellion, storytelling, divinity, irony and belief. Oh, and sex — plenty and plenty of nun-on-nun sex.

What sets The Eight Mountains apart is the degree to which co-directors van Groeningen and Vandermeersch strip away so much pretense and artifice, leaving nothing but a strong central question: What makes and prevents people from meaningfully connecting? The filmmakers then strike a refreshingly unsentimental tone when answering it.

One of Ozon’s richest and most satisfying works in years — that rarest of literary adaptations, one that honors a foundational text precisely by finding something new to say.

One Week and a Day succeeds in recreating that precise feeling, as hard to articulate as it is commonly felt, where exhaustion wears down any line between emotions.

Ly rather cleverly inoculates his film to charges of repetition by outright owning them. Of course, you’ve seen stories like before. The film freely admits, these exact same stories, these preventable tragedies and pointless injustices have been manifesting themselves for hundreds of years.

Almost never offscreen, Hüller — and Braun, who has less screentime but is no less affecting — navigate unfamiliar situations with small, precise choices and reactions that cut through the deliberately alienating period setting, imparting an emotional energy that feels both current and relatable.

Not only does Shoplifters skillfully entwine several disparate threads he’s explored over his prolific career, it does so with the understated confidence and patient elegance of an artist who has fully matured.

Like any good conductor, Cooper knows that the smallest of gestures elicits the most thunderous response.

Ben Hania shows little interest in agitprop. By burrowing into the granular details of this one tragedy on this one day, she arrives at an extraordinarily far-reaching articulation of an acutely contemporary emotion.

Parallel Mothers often finds Almodóvar doing Almodóvar, leaning into all of his tics and obsession for this tale of two women whose lives become forever linked when they meet in a maternity ward.

A small, cyclical film about the value of a small, cyclical life, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson is a perfect version of itself. His ode to small pleasures and the simple life comes in the form of a simple film that is a small pleasure.

Taken as a whole, The Brutalist both mourns and celebrates American ambition –the ambitions of an immigrant class trying for a new life with no guarantee of success, and the ambitions of a filmmaker filling a canvas with a lifetime of obsessions.