Bilge Ebiri

It’s extremely moving and thrilling and it will both make and ruin your day.

Lonergan is the master of taking a scene that starts off as something familiar, then sending it spinning off in another direction, and then pulling back at just the right moment, as the viewer’s imagination hurtles ahead to fill in the gaps.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire builds and builds and builds, as we keep waiting for an explosion, a big emotional climax. And, not unlike with another great recent import, Pedro Almodóvar’s "Pain and Glory," it arrives with the very last shot — which I won’t reveal other than to say it’s one of the finest pieces of acting and one of the most moving images I’ve seen in eons.

The tonal mismatch I feared could have turned one giant movie into a bit of a slog turns out to be among its greatest strengths. The reflective second half recontextualizes the first, and the progression of colorful action fantasia to quiet existential reckoning is overwhelming.

The result was one of the most acclaimed albums of her career — and one of the most elusive film projects of all time, full of twists and turns that would have made Orson Welles order a stiff drink.

Nolan fully embraces the power of visual storytelling in Dunkirk.

[A] truly monumental work of art ... The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace.

Among the greatest, most ravishing of films.

Through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of No Other Land lies in the way it compresses time.

We know where Tár is headed from pretty much its opening scenes, but that doesn’t mean that the film shouldn’t still surprise and shock us. Luckily, this is where Blanchett comes in, turning the movie from a moderately interesting and topical one into something quite beautiful. She brings the energy and the sensation that much of the rest of the film lacks.

While No Bears is profoundly powerful in its own right, the knowledge that its maker is incarcerated gives its explorations of exile, truth, and freedom a throat-catching urgency.

In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.

As the spiritual subtext took over, I couldn’t help but feel that something essential had been lost. The state overwhelms the individual; so, too, by the end, does this beautiful, strange movie.

Every decade or so, Godard’s film is revered all over again for everything it got right about the future. But for all its influence, Alphaville still looks and feels like no other movie. More than a prophecy, it is poetry.

This small, grim documentary about Indonesia is actually a bigger and grimmer movie about all of us — our capacity for both breathtaking evil and, occasionally, profound bravery.

Through the recollections of witnesses and victims, the film simultaneously builds a present-tense narrative while portraying the terrifying resilience of memory and trauma.

Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.

It Was Just an Accident plays like an ideal melding of the filmmaker Panahi was and the filmmaker he’s been forced to become. It’s an endlessly fascinating and extraordinarily powerful work.

The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.

A spare, lovely work directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is even more haunting on a big screen, where its shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves actually heighten the intimacy of the performance.

Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve, and visual charm.

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself.

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.

Taxi is a strange movie. These are nonprofessional actors, and the film veers between documentary realism and playful staginess.

I recommend seeing it more than once; luckily, it’s so gorgeous and spellbinding that it invites repeat viewings.

For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together.

At times, it feels as though it has emerged — dusty, tattered, and beautiful — from the storied earth of Italy itself.

Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.

By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.

Narratively, the music in Cold War is a means to an end; emotionally, however, it’s everything, often expressing what the characters cannot say themselves.

It takes a remarkably assured artist to make all this work, and Fox is savvy about how she eases us into her complicated narrative.

With each step, the film gains depth. Small variations in routine start to feel monumental, and the briefest encounter can seem like a sign of something great.

For all the film's aestheticism, there's a clarity to this child's dilemma — conveyed ably by Hightower, who is a unique kind of actress.

The film is filled with lengthy, sensuous skateboarding scenes, which feel meditative, therapeutic; we sense that these kids skated not because it was fun, but because it helped them to survive.

For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

Built around silences and the steady accumulation of human and natural detail, the story feels at times as if it’s being told by the tree itself: omniscient, unflinching, yet shot through with an almost alien tenderness. Its perspective is not so much Olympian as it is pointillist.

Despite Chalamet’s blazing brilliance, we don’t particularly root for Marty, or feel for him, or even hate him; he feels like a plot device in his own story. And yet there’s something there. Maybe the fact that this tale of constant forward motion has little room for humanity or reflection or reason says something about Marty and his times — which of course are ultimately our own.

Magical and melancholy, The Tale of Princess Kaguya comes from the other mad genius of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata, who co-founded the beloved Japanese animation company alongside the great Hayao Miyazaki back in 1985.

The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.

Viktor Kossakovsky’s mesmerizing documentary Gunda still serves as a bracing corrective to the way animals are usually portrayed on film. Its earthy radiance reminds us of what we’ve been missing in our need to see ourselves in these creatures, instead of seeing them as themselves.

Campion preserves the simplicity of Savage’s prose with the understated ease of her own storytelling, and she even finds a compelling way to navigate the novel’s somewhat outdated dime-store Freudian conceits.

An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t.

As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.

Despite its intense running time and disturbing subject matter, Dead Souls does not seek a complete accounting. In fact, it’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences.

Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.

All this could have easily become a cacophony of disconnected sights and sounds, but Cameraperson unfolds with beauty and purpose — mixing the fluidity of a dream with the acuity of an essay. Johnson teases out themes and finds echoes across the years.

It truly is a movie about politics, and it’s among the more mesmerizing ones you’ll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself.

Aside from being a disarming, refreshing wallow in kindness, Paddington 2 also has the benefit of being well-constructed and exceedingly well-performed.

The Death of Stalin would be a brilliant, harrowing film even without all that contemporary resonance.

We walk away from the film with a dark empathy for these people, and for ourselves.

Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.

As we watch this woman lose her family, her status, and maybe even some part of her pride, we sense both the horror and the intoxication of freedom.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

Granik films with subtlety and quiet grace, but Leave No Trace explodes in the mind.

You’re left with no real catharsis — religious or emotional. And without that, Captive winds up building to a big nothing.

It confronts, but it doesn’t exploit. It’s about one of the most horrifying events of recent years, and yet it’s defined by its austerity, its sense of quiet. It is as much about the complex, dull horror of memory as it is about the brute, sharp horror of that day.

Kids will be enchanted, adults will be enraptured. It’s somehow light as air yet overwhelming, both ineffable and unforgettable.

Of Men and War’s compassion is matched only by its relentlessness.

Pain and Glory is at once the gentlest and most emotionally naked movie Pedro Almodóvar has ever made.

The breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.

A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.

Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living.

Shot in black and white and filled with images of collapse, Below the Clouds is nevertheless a strangely hopeful work.

The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.

The off-kilter, absurdist vibe of the picture is enchanting, but it’s rooted in deep horror: The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified. Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself.

Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations.

Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential.

It speaks both to del Toro’s confidence and generosity that, having designed this world so thoroughly, he essentially hands the whole thing over to Hawkins — not just so she can breathe life into her own character, but so she can conjure all the emotional connections required for any of this to work on any level. And my god, how she runs with it.

The Color Purple is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. For both movie and play, it feels as much like a trip to church as it is a trip to the theater.

A truly strange, wondrous beast. It has the playful humor and charm of a children’s movie, but its design is dark and unsettling.

The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.

Playground is bleak, bleak stuff. It’s also electrifying.

It’s not hard to see why Triet’s picture resonates. It has both suspense and intellectual ambition; plot revelations don’t just send the story in new directions, they expand the film’s cultural scope.

There’s life boiling under the simple surfaces, which is both Kaurismäki’s aesthetic mantra and his great theme. At their best, these quiet, cool films tear you to pieces. Fallen Leaves already feels like one of his signature works.

Josephine might not tell a particularly original story, but it tells it in a way that makes us see the world anew.

What Now? Remind Me is all over the place, but it never feels messy or lax.

It’s the closest I’ve seen a film come to an act of genuine hypnosis.

There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.

Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.

Knife deserves credit for more than just its compelling depiction of a horrific recent event. It artfully interweaves multiple threads from Rushdie’s life and career. The film works as a biography as well as an important history lesson.

The film is both humane and scathing. Which is why Haynes’s stylistic treatment of the subject, veering between noirish gusto and flights of snark, winds up being so touching.

The Great Beauty is a subtly daring cinematic high-wire act — an entire film built around one character’s unrealized, unspecified yearning. And it might just be the most unforgettable film of the year.

For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.

Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.

What emerges is a very close, tender look at the Ford family.... The film is unflinching in its portrayal of their devastation after the loss of their eldest son.

Ernest and Celestine is a modest, beautiful little children’s fable with a wise, grown-up heart.

Baby Driver is an almost perfect pastiche, a thoroughly enjoyable object. But sue me, I kind of miss the losers of the Cornetto Trilogy.

This could have easily become a torrid, tear-jerking melodrama, but Hansen-Løve’s matter-of-fact approach to performance and incident allow the emotions to emerge organically from the unfussy drama onscreen.

Park’s ability to manipulate his imagery is something else entirely. His dissolves and overlays and intercutting are formal and sensual expressions of his great subject: that all of us are trapped in the same socio-economic and psychological nightmare.

The Scorch Trials isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s just fast and nutty enough to keep you entertained.

The picture’s charming modesty is its great virtue; it’s a light movie with a heavy heart.

Watching The Salesman, I can’t help but feel that this is the first time Farhadi’s mastery of the particular is undercut by the artificiality with which he’s treated the general. He remains one of the world’s foremost filmmakers, but this time around, his expertise and artistry are undone by phoniness.

Whether this new picture is a masterpiece, or a masterful reimagining of a troublesome original, will have to remain in the eye of the beholder.

Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui’s The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema.

Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful.

The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating.