Bilge Ebiri

In restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision.

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.

Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.

It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.

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.

Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro, Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle), but it is more subdued.

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.

It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

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.

It’s all supremely touching and evocative without ever feeling too on-the-nose or heavy-handed.

Kusijanović conveys all this through the way her actors move against and look at one another. That’s filmmaking of the highest order — intimate and gripping.

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

Aware of the raw, incendiary power of her subject matter, Ben Hania doesn’t sensationalize this story, keeping the action fixed entirely in the call center itself, with actors portraying the dispatchers on the line.

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

Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.

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

For all its airy lightness and apparent simplicity, it’s hard not to watch Claire’s Camera and sense beneath its placid surfaces the fretful voice of a filmmaker who longs to return to the elements of his art.

It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.

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

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

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

The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action and suspense to add some urgency, not the other way around.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.

Mermaid is a very, very funny movie, but its caustic swipes at China’s nouveau riche, combined with its despairing look at the devastation of the country’s environment, suggest a filmmaker trying to find ways to reconcile his buoyant sense of fun with deeper, darker themes.