Carlos Aguilar

Where others could have made a less sophisticated pastiche, Schoenbrun has filtered the familiar through their nonconforming lens to beget a bona fide original.

An exquisitely tender tribute to love in its purest expression, The Blue Caftan doesn’t romanticize the complications and conflicts facing its two soulmates, and precisely because of that it feels like an utterly honest tale of romance.

On the Count of Three is a rousing tragicomedy that straddles a line between incredibly calibrated gallows humor and a devastating discourse on the burden of existence.

An offbeat and life-affirming triumph, “Limbo” is the kind of original work of art that moves the needle on an issue by interrogating the human factor rather than hanging out on the impersonal surface. A movie born of our times but destined to outlive them, it deserves to cross the threshold from festival darling to audience favorite.

A thoughtful and tearful ride in which the destination is a spiritual confrontation with oneself, Drive My Car devastates and comforts through its vehicular poetry of the sorrow from which we run, the collisions that awaken us, and the healing gained from every bump in the road.

Not only is Wolfwalkers easily the best animated film of the year, but a stirring masterwork, as stunningly gorgeous as it’s philosophically profound.

An aesthetically imaginative and affectingly breathtaking fairytale for our modern world, Belle envelops you first with its clever mechanics and youthful preoccupations. But as the reflective subtext comes to light, it extends an invitation to reconnect with others offline and to beware the comfort of these surrogate identities.

After the youthful splendor of last year’s The Souvenir Part II, Hogg returns with a magnificent achievement of a more inconspicuous kind: a striking phantasm of affection, regrets, and remembered accounts that might be factually inaccurate but emotionally unfeigned.

One of the year’s most thought-provoking and spellbinding releases, Our Time is calibrated for patience and observation with ideas as concrete as such an ambiguous storyteller like Reygadas can offer.

Moratto’s concise firecracker of a movie is straightforward in its soul-crushing blows and an essential piece of social-realist cinema for our times.

End of the Century is a sublimely haunting experience that will make you sigh in recognition of the what-ifs in your own life.

For all of the film’s ideological richness, what Neptune Frost discusses is far from impenetrably abstract. The directors not only hack cinema, a medium historically dominated by white storytellers, to make a statement, but they also reposition its lens to center a fresh crop of artistic voices in a mesmerizing battle cry of a film set to the inextinguishable beat of the drums.

López Estrada and company not only subvert lazy assumptions about their misunderstood metropolis and who lives and thrives there, but they also entirely shift the focus to the unheard and unseen for a wonderful reinvention. You’ll never see L.A. the same again and that’s for the better.

The Ground Beneath My Feet is essential viewing for our anxiety-ridden times.

The cultural subtleties Wang inserts purposefully elevate The Farewell to have not only emotional impact but also revelatory social significance.

The character complexities grow out of Mills’ divinely extraordinary writing.

Invoking genre narrative devices, the entrancingly evocative La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) walks between fact and myth to engender a shrewdly frightening piece of political horror.

As crushing as it is stirring, the gritty fable co-written for the screen by Clapin and Laurant (“Amélie,” “A Very Long Engagement”) finds an ideal visual medium in the filmmaker’s evocative animation.

Aside from exploring the housing crisis benefiting developers and startups, “Last Black Man” hones in on male friendship from the standpoint of two young guys whose fraternal bond surpasses any need for the posturing associated with toxic masculinity.

Inventively, Gilroy utilizes exaggerated horror tropes to take to task our cynical thoughts about artistic creation. His sharp Velvet Buzzsaw is an exquisitely diabolical exposé on the merciless materialistic ambitions that run rampant in cultural fields.

Buoyant first-time actor, Levan Gelbakhiani goes from unknown to galvanizing star in a unique role. His presence is one of stunning physicality, proving there’s strength in what others see as a weakness in his character.

Writer-director Rodrigo Moreno methodically unfurls a genius tragicomedy on the elusive nature of freedom: an idealized state in which, in theory, one does as one pleases at all times.

Through the increasingly ghastly parade of grotesqueries, Barker sharply comments on poisonous relationships.

An arrestingly beautiful and philosophically imposing bilingual historical drama about the arrogance of mankind in the face of nature’s unforgiving prowess, the inherent failures of colonial enterprises, and how these factors configure the cultural identities of individuals.

A tribute to those children of immigrants, especially those in families divided across borders, pulling for their own aspirations while carrying on their backs their parents’ hopes for a life without fear, “Mija” beams with the knowledge that in its specificity it speaks to millions. That this documentary soon becomes a rock in an avalanche and not an isolated bright star of representation is the hope.

DuVernay transcends the academic nature of the material via imaginative swings of fancy that immerse us in Wilkerson mournful mindset.

The Krafft’s globetrotting love story exists at its most ardent in proximity of their mutual passion.

With its uncompromising and full-frontal depiction of the elements that give us life, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” tests our levels of comfort in accepting we are essentially all decaying entities made of organic material. It also makes us reconsider our relationship with medicine.