Christopher Gray

How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.

The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.

By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.

The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.

A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.

A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.

Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.

Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.

Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism.

The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.

Feras Fayyad's film is broadly concerned with portraying the titular Syrian city as a community of neighbors and colleagues.

Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.

Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.

The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.

After the film's early optimism and speculative midsection, Western struggles to manage all the rich dramatic irony of its final half hour, perched uneasily between plot and stasis.

The film's rough-hewn naturalism belies an exquisite sense of pace and a sneaky breed of gallows humor.

Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.

Much like its subject, Avi Belkin’s documentary knows how to start an argument.

The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.

Logan Lucky is both a Robin Hood fantasy and a uniquely Soderberghian lark, an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.

Devos's impressive debut bores into the mourning process and its piquant combination of emotional numbness and sensory vulnerability, rigorously avoiding finding an easy way out of this quagmire.

Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.

The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.

Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.

It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.

As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.

We come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect that allows the complex, funny, and indomitable personalities to shine through.