David Ehrlich

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

One Cut of the Dead is so heartfelt and hilarious that it’s easy to forgive the contrivances that hold it together, and to overlook how transparently Ueda reverse-engineers most of his best gags.

Schoenbrun’s astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale.

Haynes’ tonal playfulness has sometimes been overshadowed by the unerring consistency of his emotional textures, but here, in the funniest and least “stylized” of his films, it’s easier than ever to appreciate his genius for using artifice as a vehicle for truth.

At a time when the American government is waging a sustained attack on investigative journalism, and on the very nature of truth itself, to watch Cover-Up is not just to wonder what they might be trying to hide, but also to recognize that we’ve seen it before.

In this remarkable and shudderingly unresolved film, blessings and despair tend to become one and the same, two limbs of a shared body that Nina’s patients aren’t allowed to control for themselves.

To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.

This one is every bit as static and chatty as fans have come to expect; rooted to its two-actors-in-a-room reality, but also charming and characteristically unpredictable for the ways it wiggles free of it like a loose tooth.

It often feels like Heineman is (understandably) too overwhelmed by the stories he’s capturing to help shape them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But no other film has so convincingly, or so urgently, illustrated the role that media will play in our fight for the future.

This light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages to draw a comprehensive map of what the Cold War relic has come to represent — and what freedom means to the people of a nation that’s been defined by its pursuit.

A film that’s dark and delightful and ripe for rediscovery.

Hansen-Løve has traced her own paternal grief into an illuminatingly honest sketch about how loss is necessary for rebirth, guilt inextricable from self-fulfillment, and the present worth savoring for its role in bringing the past and the future together — rather than as a buffer for keeping them apart.

There are any number of movies about people who try to reinvent themselves in the face of a crisis. There are many fewer movies about people who violently refuse to even consider that idea — people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious “No Other Choice” is the exception that proves the rule.

My Father’s Shadow resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood.

Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

The film’s unflinchingly repetitive shape allows viewers to lose sight of their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be more involving than the didacticism that a traditional documentary might bring to the same topic.

If Get Out isn’t half as scary as the ideas that inspired it, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is almost certain to be the boldest — and most important — studio genre release of the year. What it lacks in fear, it nearly makes up for in fearlessness.

It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.

It’s a movie that often feels like a mega-mix of Jia’s greatest hits, but one that rehashes them with precious little of the ineffable grace that make each of them so valuable on their own.

Watching the 90-year-old filmmaker pick through the scrapheap of her own memories and fashion the bits into a fresh perspective on the relationship between reality and representation, stillness and movement, life and art, it seems that Varda has become something of a gleaner, herself.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

In some respects, it feels like the most nakedly personal film the now 83-year-old has ever made. In others, it feels like the only film he’s ever made. Or maybe all of them.

A furious yet resiliently hopeful documentary about white America’s long and ongoing history of colonizing the Očeti Šakówin (along with the rest of this land’s indigenous people), Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s vital Lakota Nation vs. United States doesn’t waste any of its 121 minutes, but it also boasts a number of moments that effectively squeeze the film’s entire perspective into a single unforgettable image.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

The action scenes are so inexplicably painful — and the character work in “Snake Eyes” is so unexpectedly strong — that your heart sinks whenever the swords come out.

It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

This bitter and beautiful Sundance-winning doc focuses on a single beekeeper as though our collective future hinges on her hives.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

At times a frustrating experience, Vengeance Is Mine transforms over the course of its running time, Enokizu’s impenetrable nature eventually bottoming out and blossoming into a perverse relatability.

While The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar may be, in some respects, the most literal Dahl adaptation you could possibly imagine, the true author of this project is never in doubt.

Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

Beanpole is slow to thaw, and its emotional impact is dulled by a structure that delays the story’s full power until the final moments, but there’s a resonant beauty to how these women seize control over their themselves.

Dare to peek under the scales of this wholly original and ominously enchanting nightmare, and you’ll find a simple story about the things that society forces a girl to give up if she wants to be part of our world.

Forget that The Lovers doesn’t have the courtesy to be fun; no cosmic romance should be so deeply afraid to shoot for the stars. As one of the film’s many forgettable characters so eloquently puts it, “This stinks worse than an oyster’s fart.”

Shaggy and slapped together as it may be, “76 Days” is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight; the film’s value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we’re making alone and together.

Hirokazu Kore-eda may only make good movies, but After the Storm is one of his best.

Horse Money is an ordeal, but you’ll be glad that Costa was there to help Ventura’s words find their way through the cracks.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

"To Leslie" doesn’t always make things easy, but it’s deeply touching to watch the film’s characters learn how to share their mutual good fortune.

To talk about Toy Story 4 is to talk about Forky. This is a movie that doesn’t initially appear to have any compelling reason to exist — the forced but satisfying third installment of Pixar’s signature franchise seemed to wrap things up when it came out almost a full decade ago — and yet Forky alone is enough to elevate this potential cash-grab into the beautiful and hilarious coda that its long-running series needed to be truly complete. Forky is the hero we need in 2019.

No disrespect to the similarly Proustian rewards of “Ratatouille,” but here is a 73-minute movie — animated by about 10 people — that manages to deliver twice the flavor with a fraction of the ingredients.

So exuberant and full of life that it would probably convince you the movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, In the Heights is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about ever since the pandemic began — the kind that it almost seemed like we might never get to enjoy again.

The violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.

The Witch is one of the most genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory because Eggers has the guts to earn your fear.

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

Staggeringly beautiful and immensely true, the best animated film of 2016 — one of the year’s best films of any kind, really.

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.

Lapid’s film is too fresh and intransigent to know how well it will age over time or hold up to repeat viewings, but on first blush it feels like a powerful howl that’s hard to hear clearly, and harder still to get out of your head.

If On Her Shoulders struggles for an ending, perhaps that’s because we have to supply our own. People like Nadia can’t fix the world, but this vital documentary is proof that it’s heroic enough just to be heard.

Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

By sprinting through 50 years of features so fast that each of them ultimately feels like a single frame rattling through a projector, they blur De Palma’s body of work into a moving truth that none of his individual films has ever crystallized with such clarity: The movies are real-life; the great filmmakers are the ones who never let you forget that.

For all of its innumerable pleasures, however, The Forbidden Room can feel like too much of a good thing—premiering at Sundance, Maddin’s latest plays like a robust film festival unto itself.

Lee often seems unsure of whether he's directing a comedy or a civics lesson, and the film only finds its wings in the moments when he realizes that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

In focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, it finds enough fleeting joy to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward.

Wenders’s reverent enthusiasm for his subject is evident throughout the film, and he details every chapter of Salgado’s life with an acolyte’s inability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.

Lingui can only exist in the face of great hardship, and Haroun’s surprisingly cathartic film honors the tradition by celebrating the fact that it still does.

This is an important and compulsively watchable portrait made by someone who understands the brute power of broadcast media and the people who make it for all the world to see, but it can only afford Mike Wallace with a little moment of truth, and the satisfaction of playing his part in the greater continuum of things.

Split into three parts that reflect an infinite pattern of crime, punishment, and cultural recidivism, Predators fixates on our shared complicity in continuing that cycle with every click.

This is the rare movie that’s redeemed by its unchecked nostalgia.

This visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama.

Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.

Newton’s film knows that people are always going to be letting themselves (and each other) down, no matter how hard they try, and Nicholson’s unforgettable turn makes it impossible for us to forget it.

If Jerry Rothwell’s film version of The Reason I Jump is far more effective and self-possessed than most documentary adaptations of “memoirs” tend to be, that’s largely because it sees Higashida’s book as a lens instead of as a subject, and refracts various other people through it in recognition of the rare tale that’s less important than how it’s translated.

Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

Crucially, these characters are so believable that every scene has an internal logic and justifies itself.

Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful.

I can’t say whether Hong has suffered any of the creative self-doubts that animate his latest heroine, but the film he’s made for her feels as revealing as the one she then makes for herself. Free your art, your art will free you in return — a nice idea, but one that the uniqueness of Hong’s career makes easier to admire than it is to internalize.

If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.

A master chef preparing an entire feast inside a pressure cooker, Spielberg shoots The Post like every shot was delivered to the studio on a deadline, and the result is a film that combines the spartan clarity of hard journalism with the raw suspense of an Indiana Jones adventure.

The film’s hyper-naturalism is its raison d’etre, and Being 17 is at its best when it leans into that approach.

There’s no denying that the domestic scenes of Free Solo are more powerful because you appreciate the madness of what Honnold is trying to do, and the climbing scenes are more powerful because you appreciate the full extent of what he’s risking to do it.

A slender but unholy cross between “First Reformed” and “The Exorcist."

The overarching plot of Palm Springs isn’t especially novel, but each scene is just sweet, funny, and demented enough to feel like a little surprise.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

The film is essentially a war of attrition between emotion and pragmatism, the rare thriller fueled by stress rather than speed.

Cuba and the Cameraman, while essentially a greatest hits collection for Alpert’s career, never feels recycled. It also never feels Frankensteined together.

The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.

Biller spins an archly funny — but also hyper-sincere — story about the true price of the patriarchy. There hasn’t been anything quite like it in decades.

A light but meaty piece of magical-realism that threads the needle between Cronenbergian body horror and Miyazaki-like fantasy to create a modern parable that evokes any number of identifiable emergencies — deforestation, the AIDS epidemic, the global migration crisis and its attendant xenophobia, etc. — in the service of a story that refuses to be reduced into a clear metaphor for any one of them.

A tense prison drama that’s penned into the trappings of a classic Western, The Mustang is a small movie about a subtle transformation, but its closing moments — however contrived they might be — are as touching as they are unexpected.

Powell and Arjona have fizzy chemistry with each other, which isn’t much of a shock for two people who could probably get a spark going with a paper bag during a rainstorm, but it’s fun to watch both of their characters throw themselves into their new lives.

But for all the luminous beauty of its images, "Grand Tour" sorely lacks a current strong enough to sustain the thoughts that flow between them, compelling as some of those thoughts may be.

It’s a shame that Meneghetti’s script (co-written with Malysone Bovorasmy) almost seems to be afraid of its own potency, as the movie stagnates over the course of a second act that relies on thin suspense and empty introspection when it can no longer bear to sit with the agony of Nina’s predicament.

Sensitive and lived-in and strong in ways that a more forceful version of this story could never have been, Bora’s debut sketches a portrait of a girl coming into her own strength, and learning to see the blank page of her life as an opportunity rather than a death sentence.

Too distracted to be a love story, too contained to be a city symphony, and not didactic enough to feel like an essay film, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? gradually coalesces into a kind of abstract pastoral romance more than anything else — it finds the romance that fringes everything around us, and captures it on camera with the unbearable lightness of a movie that knows we could never hope to see it with the naked eye.

I wish we got to see more of the big show at the end of the movie, but that’s almost beside the point — all that matters is that, somehow, someway, it goes on.

Tsai’s work sees generational defiance as a symptom of the ennui felt by their young subjects as they drift into adulthood, and Rebels’ unusually sharp focus on that theme makes it an accessible primer for the elements that would inform the more oblique masterpieces to come.

Life and Nothing More may be shot with the unblinking attention of Frederick Wiseman’s films — and share their same broad scope of concerns — but it’s always true to the tenderness of its title.

The results are a bit more wishy-washy than usual. If Mills’ films are typically aimed at the intersection where the personal and the universal collide, this one can be unspecific in a way that drifts toward vagueness.

A crackling, devious, and hugely satisfying old-school whodunnit with a modern twist ... Even if you do somehow manage to piece the whole thing together in advance, there’s no way of predicting the joy of watching it all unfold.