David Ehrlich

All That Breathes is determined to illustrate how two peoples’ failure to listen to each other is no different than one species’ failure to acknowledge the rest of its environment — that each aspect of Delhi is sharing the same broken conversation, whether they recognize that or not.

Told with the ramshackle energy of a first feature (but with a depth that hints at many more to come), Hart’s debut blossoms into a lovingly realized story of grief, getting by, and finding help in unexpected places.

Effectively portrays New York City as a cacophonous collision of disparate voices, sidestepping the nightmarish outcome of that child’s story in favor of a different, more enduringly visible disaster.

The Light of the Moon is a lucid, clinical, and wholly necessary drama about life after rape, and the while the film is far more watchable than it might sound (thanks in large part to Stephanie Beatriz’s rich and involving lead performance), viewers should know what’s in store for them.

Significantly more intimate and grounded than the previous “Hunger Games” movies (despite being longer than any of them and responsible for seeding all of their lore), “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” is the rare prequel that manages to stand on its own two feet and still feel taller than the other stories it’s ultimately meant to support.

The Chronology of Water can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy.

Studio 54 isn’t an especially clever or innovative film, but it taps into its namesake’s dormant spirit, and reclaims a famous piece of Manhattan folklore for the people who made it possible.

A movie theater may not be the safest place to hide from a tornado, but this winning July blockbuster makes perfectly clear that huddling in the dark with strangers is a hell of a lot better than watching the storm from home.

When lifetimes of latent drama come home to roost in the surprisingly eventful final scenes, Fourteen builds to an unsparingly lucid assessment of what two friends can take from — and carry for — each other.

Even when accounting for its forced and uncertain finale, this is the most poignant and perceptive thing that LaFosse has ever made, and therefore also the most painful.

While Love Life has its fair share of sharply written heart-to-hearts, many of its most touching moments (and all of its most telling ones) hinge on a certain kind of emotional geography.

The power of this sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama is rooted in the friction that it finds between biblical paternalism and modern personhood.

This lilting tale’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity proves inseparable from the lasting power of its punch-to-the-gut impact.

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.

While some of Bispuri’s scripting can be a bit too pointed for a story that traffics in such elemental textures (a brief flashback scene is particularly ill-advised), the film renders each of Vittoria’s mothers with such riveting and unvarnished empathy that you hardly even notice how their daughter is growing up before your eyes, stronger than the both of them.

Non-Fiction isn’t a surrender, nor is it a call to arms. It’s an anxious — but strangely calming! — reminder that change is the only true constant, and that steering the current is a lot easier than fighting it. Nobody does that better than Assayas, even when it looks like he’s not even trying.

If all of Perry’s stories have been hard to stomach, Her Smell takes things to impressive new lows before hitting bottom and tunneling out through the other side. It’s truly one of the most noxious movies ever made, which might help to explain why it’s also Perry’s best.

And “Megalopolis” — in its most dazzling and audacious moment — breaks through the screen to bridge the gap between life and thought, art and reality.

The genius of the franchise-reviving “Prey” and last summer’s utterly awesome “Killer of Killers” is that they both cast the Yautja as a foil first and an antagonist second. Now, the super fun and fantastically spirited “Predator: Badlands” takes that approach to its logical conclusion by making one of these creatures the hero of a story in which he gets deprogrammed of his culture’s “The Most Dangerous Game”-inspired approach to other species.

Anchored by a brilliant Mélanie Thierry, whose stone-eyed lead performance is at the center of almost every frame, Finkiel’s film never betrays the distance that Duras inserted between herself and her own experiences, or that she wrote from the perspective of a vessel as much as she did a subject.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

If Cold Case Hammarskjöld resolves as Brügger’s most rewarding film, it appears to reach that point almost by accident. His usual methods achieve most unusual results, as he digs into the facts with the wry amusement of someone who doesn’t expect to find anything.

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.

In its haphazard search for facts, it happens upon a great many truths about how we see each other, and the price we pay for looking too closely.

Each scene is so quietly compelling because Haigh doesn’t focus on cruelty, but helplessness.

An 81-minute film that’s as crisp and bittersweet as a late autumn breeze, Kaurismäki’s latest might amount to little more than a bauble in the end, but it offers a stirring reminder — both with its story, and through the experience of watching it — that life can only be so bleak so long as you can still go to the movies and escape it for a little while.

Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.

At a time when movies are growing more plastic by the day, it’s always a thrill to experience something that’s so attuned to the tactile pleasures of the cinema; to see a movie that you can feel with your fingers even when it bypasses your heart or goes over your head.

Pleasure — which is almost by default the most knowing and honest commercial film that’s been made about the modern American porn industry — is determined to avoid framing pleasure and business in binary terms.

That Bad Apples is so much fun to hem and haw about is a testament to Ronan’s typically excellent performance, which showcases both her low-key comic charm and also her pronounced talent for ambivalence.

Great Absence isn’t quite as allergic to sentiment as this slow and steady film might seem on the surface, and it’s prone to metaphor in a way that a less honest story would never be able to survive, but Kei is committed to keeping things at the same even keel as Yamazaki Yutaka’s locked-off cinematography.

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns Killers of the Flower Moon into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.

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.

For all of the film’s janky pacing, thoroughly mediocre action setpieces, and the clumsiness with which it’s forced to double as backdoor pilot for Disney Plus’ “Ironheart” series, Coogler’s subthread of the MCU continues to operate at a significantly higher strata of thought, artistry, and feeling than the rest of Marvel’s assembly line.

The scarring power of Nyoni’s film ignites from Shula’s eventual realization that she would rather torch her family to the ground than let them forget what happened.

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.

Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.

Kill makes very, very good on its goofy title by the time all is said and done, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it inverts expectations without ever getting off-track.

Erlingsson has created a winsome knickknack of a movie that manages to reframe the 21st century’s signature crisis in a way that makes room for real heroism.

A broadly safe film like “Finch” might roll into its destination with an ease that belies the risks of getting there, but sometimes the real treasure is the friends we build along the way.

In Beginning, the borders of the frame aren’t just the iron bars of a jail cell, they’re also the garden walls of Eden, the tempting hiss of the snake, and the angel of the lord who interrupted Abraham from killing his son.

Rossi’s scathing (yet seemingly fair) documentary doesn’t just illustrate the institutional ironies of modern education. It also strives to understand why tuition is at an all-time high when knowledge is practically free.

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

Entrancing from the start but slow to reveal the full scope of Wilson’s vision, Look Into My Eyes locks into that furtively cinematic essence by framing its psychic readings with a stiff naturalism that recalls the interview scenes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life.”

A lucid crystallization of both Arulpragasam’s private life and her public mission, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. offers an intimate profile of a righteously modern renegade without ever feeling like propaganda or a plea to stream her latest album on Spotify.

As Swift observes in the movie, powerful women are given the almost impossible task of being “strategic” but not “calculating,” and Wilson is so good at splitting the difference that some of her documentary’s most humanizing moments are beautiful for how they contradict Swift’s intention.

Director Michael Winterbottom hasn’t just delivered the funniest movie of the year, but also a comedy that casts its characters in a harsh new light.

A nuanced portrait of a city in flux (or decline) that uses the impressionableness of adolescence to shake our own understanding of gentrification and its residual effects, Little Men is that rarest of beasts: a truly hopeful heartbreaker.

Once the menacing and mysterious Screenslaver is introduced, inciting a Spielberg-level monorail chase that reaffirms Bird’s lucid gift for kinetic and character-driven action filmmaking, the movie blasts off and never looks back.

De Wilde doesn’t strain for relevance or reinvent the wheel, she just unapologetically serves dessert for dinner until you’re left with the satisfaction of eating a three-course meal.

While nothing in your life may come as easily to you as everything in Coldplay’s lives seems to have come to them, this delightful and unexpectedly inspiring documentary has a funny way of making your dreams seem closer than they might appear.

Hypnotic from start to finish and unexpectedly hopeful for a movie with so much arsenic in its blood, Islands knows that even the greatest of vacations can never compete with the rewards of fostering a reality you actually want to return to when it’s over.

This semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.

The coolheaded patience of Burns’ approach is precisely what makes “The Report” so powerful in the end, not only as a lucid crystallization of our country’s recent political history, but also as an urgent reminder of how a world that prioritizes emotions over ethics will eat itself alive.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

Few movies have ever so boldly explored how fraught the safety of unconditional love can be in such a cruel world, and even fewer — including Aster’s own “Hereditary” — have been so willing to sit with the irreconcilable horrors of trying to share that love with someone else.

Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.

This intimate, unvarnished, and occasionally transcendent micro-portrait may seldom leave Dunning’s property, but it takes stock of the whole world.

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.

Anaïs isn’t so different in the wonderfully surprising last shot than she is in the first, but at last we can see that she’s having the time of her life.

The whole movie is suspended in a pleasant and intimate space between order and chaos, love and abandonment, leaving the nest and building a new one. Every time Shithouse borrows from something else, it only seems to become more itself.

Spurlock’s quest to put Chick-fil-A out of business is always entertaining — the filmmaker is still a charming and quick-witted man of the people, and his shtick has aged much better than Michael Moore’s — but if “Super-Size Me 2” isn’t quite as funny as the first installment, it’s considerably more horrifying.

In the Earth may not run deep enough to grow roots, but it’s the first COVID movie that dares to think beyond what it can see in front of its face, venture into the world outside, and confront how terrifying and necessary it’s going to be to commune with nature on new terms when the nightmare is over.

This is powerful and uniquely disquieting cinema that should reward the curiosity of those brave enough to seek it out, but you can only stare into a bottomless abyss for so long before you lose the will to keep looking.

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.

[A] delightful and unusually spirited love letter ... Tempting as it can be to wish that Wright had slowed down, probed deeper, and leaned even harder into the Mael brothers’ love of movies, it’s so fun and thrilling to watch the movies finally love them back.

As usual, Strickland has made a sumptuous meal out of social impropriety — a strange cinematic delicacy about the discomforts that need to be shared so that others don’t have to be stomached.

The emotional rawness of that super-real encounter is typical of what viewers will find scattered across Cutler’s film, an 135-minute opus — complete with intermission! — that indulges Eilish fans without alienating casual passersby.

It’s not a movie about healing so much as a movie about learning to hurt in the healthiest way possible. And if its diaristic, inside-out approach has the strange effect of keeping us at a distance . . . it also invites its most vulnerable young viewers to appreciate that even their favorite superstar is still fighting to be closer to herself.

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.

This heartfelt origin story is more than the sum of its immense charm and Spielbergian attention to detail.

This haunted and harrowing psychodrama — based on surviving records from the 18th century, and rooted in the day-to-day tedium of Styrian farm life — has too much respect for its emotionally isolated heroine to frame her unraveling as part of a broader phenomenon.

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.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

While it’s a mild shame “The Naked Gun” peters out a little bit toward the end (at least before rebounding during the credits), it’s even more of a shame that it has to end at all.

This soulful and deeply satisfying film — a fitting swansong, if ever there was one — makes a compelling argument that change is always possible, and that the path we’re on is never as narrow as the highway makes it look.

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

Shot in beautifully textured 16mm and told at an unhurried pace, Person to Person requires some getting used to, but once you settle into its groove the movie becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

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.

Gyllenhaal has been too good too often to label any one of her performances as her best, but she’s certainly never been better than she is here.

Sing Street is a winsomely entertaining musical tribute to how passion can pave the way towards a better life.

An exhilarating postmodern comedy about people fighting for every moment of screen time they’re able to wrest from this stupid world before they have to leave it, Red Post on Escher Street is the best argument for Sono’s vital body of work since 2015’s “The Whispering Star,” and a perfect opportunity for newcomers to get their toes wet.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

Blisteringly cool one moment and ridiculously silly the next (much like its high school heroine), this punchy and propulsive late summer surprise is able to capture the way we live now because it displays such a vivid understanding of the reasons why we live that way.

If “Synonyms” was a howl, Ahed’s Knee is the spittle that was still left in Lapid’s mouth when it was over. It’s a smaller and less electrifying film — as contained and implosive as its title’s reference to Éric Rohmer would suggest — but also one that cuts to the heart of Lapid’s visceral genius and cauterizes the open wound at the center of his body of work.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.

In some ways, it’s the softest and most subtle of her six features. In others, it’s the most violent and stubborn of the lot, stunted in many of the same places where her previous stuff flowed like river water. But if Maya isn’t the best of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films, there’s a wayward urgency to the whole thing that makes it feel like it might have been a necessary one for her to make.

Herzog shoots first, and asks how the footage might be pertinent to his project later; Into the Inferno often feels scattered and listless as a result, but this tactic is also responsible for so many of the movie’s most perfect moments.

Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, R.M.N. masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union.

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.

Don’t be fooled by the airiness of its wine-drunk aesthetic or the languor of its pacing: Last Summer is every inch a Catherine Breillat movie, and its effervescent sheen is nothing but a natural distraction from the uncertain gloom that comes with the fall.

Raiff scales up the disarming earnestness of his debut without losing any of its DIY intimacy.

Black Panther is different. It’s the first one of these films that flows with a genuine sense of culture and identity, memory and musicality. It’s the first one of these films that doesn’t merely reckon with power and subjugation in the abstract, but also gives those ideas actual weight by grafting them onto specific bodies and confronting the historical ways in which they’ve shaped our universe.

Twinless mines a steady drumbeat of solid laughs from the mismatched energy of its co-leads, and the Pinter-like precision of Sweeney’s dialogue is especially well-suited to the scenes where Dennis and Roman are talking at each other on completely different wavelengths.

While the storytelling grows frustratingly elliptical, Lelio so desperate to constrain the drama that he resorts to removing helpful pieces of it, the scenes that remain are succinct and evocative.

The result is a low-key but lingeringly resonant tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director — an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret.

It’s only because Freire’s hyper-combustible debut feature remains so true to itself that we believe Malu and Lili might find what they’re looking for, even if it ultimately doesn’t look anything like what we expected them to find.