David Ehrlich

If the Coen brothers’ dramas are cautionary tales, their comedies are veritable how-to guides for people who can’t help but enjoy a mirthless chuckle at the humility of human existence. Yeah, the joke is on us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows.

It may have taken Hogg several decades to realize that her own box of darkness was actually a beautiful gift, but she unwraps it with the care and tenderness of someone who understands its true value.

He’s only Tom Cruise because nobody else is willing to be — or maybe he’s only Tom Cruise so that nobody else has to be. Either way, Fallout is the film he’s always promised us, and it was totally worth the wait.

The Power of the Dog sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film’s ending doesn’t stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar.

For all of its self-insistent detours and high-minded indulgences, I’m Thinking of Ending Things rarely feels like a concept in search of a movie. There’s a fullness and vitality to it that shines through even when the film is chasing its own tail, which is basically all it wants to do.

A ravishing neo-romantic takedown of Victorian repression, spooky and scathing in equal measure.

People change, some more than others, but 63 Up is so beautiful and bittersweet for how it finds them becoming who they are. Hopefully many of them live to enjoy it, and this series continues for a couple more decades to come.

As vulnerable as its predecessor and textured with the same velvet sense of becoming, “Part II” adds new layers of depth and distance to the looking glass of Hogg’s self-reflection.

Gentle as the stream that flows through the Yi’s property, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving — and immensely lovable — immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other.

This spry, sharp and relentlessly clever middle finger to censorship is Panahi’s boldest act of defiance to date.

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.

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.

These portraits don't have a hint of didacticism or preachiness, but "Ex Libris" achieves a certain emotional velocity all the same.

Building to an emotional wallop that’s almost on par with anything found in one of Miyazaki’s or Takahata’s films, The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness is pornographically interesting for Studio Ghibli fans; as a delicate depiction of the artistic spirit, it’s equally essential viewing for everyone else.

A devastating and deceptively simple tale adapted from 10th-century folklore, Isao Takahata’s The Tale Of Princess Kaguya distills a millennium of Japanese storytelling into a timeless film that feels both ancient and alive in equal measure.

In Licorice Pizza, time isn’t something that keeps people apart — it’s the only thing that allows them to find each other in the first place. And this euphoric movie doesn’t waste a minute of it.

Red Rocket is so arresting because of how it keeps hope alive by rescuing devastation from the jaws of happiness.

The least funny and most tender movie that Andersson has made since building his own studio with the profits he’d saved from decades of enormously successful commercial work, About Endlessness adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite.

Like all of the best comfort food, Tampopo tastes familiar but not derivative, something more than the sum of its ingredients. If Tampopo resonates with you in ways you might not expect or be able to name, it’s because Itami also engenders the same respect for everything that goes into the making of a movie.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

[A] furious and fiendishly well-crafted new film. ... Giddy one moment, unbearably tense the next, and always so entertaining and fine-tuned that you don’t even notice when it’s changing gears, “Parasite” takes all of the beats you expect to find in a Bong film and shrinks them down with clockwork precision.

Part B-movie spoof, part handcrafted satire, and always driven by a genuine vision for a better tomorrow, Diamantino is like looking at today’s Europe through a funhouse mirror, and somehow seeing it more clearly as a result.

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

While gripping from start to finish, there isn’t a minute of “Time” that feels engineered for our entertainment. And though Bradley’s grounded footage can seem at odds with Fox’s home videos — like ice floes dropped into a rushing spring — they ultimately melt together into the film’s most profound moments of enduring love.

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.