David Ehrlich

Corbet and Fastvold’s script is left to engineer a reductive non-climax that illustrates the relationship between capitalist and laborer in the most obvious terms imaginable.

O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow.

Quick, vibrant, pulsing with all sorts of crossover appeal until a slightly moribund energy takes hold toward the end, Trier’s film is never more fun than when Julie is second-guessing herself and/or trying to keep time from slipping through her fingers.

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.

32 Sounds wants nothing more than to send audiences back out into the world with ears wide open. With the on-screen help of Le Tigre musician and co-conspirator JD Samson, Green accomplishes that goal so well that it feels like he probably could’ve gotten the job done with just 16 sounds instead, but this playful and aggressively pleasant little film is an easy sit, and the strength of its individual episodes — in addition to the echoes that resonate between them — helps to absolve the discordant chaos of their arrangement.

Marrying the biting frenzy of Terry Gilliam’s film universe with the explosive grandeur of James Cameron, Miller cooks up some exhilaratingly sustained action. But the key to this symphony of twisted metal is how the film never forgets that violence is a sort of madness.

The director never intrudes on his film, but — even through the melancholic veil that Collin drapes over this ghostly portrait of the past — you can still feel his unbridled sense of discovery as he introduces the man who made this movie possible.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

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.

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.

These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but Sound of Falling so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us.

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

Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

It’s a brave thing, to tell a story by omission, but Pawlikowski almost pulls it off.

An immense, brave, and genuinely earth-shaking self-portrait that explores sexual assault with a degree of nuance and humility often missing from the current discourse, The Tale is undeniably primed for the #MeToo movement, but it’s also so much bigger than that.

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.

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.

The ultimate value of the famed filmmaker’s latest documentary—a subject National Gallery turns into a reflexive concern—is not that Wiseman makes it possible for a broader audience to see these priceless works of art, but that the scope of his project invites all audiences to look at them through an illuminating new lens.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

The Hidden Fortress is a bracing adventure in its own right — not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world.

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.

Seymour unfolds like a Jewish Jiro Dreams of Sushi—Bernstein may look like your average NYC grandpa, but he lives like a monk and talks like a guru.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

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.

It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.

If Great Freedom is a subdued film more interested in studying old scar tissue than licking up fresh wounds, the rare instances when it draws blood . . . are all the more bruising as a result.

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.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”