David Ehrlich

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.

This is a soul-stirring and fiercely uncynical film that suggests the entire world is a living museum for the people we’ve lost, and that we should all hope to leave some of ourselves behind in its infinite cabinet of wonders.

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.

Like a game of Russian roulette, this is a movie that would have seemed embarrassingly stupid if things had gone wrong. It’s a dangerous and somehow enjoyable movie that dances around the edge of an open wound from start to finish as it risks making light of the heaviest things that so many of its viewers will ever have to carry. But it’s exhilarating — a little at first, and then a hell of a lot — to see these characters find the kind of happiness worth dying for.

Unfolding like a symphony of small humiliations, there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel at least vaguely familiar, and there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel completely true.

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

Bergman Island is a heart-stoppingly poignant stunner all the same — one beating inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination.

A beautifully tender comedy that tears your heart in half with a featherlight touch — a film that swerves between tragedy and gallows humor with the expert control of a stunt driver, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke.

An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years.

It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.

For now, the only thing that matters is that after 13 years of being a punchline, “going back to Pandora” just became the best deal on Earth for the price of a movie ticket.

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.

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

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.

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

There are any number of movies about gay men trying to liberate themselves from the long shadow of heteronormative oppression — a regrettably, enduringly relevant premise — but few have been told with the extraordinary nuance or compassion of Jayro Bustamante’s Tremors.

Far and away the best animated film of the year so far (one worthy of such hosannas no matter how limited the competition has been), this heartfelt tale of love and loss is the most visually enchanting feature its studio has made thus far, as well as the most poignant.

Between meaning and mayhem. This meandering but laser-focused essay film is, like the best episodes of Wilson’s show, sustained by parallel dramatic questions that inevitably answer each other by the end.

For all of its provocatively cerebral ideas, the prevailing truth is that Goodbye To Language is actually a great deal of fun—not just to think about, but also to experience. It’s “Godard: The Ride.”

While this is arguably Greengrass’ best film, it’s almost certainly his most urgent.

An instantly and enduringly compelling documentary.

Palo Alto is one of the best movies ever made about high school life in America (admittedly a low bar), blurring the lines between how unique it is to be a teenager, and how universal it is to feel like one.

A feral and staggeringly well-conceived revenge saga.

When Allen conceives of a character this great, it’s hard not to wish for him to slow down and maybe write that extra draft to refine his creation, but Blanchett – at once both repellant and eminently relatable – uses the casual tone to her advantage, the same way that monster movies use miniatures for scale.

The human imperative informs every aspect of After Tiller, resulting in an unexpectedly warm film.

The most fun and least depressing superhero movie in a very long time, Gunn’s deliriously ultra-violent “The Suicide Squad” wears the yoke of its genre with a lightness that allows it to slip loose of the usual restraints, if not quite shake them off altogether.

At once both more forceful and more inscrutable than Filho’s previous work, Bacurau plunges deeper into midnight territory as its core ideas take hold, its ghosts become literal, and its heroes take up arms.

Shot with raw specificity and a remarkable sense of place, Dayveon doesn’t cut through its clichés so much as it is reclaims them as the stuff of real life.