David Ehrlich

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.

While all of the people they meet are delightful characters who the film manages to milk for every ounce of their personality, Varda and JR inevitably emerge as the real stars here.

American Utopia isn’t just a concert doc, but also a life-affirming, euphoria-producing, soul-energizing sing-along protest film that’s asking us to rise up against our own complacency.

A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself.

Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, and the Israeli military, like all thieves, wilts in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning array than it is here. Now it only has to be seen.

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

TÁR is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them.

Few movies have so palpably conveyed the sheer isolation of fear, and the extent to which history is often made by people who are just trying to survive it — few movies have so vividly illustrated that one man can only do as much for his country as a country can do for one of its men.

An awe-inspiring film.

Razor-sharp and shatteringly romantic ... as perfect a film as any to have premiered this year.

It’s a sexy concept that will thrill Assayas neophytes, but the director’s longtime fans will find its pleasures virtually pornographic.

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.

It’s no surprise that Hertzfeldt distills the tragicomic absurdity of being alive in 2020 better than any other filmmaker has thus far (after all, he’s been doing it for the last two decades).

For a biblically-scaled film cycle so rich with irony that it seems to be chipping off the walls of the brutalist apartment complex where most of it takes place, perhaps the greatest irony of them all is that Dekalog is ultimately defined by its humility.

Robert Eggers' uncompromising directorial debut is a bracingly new experience that boils with the primordial fever of America's original sins.

Mistress America steamrolls through its mesmerizingly dense running time with such joyous violence that its themes only bubble up to the surface in retrospect, the heart of the movie identified like the dental records of a body that’s been burned beyond all recognition.

One Battle After Another might be among the sillier films that Anderson has ever made, but there’s no mistaking the sincerity of its horrors, or how lucidly it diagnoses the smallness of the men inflecting them upon the innocent and the vulnerable.

As with most miracles, Sunset Song is more likely to evoke awe than any one particular emotion; it accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm.

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.

While this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, The Boy and the Heron finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

Things to Come may lack the urgency or cool that flecks the writer-director’s previous movies, but this is perhaps her richest piece to date, a warm, funny and profoundly sensitive portrait of letting go and learning to make new memories.

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.

Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.

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.

Alternately funny, touching, tough and hopeful, In Transit never tells you how to feel, but it sure makes it easy to feel it.

The final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it’s too late.

Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, “Anora” has next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right.

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

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one that self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s own experiences as a mother, but the film refuses to wink at its audience or often even the slightest hint of memeable solidarity.

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.

These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire, and Guadagnino’s deliriously enjoyable movie doesn’t let any of its characters get off until even the most sophisticated Hawk-Eye line-calling technology on Earth would be unable to pinpoint the exact spot where tennis ends and sex begins.

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.

For all of its clumsiness and rookie missteps (which continue through the film’s gut-punch of a coda), His House is an urgent and spine-tingling ghost story about what it means to begin anew in a home that may not want you to live in it.

The genius of Kikuchi’s performance is that – by the end – her slow descent into mania humanizes Kumiko precisely when it would have been so easy to reduce her into caricature.

A documentary as sprawling and brilliant and flawed as the country it traverses, Eugene Jarecki’s The Promised Land is a fascinatingly overstuffed portrait of America in decline.

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.

The result is at once both the most ordinary and most enchanted thing that Sciamma has made so far, a wise and delicate wisp of a movie.

A Hidden Life is a lucid and profoundly defiant portrait of faith in crisis.

To quote a poem that Orlando reads toward the end, the dead are “not gone, but merely within you.” This urgent and beautiful documentary urges us to let them out.

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.

The ultimate brilliance of Fastvold’s movie, which remains without question for all of its peaks and valleys, is that it has the courage to reimagine the essence of belonging itself; to see it not as something we find, but rather as something that we create together.

Anyone who’s willing to meet this movie on its own terms and roll with the dream logic it requires will be rewarded with a resonantly cathartic saga about the struggle to find beauty in a world that forces us to leave parts of ourselves behind.

More than just a hypnotically hyper-real distillation of what it means to be young, All These Sleepless Nights is a haunted vision of what it means to have been young.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

A hyper-stylish and unexpectedly sweet rebuke to the idea that screwing people is a good way to get ahead, Gavras’ second feature manages the almost impossible task of mining something nice from the me-first mentality that’s been sweeping across modern Europe.

Talbot has a gift for making twee material feel true, but his grip weakens during the pivotal home stretch of his debut, and as a result the ending doesn’t land with the emotion it deserves.

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.

Human Flow is an epic portrait of mass migration that understands how a lack of empathy often stems from a failure of imagination.

High Life is fixated on the hypnotic rhythms of oblivion, and the human desires it brings to the surface.

Dano crafts an unsparing portrait that’s harsh and humane in equal measure.

A wrenching self-portrait of inherited abuse that joins “The Tale” and “Leaving Neverland” on a growing list of essential and unfathomably brave films about the internalization of sexual trauma. What “Rewind” sometimes lacks in elegance, it makes up for in immediacy.

Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while .

The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

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 World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.

It’s the rare movie that can drop a long-take dance sequence into the middle of a pressing conversation without seeming the least bit mannered or aloof; the rare movie that only feels more honest as a result of its most flamboyant choices, and only makes its heroine more empathetic as a result of how she pushes other people away.

This is Hamilton as you always wanted to see it, and it always will be.

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

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.

This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.

Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen.

Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that Titane is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.

Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.

The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might.

A master of threading the needle between conflict and contrivance, Kore-eda manages to turn this drama inside out without every betraying its most resonant truth.

The absolute immediacy of Lee’s performance allows you to feel every frame of Past Lives on your skin, which is crucial to a film that conveys the brunt of its meaning through sense instead of story; a film that commands its placid rhythms and ethereal fussiness with a confidence that elevates Song’s “people don’t talk like that” dialogue into a decisive plus.

A Bigger Splash has neither a clear center nor a clear moral, and it's all the better for it. This is a film about behavior, not plot — and how people are ruled by emotion, and not logic.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

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

The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.

Citizenfour offers a remarkably intimate look at history as it happened. In fact, the immediacy of Poitras’ film is so remarkable that, at least for the immediate future, her craft is likely to be overshadowed by her access, her storytelling overshadowed by her opportunity.

It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

Days becomes such a resonant addition to Tsai’s exhumed body of work because the filmmaker recognizes and embraces that uncharacteristically sentimental undertow; the last 30 minutes of this (relatively short) movie reward viewers who’ve spent the previous 90 minutes searching — reaching — for a souvenir they might be able to take away from it.

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.

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.

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is.

One of the greatest comedy sequels ever made.

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.

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.

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.

Such an internally combusting prequel might seem like a strange lead-in to a movie that spit fire in every direction, but don’t you worry: George Miller still has what it takes to make it epic.

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.

The subtly profound ways in which this movie distorts the recent past makes it one of the most radically entertaining things its iconoclastic scribe has ever written.

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.

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

Hard as it might be to imagine, Women Talking is an upbeat and propulsive film cut with a sharp wit and a ready sense of humor, even if its characters are often laughing as hard as they wish they could cry.

By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction.

If Spider-Man: No Way Home is the poison, this is its antidote.

Through its hushed portrait of loss and reclamation, After Yang whispers a powerful fable about an all too present tomorrow in which people are more intimate with technology than they are with their own family. Few movies have ever felt so knowing or non-judgmental towards the love that we divert onto material things, and even fewer have so earnestly speculated that those things might be able to love us back.

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.

Verbinski packs so much stuff into his giddy Grand Guignol, and the more he crams in the better it works.

Brizé ("Mademoiselle Chambon") is a humanist, not an economist, and his modest but moving new film is a welcome reminder that — for someone who can't afford to put food on the table or provide a proper education for their child— business is always personal.

The staggeringly well-crafted Isle of Dogs is nothing if not Anderson’s most imaginative film to date.

However you slice it, this is the rare CGI movie that radiates its own kind of inventive beauty, slick without feeling plastic, and the artistry that made it possible deserves to be celebrated on its own merits.

There's an undeniable genius at work here, strong enough to survive the psychedelic sleaze that's been baked into every frame.

Coen smartly plucks his cast from a rich mix of famous screen actors (e.g. Sean Patrick Harris, Stephen Root) and world-class veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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.

It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success.

If A Family Tour is sweet and more sedate than the dissident filmmaker’s previous work, it might also be the angriest thing he’s ever made. The coiled fury he displayed in “When Night Falls” (and “Taking Father Home” before that) has metastasized into a paralytic rage; his homeland’s betrayal is no longer just the focus of his life’s work, but also the full extent of his life itself.

Last Men in Aleppo is less about finding meaning amidst a massacre than it is about people who are trying to survive without it.

This raw and lingeringly sensitive film resonates more strongly when it’s lost in the ice maze than when it’s tracing its steps back to the entrance. The Breaking Ice sticks with you because it doesn’t lead its characters out of the maze, it just melts down the walls between them.

Tragic and terrifying in equal measure, Wu’s intimate portrait of China’s live-streaming culture uses one country’s recent past as a dark portal into our collective future, sketching a world in which even the most basic pleasures of human connection can only be experienced vicariously.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Expedition To The End Of The World courses with the zeal of Robert Flaherty, the fearlessness of Werner Herzog, and the fatalistic humor of Lars Von Trier. While individual moments echo with a familiarly mordant sense of alpha-male adventure, together they cohere into something wild and new.

This wise and diaphanous little drama finds Kore-eda once again exploring his usual obsessions, as the man behind the likes of “Still Walking” and “After the Storm” offers yet another insightful look at the underlying fabric of a modern family.

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.

Rebuilding accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way. Even the film’s most schematic moments make it feel as though Walker-Silverman is simply unearthing something that was already there.

Empowered by the indivisible viscerality of Monk’s work (a massive Zoom discussion on her career immediately devolves into a mess of voices unintelligible enough to sound like one of Monk’s performances), Shebar’s film relies on creative urgency to compensate for what it lacks in specific insight.

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.

Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment.

Its characteristic focus on the tension between tactile labor and abstract crises — between day-to-day upkeep and spiritual survival — is present from the opening moments, but so is its characteristic refusal to artificially define the contours of that tension.

The directors do a brilliant job of making its ad-hoc, mixed-media aesthetic into more of a feature than a bug. Glitched together from dozens of Charli’s boom-tastic PC Music bangers and punctuated with computer-generated animation (impish avatars and the like), the film nails the semi-digital existence that we all have come to understand as its own kind of reality.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

The Father exists for no discernible reason other than to render an inexplicably cruel element of the human condition in a recognizable way, and to do so in a way that only good art can.

Where Hogg’s last two movies saw the filmmaker tracing a version of herself from memory, this one sees her tracing a memory from a version of herself.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.

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 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.

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.

Longley’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “Iraq in Fragments” finds a way to negotiate between empathy and condescension.

The non-linear shape of its story doesn’t just allow Weapons to disguise the age-old genre pattern of tension and release, it also allows Cregger to condense it until he’s completely elided the distance between horror and comedy, terror and relief, self-control and surrender.

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.

While the film covers — and somehow manages to contain — a staggering breadth of topics and ramifications, one little sentence is all it takes to lay out the means and ends of the crisis at hand: Russia didn’t hack Facebook, Russia used Facebook.

Despite its new failures and familiar assortment of dud stunts (Wee-Man being launched onto a pile of metal is a pretty lame payoff to that musical chairs gag), Jackass Forever inevitably benefits from a stronger emotional undertow than any of the series’ previous films.

Revenge is a bit too thin to sustain its running time (despite its slickness and mesmeric rhythm), but Fargeat’s well-executed finale is worth the wait, particularly for how it cements Lutz as a final girl for the ages. A girl who’s stripped of her humanity, and then finds the strength to return the favor several times over.

It leans into the tonal chaos of life on earth, creating an impressively layered genre mishmash that reflects the complex reality of how women are seen in the world, and how they see themselves in return.

While there’s a certain “muchness” to Rankin’s style, and it goes without saying this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, the filmmaker’s refusal to temper his vision serves him well in the long run, as his feature debut eventually achieves an operatic wackiness that carries it over the finish line.

Durkin’s movie has its fair share of crucial moments in the ring, but none of them would land with a fraction of the same impact if not for the many crystalline little moments in which Kerry, Kevin, David, and Mike get to build each other up.

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

Structured like a fireworks display, with only a handful of small reprieves throughout, Brimstone & Glory naturally builds to a marvelous grand finale.

So urgent and far-reaching that it never settles into the comforts of a coming-of-age story, The Breadwinner is a small film about the biggest things. It’s engaging from start to finish, but Twomey — to her great credit — prioritizes stoicism over sentimentality.

Wendy doesn’t take the appeal of “Beasts” in a new direction, but it clarifies its strongest qualities. Zeitlin’s roving narrative techniques may have their limitations, but this spellbinding followup proves they still have juice. Everyone grows up, but the “Beasts” formula has yet to grow old.

Charlène Favier’s Slalom is a familiar story of sexual abuse, but one told with such bracing intensity that it snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air.

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.

It may not be the best Pixar movie, or the riskiest — it sure as hell isn’t the most ambitious — but Luca is also one of the precious few that feels like it isn’t afraid to be something else.

This isn’t a film that strives for big laughs — McDonagh seems more interested in putting you in a particular frame of mind, even when doing so requires a fair bit of downtime and dead air — but its constant undercurrent of humor affords the story’s most pressing questions an appropriately ridiculous context, one that speaks to the absurdities of all existence.

Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.

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.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.

Faraut is able to conflate the cinema’s quixotic obsession with reality with the athlete’s similarly impossible dream of perfection. In its own playful way, his film celebrates the beautiful folly of both pursuits.

What starts as the knotted stuff of violent coincidence soon unravels into something more bittersweet, as Mads Mikkelsen’s first movie after Oscar winner “Another Round” restitches itself into another giddy and unexpectedly poignant modern fable about the search for meaning in a world where everything happens by chance, but nothing is a coincidence.

It’s a project that was made to restore a certain way of seeing; to punch a hole through the screen that separates people from the reality of what’s happening in their world. But in trying to get so close to the truth without touching it, Hassan almost fell into the same gap that he was trying to bridge.

The more that Goddard upends our assumptions about who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s going to live through the night, the more we realize that we’re rooting for all of these fucked-up people to get right with the world. It’s massively didactic, but in a way that encourages us to dwell on how we feel about these characters, and how malleable those feelings are.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

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, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

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.

One of the most compelling things about Karem Sanga’s raw and emotionally radiant First Girl I Loved is how well it captures the heart-pounding terror of becoming someone, the one-way nausea of committing to yourself.

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.

It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but Ride or Die retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

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.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

Babyteeth is the kind of soft-hearted tearjerker that does everything in its power to rescue beauty from pain.

A rambling magic trick of a movie that reanimates a hazy chapter of American history by unmooring it from the facts of its time, and even perhaps from time itself.

That The Card Counter shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm.

The raw and resonant Passages is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

The film has the power to make our bodies catch up with our hearts — the power to help us safely experience the kind of terror we need to remember in a way that makes it impossible for us to forget.

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.

Lane has an unmatched ability to strike the right balance between anger and absurdism, and frames the Temple in a revelatory moral light.

Yes, this crushingly personal film can make you feel like you’re intruding on a sacred ritual between perfect strangers, but that sense of trespassing (or TMI) is also what allows Last Flight Home to be such an immediate argument for the universal right to die.

Locked in a heated conversation with its own campiness from the moment it starts, 'House of Gucci' leverages that underlying conflict into an operatic portrait of the tension between wealth and value.

A blunt, breathless, and astoundingly unsentimental morality play that’s told with the intensity of a ticking-clock thriller, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx is every bit as ominous as its title suggests, and far less fanciful.

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 Bob Fosse had fallen in love with CGI instead of jazz hands, this is probably the kind of movie he would’ve made.

The film never loses its strong sense of character, but those characters deserve a bit more love than they’re afforded. Still, Lynskey and Wood see it through.

Whereas most docs about “different” people are content to flatter our empathy, Dina aims to deepen it.

Few narrative dramas (if any) have more sensitively explored the nuances of growing up transgender, the bravery required to transition, and the struggle for self-acceptance that can motivate or define that process. Likewise, few narrative dramas (if any) have more palpably distilled the pain of being deadnamed, the humiliation of being reduced to your body, and the cruelty of being misrepresented as something that you’re not.

It doesn’t help that Plante frustratingly writes around the palpable tension between the swimmers’ individual success and their value to each other as teammates. But if his film sometimes mistakes murkiness for ambiguity, it still resolves as a deeply felt (almost anthropological) look at a rare butterfly in search of the second chrysalis she needs to spread her wings and become herself all over again.

Lynch’s directorial debut is a wisp of a movie, blowing across the screen like a tumbleweed, but it’s also the rare portrait of mortality that’s both fun and full of life.

Of all the non-fiction movies that have already been made about the toxic cesspool of the 2016 election, or how Trump emerged from it like a leather-tanned Swamp Thing, Get Me Roger Stone is the one that best articulates how we got here and who’s to blame.

As is often the case with Denis’ films, Fire grows more illuminating as it gets hotter; what starts like a constrained and unusually jagged French drama is eventually forged into an incendiary portrait of three people who — to varying degrees — all delude themselves into thinking that the past is possible to quarantine away from the present.

Ema doesn’t always dance to a clear or recognizable beat, but anybody willing to get on its wavelength will be rewarded with one of the year’s most dynamic and electrifying films.

Thoroughbred is a dark and pointed piece of work that depends on the delicacy with which someone can thread the needle between Hitchcockian suspense and capitalistic venom, and Finley — adapting his own play to the screen — demonstrates a cinematic authority that eludes many filmmakers who have worked in the medium for decades.

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.

That From Ground Zero exists is both a tragedy and a miracle in unequal measure, a fact that proves impossible to forget over the course of a film whose every frame has been rescued from the rubble of an ongoing genocide.

Jan Hřebejk’s The Teacher is a sardonic, richly seriocomic morality play that uses a delicate touch to explore why communism never seems to work out in the long run.

Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

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.

It’s undeniably affirming to watch someone risk it all in order to embrace who they really are, even if that’s not who the world said they should want to be. It’s been one hell of a journey, but David Arquette has finally found the role of a lifetime.

An agile, vicious piece of work that’s anchored by extraordinary performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una maintains its grip even when swinging a bit too hard for the fences.

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.

The film misses the core emotional charge of “A Separation” despite a similar eagerness to wade into the weeds of Iranian civil law, but what it lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the Socratic purity of its structure and the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one?

The documentary lets its subject’s weathered charisma do most of the hard work here — Scorsese and Tedeschi love him too much to beg for your attention — and yet it weaves in enough context to convince even the biggest New York Dolls neophytes of the band’s legacy. Even longtime fans might be struck by the contrast between the breeziness of the film’s tone and the weight of its history.

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.

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.

It’s easy to imagine how a version of this film might have descended into vaguely connected sketches (and still would have been one of the funniest pure comedies in forever despite its shapelessness), but there’s a clear and rewarding intentionality to DeYoung’s plotting, and it pays off with a finale that — better than almost any scene before it — perfectly threads the needle between all of the movie’s competing energies.

Pansy’s general distaste for humanity would make Mr. Burns seem big-hearted by comparison, but Leigh’s faith in the root humanity of Jean-Baptiste’s performance — and in the hurt that guides it through even the broadest moments of humor — allows him to indulge in a variety of laugh-out-loud setpieces without any risk of losing Pansy to caricature.

Modest and casual until the exact moment when the film’s master plan suddenly clicks into place like the hammer of a gun transforming a neutral tool into a deadly weapon, “Good One” is the kind of movie that tightens its complete lack of tension into a knot in the pit of your stomach.

However disappointing it might be that Bad Education is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance.

Splitting the difference between silent cinema slapstick and the cartoon roguishness of Benny Hill, this is still the kind of old-fashioned, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.

A thoughtful, fast-paced, and immaculately acted procedural that unfolds with the urgency of a newspaper deadline, By the Grace of God zips through the facts of this horrid case, while also shaping them into a lens through which to examine the uneasy relationships between mercy and justice — between faith and the flawed institution that exists to preserve it.

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

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.

Abrupt to a fault but still unexpectedly moving, their perpendicular journeys back to a place of mutual appreciation ring true enough in a time when narcissism can bring joy to people around the planet, and altruism isn’t enough to guarantee a connection with your own kids.

Robbie, for her part, has never been better. Making the most of her first leading role since Z for Zachariah, she does a brilliant job of skating along the thin line that runs between glory and the gutter. Sympathetic but not too sympathetic, her performance is all that allows the film to maintain its tenuous hold over its queasy tragicomedy.

If you have even the slightest emotional connection to Springsteen’s music — if you’ve ever found salvation in a rock song, or desperately wished that you could change your clothes, your hair, your face — this giddy steamroller of a movie is going to flatten you whether you like it or not.

Tragic news for anyone who’s sick of superhero movies: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse completely reinvigorates the genre, reaffirms why it’s resonating with a diverse modern audience that’s desperate to fight the power, and reiterates to us how these hyper-popular spandex myths are able to reinvent themselves on the fly whenever things get stale.

There may be individual shots in this movie that cost more than the director’s entire pre-existing output, but make no mistake: This is a David Lowery movie — a movie imbued with the same tactile nature and uniquely American flair for myth-making that characterized his Sundance breakthrough, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.”

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

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.

In the end, Jones’ performance is even more lifelike than I feared — a tortured and astonishingly nuanced rendering of a childlike creature whose id could only be tempered by love for so long before it chose violence instead. And it should go without saying that Kurzel’s fatalistic storytelling so pungently exhumes the pain that led up to that awful day in April 1996 that you can smell the death coming several hours in advance.

Fingscheidt’s nonlinear approach allows the film to ride the tidal rhythms of addiction, while Ronan’s committed performance churns those ebbs and flows into a widescreen journey that earns its epic backdrop.