David Ehrlich

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.

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.

Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.

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.

If Her is ultimately better at considering the future than it is at taking us there, it resonates as an insightful reminder that love isn’t obsolete quite yet.

The movie is every bit as bloated as his last few, but its charms remind us of his great potential (and potential greatness).

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

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.

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.

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

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.