David Fear

Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.

Leigh and all of his cast are so on-point here, so dedicated to breathing life into these everyday people, that every time he cuts away from Pansy and allows us unfettered glimpses into their lives outside her sphere of influence, you want to follow them into their own two-hour movies.

It’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage.

Furiosa runs on a high-octane philosophical perspective that finds hope in a hopeless place. Also, a lot of cars go fast and sh*t blows up. It’s a win-win.

Funny, poignant, personal and a rage-filled valentine to a metropolis that’s seen its fair share of gentrification.

How it informs so much of what the movie is getting at is something you’ll find yourself mulling over for weeks after you’ve left the theater. The feeling that you’ve just witnessed a major work from a great American filmmaker, however, is instantaneous.

The writer-director gives these unsung, oft-judged heroes of labor empowerment via empathy and representation.

What Eisenberg accomplishes overall here, however, is beyond measure. It’s the real deal.

You can barely call it a movie. You can, however, recognize it as one of Wes Anderson‘s best attempts at transforming both his and his literary idol’s idiosyncrasies into something like art — and the most satisfying posthumous double act in ages.

While Barbarian‘s unexpected popularity outside of die-hard genre circles can be attributed to old-fashioned, organic word of mouth, it’s also a first-rate horror movie, full stop.

It’s a love letter — to New York, to the bohemians and musicians who still live there come hell or high water, to the art of crafting a damn fine customized Stratocaster, to taking pride in your work, to shooting the shit and most importantly, to finding a place for fellow freaks and misfits to call home.

It’s the perfect goodbye from an artist who lived to jolt you out of a sense of complacency. Mission accomplished.

This may be one of the few rockumentaries since Stop Making Sense to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental.

It's a compelling, twist-filled tale, one told with a highly developed sense of empathy, a few aesthetic missteps (perhaps it's time to issue a permanent moratorium on montages set to "Walkin' on Sunshine"? Actually, scratch the perhaps there) and a knack for turning the triplets' experience into something bigger than just stranger-than-fiction tabloid fodder.

In the end, what Quest gives you is not just well-earned empathy but the pleasure of the Raineys' company, and that is what genuinely makes it worth seeking out and seeing ASAP.

Pfeiffer gives an incredible performance as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

What makes this documentary more than just a feature-length DVD supplement is how these peeks behind the curtain are offset by a connect-the-dots case study of obsession and devotion taken to extremes.

Whether it's the "best" documentary of 2017 is a matter of opinion. But it is assuredly the most vital.

Neither Reilly nor Tomei have ever seemed so effortlessly funny, and whoever thought to cast one of Judd Apatow's regulars as a dysfunctional, disturbed manchild should be dubbed a genius.

It’s the sort of performance that feels like early Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, all twitches and vibrations and seeming like he’s in a constant state of motion even when standing still. And it fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary in the best possible way.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

These two trash-talkin’ Picassos may or may not end up getting their due, but Leon and his two extraordinary actors (especially Washington) have already put us squarely on the side of the beautiful losers regardless.

Suddenly, everything clicks; this snooty art merchant may love the sound of his own voice, but you're reminded how much Rohmer valued the sound of others' voices above all, and why going out on a whimper occasionally works wonders.

A certain leap of faith is required. But for those believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that.

Lyrical touches and the most moving use ever of Katy Perry's "Firework" almost cancel out a cheap-shot third-act tragedy, yet it's the actors that save the film from soaping itself into Euro-miserablist irrelevance.

At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment.

Congratulations, Gen-Z, you’ve just been handed your new midnight-movie obsession.

Your suspension of disbelief may get tested more than a few times as Linklater’s crime comedy shuffles to its ironic happily-ever-afters — ditto your tolerance for self-consciously jaunty scores — yet your faith in Powell as a real-deal leading man who can work miracles is never shaken.

The Square offers more than just pictures of a revolution; it lets you into the mind-set of those fighting for their future, and that makes all the difference.

Rather than telling you how young women are affected by this, Patton and Rae show you. And to watch one of the interviewees go for being a joyous, giddy, chatty child to being a slightly older, more distant and jaded tween is heartbreaking.

Push any guy long enough with alcohol and aggressive masculinity, the film suggests, and you'll find an XY-chromosomed predator lurking behind the mask.

Tomboy may add little to conversations about gender or sexuality. It has everything to say, however, about that period of childhood when identity is at its most malleable.

Enys Men is for us. It’s a cult classic that didn’t feel the need to kill time in order to be called cult or classic.

The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly.

The Fall Guy is at its delirious best not when it’s ginning up sound and fury and mayhem, but when it simply lets Gosling and Blunt trade screwball banter and give every scene they share a will-they-or-won’t-they tension.

There are no lava-spewing natural phenomena or gut-wrenching slaughterhouse sequences in this unofficial companion piece, but you do witness sex tourists in Bangkok choosing numbered "girlfriends" as if they were picking out lobsters in a tank.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.

Though it’s divided into three chapters--“Voices,” “Recollections” and “Innocence”--the film takes a largely free-form look at a dying community that’s more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s nonfiction case studies than the usual sociopolitical hand-wringing.

No one else has come close to translating England's homegrown blend of deadpan and madcap for a younger audience, much less with such impressive Claymated technique. You couldn't ask for better lesson in "Anglo-Absurdism for Beginners."

The film occasionally skews a little on the PBS-dry side, but in terms of looking back on a legacy of American skullduggery and high-level shenanigans, its access and acknowledgment of our dark past make for one intimate indictment.

Tuesday makes a strong case for death as a natural, if not the most natural part of life. It makes an even stronger case, however, for Julia Louis-Dreyfus being one of the greatest actors working today.

Short Term 12 isn’t without drawbacks, occasionally dipping into a too-neat narrative tidiness and a self-conscious sloppiness. Yet the film’s charms and ability to cut through jadedness despite the subject matter makes it a rarity — a modest indie that’s feels like it’s in it for the long haul.

As you find yourself instinctively reviewing those own seemingly insignificant moments in your own life, the ones that you hold so dear, while following this cyber-compassionate movie to its conclusion, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the long game that the film’s creator is playing.

It is a gorgeous film, and one that deserves to be seen on a giant screen as much as that other only-in-theaters release this weekend, F9. And even when I Carry You With Me becomes so lost in its aesthetic that you worry it’s losing focus, this impressionistic approach doesn’t take away from what is an intimate, extremely personal story of two men fighting to build a life with each other.

Watergate is an extraordinary dossier on what remains a major black mark on the republic. It’s also a sobering reminder that just because we were able to stop it once doesn’t mean we can relegate it to our country’s back pages. Consider this a cautionary tale.

This documentary raises enough questions about the ends justifying the means during an era of endless war that it earns the right to be called essential viewing.

Unlike "The Wrestler," which Siegel scripted, Big Fan has a way of making a socially marginal figure seem oddly charismatic without stacking the sympathy deck.

It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic.

(The verb in the title is not superfluous. If this movie resembles anything, it’s "Citizen Kane" — structure-wise, if not remotely aesthetically.)

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

This muted mobster story reminds us that the ties that bind can also gag you, garrote you and slowly deaden your soul.

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.

We Live in Time is an actor’s movie, by necessity if not always by design. You know where the destination ends before the movie’s even begun. Pugh and Garfield make the endgame worth the journey, no matter where you place it.

Long after the dance-movie thrills are in the rearview and before the images turn themselves upside down — before the movie becomes a literal danse macabre — you find yourself impressed by the fact that he’s not out to recreate a bad acid trip. He’s trying to create his own bad trip sans the drugs. And the fucked up thing about it is: You end up wanting to go along for the ride.

While the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

Had The Christophers just been a cross-generational punch-up, the sort of flinty showdown designed to throw off pleasurable sparks, you’d still walk away content. It remains a conduit for two of the best performances you’ll see all year. But Soderbergh and his two stars want to concentrate on the embers, what fans them and what keeps them burning.

As a dig at generational dissatisfaction and/or a lament about the migrant’s blues, the film is good enough. As a portrait of a diva on the verge of a meltdown that could take out a metropolis, it’s a next-level nightmare.

A prison drama less interested in crime and punishment than in catharsis and the creative power of theater, director Greg Kwedar’s chronicle of how the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program affects its participants wants you to focus on the humanity on display over everything else.

It's a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.

You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

The Promised Land is, if nothing else, a nod to both its nation’s and the movies’ past. The feudal warring over unclaimed Jutland territory may be strictly Danish, but the excitement, romance, and awe-inspiring visual spectacle of this melodrama is vintage Hollywood.

The whole thing is a blast, which doesn’t mean you don’t sense that the stakes are high or that the tension between this threesome isn’t threatening to smother a great creative collaboration in the crib.

Names get checked, baby-faced future celebrities like Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi make cameos, and various cross-pollinations between below–14th Street mavericks are clarified.

It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.

Come for the most impressive, lustrous car that a gajillion-dollar budget can buy. The reason to stay, however, is the driver.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

If Marcello Mastroianni’s character from "La Dolce Vita" hadn’t stepped off the sweet-life treadmill, this is exactly who he would have become.

So call Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a documentary, or a docufiction, or an ecstatic-truth improvisation — just don’t let it miss last call.

The movie isn’t just a paean to a pioneer spirit. It’s equally a testament to the actor playing her.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

It’s these life-or-death stakes that Happening puts front and center, as it forces viewers to not just confront the stigma associated with abortion — a word, by the way, that’s never uttered in the film — but to immerse themselves in the same dread and paranoia that Anne feels.

It’s both a sly piece of ethnography and a social satire that reads like a cosmic joke…right up until its climax makes the chuckle catch in your throat.

If any film could convince people that ACID is the patron saint of tomorrow's Godards, it's this one.

Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream.

20 Days in Mariupol gives you a sense of life during wartime that isn’t an abstraction, some distant thing happening to people thousands of miles away. The intimate feeling of what it’s like to have your country invaded, your living spaces demolished, and your closest family members killed before your eyes is palpable, and also gut-wrenching.

A strong contender for both the artiest drug movie and the druggiest art movie ever made, Gaspar Noé's tour de force of forced perspectives and free-form grief is, in every sense of the word, a trip.

So often, you can feel filmmakers straining themselves to come up with more extreme ways of shocking and awing you. With this writer-director, you get the sensation that such hallucinogenic, nerve-scrambling sensationalism comes naturally. You wouldn’t say that his agent provocateur touch is subtle. But it is expert.

This unflinching parable brings the hammer down on its cinematic brethren's fetishization of cell-block Rockefellers. R's final shot says it all: The house wins. The house always wins.

It's a credit to both the actors and Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) that the film never dives headfirst into mawkishness.

It's far from a definitive statement-why does ACT UP, a seminal presence in SF, get such short shrift? - but this oral history provides a righteous cri de coeur for those who perished in the precocktail era.

Directed by Sundance veteran Ira Sachs, Peter Hujar’s Day takes an extended conversation between talented, creative friends and elevates it to the realm of both first-rate voyeurism and the second-hand high of reliving a lost era.

Peck has long cratfed impeccable, politically charged fictions, docs, and docudramas, whether it’s his 2000 biopic on Patrice Lumumba or his peerless portrait of James Baldwin (the aforementioned I Am Not a Negro). With this latest magnum opus, the Haitian filmmaker has given us not just an invaluable, iris-out look at our present moment but the scariest movie of 2025 by a wide margin.

[Siegel and McGehee] get that this isn’t just a story about a woman bonding with a dog — it’s a tale of loss and sorrow that inherently knows such heavy feelings aren’t confined to a single species.

And when we arrive at Hoon keeping the camera rolling as he lays on a New Orleans bed, literally hours before he’ll be found unresponsive on the band’s tour bus, it doesn’t feel ghoulish. It just feels like we’ve walked long and hard in his shoes and reached the end way too soon.

An extraordinary high-pulp potboiler, one that mixes elements of indigenous mysticism, Greek tragedy and rural revenge flicks, along with a genuinely showstopping centerpiece.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

An Austrian actor whose Easter-Island mug has graced movies such as the Oscar-nominated "The Counterfeiters" (2007), Markovics shows a keen attention to performers that you'd expect from a thespian-turned-director.

So much of this drama about interrupted lives, unexpected detours, and attempts at (re)connection requires a deep reading between the lines. That’s a big part of its power.

It’s here that directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore, armed with a screenplay cowritten by Johnston and Pamela Ribon, find a common ground between family-friendly entertainment and sharp social satire.

The director’s sophomore feature brims with so many tender mercies, so many quietly observed moments, that even its light touch leaves a mark.

There’s a specific, singular madness that this movie conjures up that’s completely its own, a spell it casts that goes way beyond homages or spot-the-reference pastiches.

It becomes more of an actor’s showcase, in other words, which has always been one of Payne’s strengths — he’s an old-school director of performers, with a penchant for conjuring memories of several old schools in particular.

It’s heavy, heady stuff, coming at you via a delivery system of catalog-worthy set design, magic-hour cinematography, and often tamped-down, deadpan performances. And somehow, it all works in harmony to create a ripple effect of feeling that reverberates strongly under its placid surfaces.