David Fear

Summer of Soul is both a tribute to the artists and, just as importantly, their audience — which is what makes it not just a great concert film but a great documentary, period.

Though McQueen continues to work his themes of suffering and spiritual transcendence, this unflinching, unforgiving drama is not about a slave, but about slavery itself.

In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.

Do Not Expect builds on his previous film’s fractured style and broadens the range of his crosshairs, but the puckishness and past-the-boiling-point sense of wrath feels even sharper this time around.

Watching Collective when it premiered on the fall festival circuit last year, it was easy to see that it should be considered a flat-out masterpiece regardless of timing. Yet to watch it, or rewatch it, now is to experience something even deeper. It’s a story of a nation’s inability to take care of its citizens that comes to us in the middle of a pandemic that’s crippling America’s economy and killing its citizens.

It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.

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.

A movie that liberates your tears and makes you fall in love with it. It is almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year.

Sciamma is weaving a spell here, so pure in its emotional resonance that it breaks your heart even as it heals wounds.

Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other.

It’s moments of blunt, borderline-brutal honesty coming directly from the source that make this whole endeavor such a necessary counterpoint to all of the mythology that’s sprung up around Love ... [But t]here are a number of questionable choices that the doc makes in terms of aesthetics.

This colorful, cranium-bursting film isn’t about one specific tale so much as the endless ways you can present narratives; it’s nothing less than a kitchen-sink deconstruction on the art of storytelling.

The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

To fall in love with it, viewers only have to be receptive to a movie that examines the ties that bind with grace, wit and depth.

It’s a work that forces you to reexamine how we’ve processed this chapter of history and restores a proper sense of ungraspable horror.

Remains a primo example that cinema actually traffics in truthiness 24 frames per second.

What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.

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.

It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance.

Tótem is one of those films about death that overflows with life, and it’s a testament to filmmaker Lila Avilés that this gentle drama never collapses under its own weight or lets sorrow fully take the wheel.

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

No one needed further proof that he’s a master. This meditation on grief and growing up does solidify the position, however, that Miyazaki remains the greatest living animator today, period.

It entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it.

Once you’ve seen this deft blend of genres and tones, all of the inspired laughter and the lumping of throats, you see exactly how Hit the Road fits all of its elements together with remarkable seamlessness.

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

It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve.

Even while the director is displaying her knack for cine-magic tricks and formalist gestures, she’s also well aware that she blessed with someone at the center of this carousel who needs no illusionist’s help.

Anderson may be concocting his own personal flashback to a funkier age of innocence, but he lets these two make it their own double-act as well. Then he generously invites an audience in as well.

The sounds are finite, yet the benefits of tuning in to the film’s wavelengths are endless. It’s the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard.

Seeds is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.

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.

There’s not a bad performance among the central quartet here (Mescal once again proves that he’s a character actor stuck with a matinee idol’s square-jawed mug), but Scott is the one subtly shouldering the storytelling.

It’s a harrowing documentary, to be sure, but also healing in a way that doesn’t go for easy emotional button-pushing, or play down the white-knuckle struggle they endure while processing all of it.

There’s a certain quality of watchfulness and wiles-using Williams brings to this damaged, possibly deranged protagonist that suggests instability hiding behind her shiny hair and perfect teeth.

All Holland asks here is that viewers contemplate this headline-generating tragedy happening “over there” from the point of view of those within it. After you’ve sat through this devastating film, it’s impossible not to.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri's stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film's grisly murder.

Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.

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.

It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special.

Poetic is a word that gets thrown around willy-nilly, but it fits perfectly here. So does woozy. It feels less like a film than a high fever, burning slow but hot in order to incinerate a virus.

Jack proves he’s (von Trier) also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell seems superfluous. We’ve already been there for two and a half hours.

The Quiet Girl is, quite simply, a genuine work of art by a genuinely empathetic artist, and one of the single most moving, heartfelt, and heartbreaking movies from any country in the last decade.

The closer we get to a climax (and the more that absurd reversals keep getting piled on), the less effective Dupontel’s brutish charisma is in keeping things interesting and afloat. You pray the next he-man outing makes better use of his presence.

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.

You can easily see why Ichikawa's vision of the 20th-century Japanese-lit landmark is considered definitive; the way he elevates the story's soap-operatic elements to a level of extraordinary sublimity makes the melodramatic seem positively majestic.

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.

It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment.

What Tan has given us is an incredible, sui generis tribute to the international lingua franca of D.I.Y. cinempowerment. She’s also telling us the story of how one person stole a big part of her youth. This documentary is her stealing it back. Victory, finally, is hers.

Poor Things never gets dogmatically bogged down — it prefers a swifter, Swiftian attack on bygone mores regarding sex that still don’t feel bygone enough — but whether you dig the manner in which this pilgrim’s progress is presented may be a matter of taste.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

Even though it retains the basic theatrical conceit of a lone character having a one-sided conversation, it is pure cinema, because how could Almodóvar and Swinton do anything but turn this into pure cinema?

It takes you right up past the stratosphere alongside these souls. Then it brings everything back down to Earth with equal agility and grace. It is a revelation.

Its historical import as a peripheral civil-rights document can't be understated.

Chou has said that the film isn’t autobiographical — nor, despite the fact that Park herself was born in Korea and raised in France, is this her story. Yet the two of them have made something that feels so intensely personal and infuses so much life into this young woman’s trek toward self-discovery.

To call it the best animated film of the last few years is to undervalue it. Berger’s take on this graphic novel is both a high point of the medium and a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place. It’s a film lover’s dream come true.

You could spend a lifetime peeling the glass onion of Shirley Clarke’s merciless documentary, in which a born performer drops incinerating truth bombs while putting the con in confessional moviemaking.

McDonagh also wants to give his actors a hell of a showcase, too, and it’s the two stars butting brows at the center of The Banshees of Inisherin that make this a masterpiece of men behaving very feckin’ badly.

There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature, and like the Zambian filmmaker’s awe-inspiring debut, I Am Not a Witch (2017), it proves she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.

What starts out as an impressive mix of various classic-Italian-cinema strains turns into something much richer, rewarding and singular. Rohrwacher isn’t interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and modern-day anger.

On paper, the endeavor sounds like the equivalent of a B-sides and rarities compilation. On screen, it plays like a sucker-punch masterpiece.

It announces right from the start that you are not just watching a movie. You’re experiencing an immersive portrait of a life and a landscape intertwined, and entering what feels like a feature-length sense memory.

Blue Jean manages to take an ancient anti-LGBTQ+ law and use it to foster a story of personal liberation. But it also knows that when your basic rights are threatened, no matter who you are or how you live or who you love, everything most assuredly is political.

It remains a how-to model for making something that fancies itself a slow-burn thriller—until it isn’t slow-burning whatsoever.

For many of us staring down the next four years, the idea that a community can come together to take on the rising tides couldn’t be more welcome or needed.

An epic indictment of media manipulation, this avant-doc delivers its coup de grâce once the camera finally demands accountability - leaving the disgraced despot staring into the lens, and the abyss of history staring back into him.

Creepy doesn't begin to describe these masterworks of control freakery, nor does beautiful - they look as if they're glowing from the inside out, even as Crewdson's scenes of furtive common people make viewers feel like voyeurs.

Good One is, among its infinite attributes, an ode to a style of filmmaking that appears to be humble, yet still manages to be devastating and humanistic to its very core. Mostly, it’s just a great f*cking movie, full stop.

The Tillman Story balances cynical and inspirational aspects in equal measure. Pat's demise-and the media debacle around it-seems that much more tragic and enraging.

Though some may come for the murder mystery, it’s Triet’s way of using that genre to get at deeper notions of love turning to hate, and tiny marital fissures that turn into chasms, that really makes this something close to an anti-romantic masterpiece.

If the overall effect of Nebraska’s father-son bonding and attention-must-be-paid pathos doesn’t quite have the zing of the filmmaker’s best work, he’s certainly got an ace in the hole.

The thrill of the multiversal new is gone. Everything else, however, is extra-webbed for your pleasure.

Welcome to Chechnya is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.

That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the “masterpiece” side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.

Shindô concocts a stylistic mix of odd experimental flourishes, female nudity, Soviet-style close-ups and baldly sentimental melodrama to emphasize the toll this disaster took; its cup may runneth over, yet the stark vibe is impossible to shake.

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

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

A worthwhile portrait of a genius who made beautiful music, and a case study for how to tragically, epically self-destruct.

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.

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.

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.

What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours.

American Factory sets out to chart what’s supposed to be a test run for the future of the auto industry and an example of positive international relations. It ends up capturing a cross-cultural car wreck in slow motion.

A first-rate piece of forensic filmmaking.

The attention to visuals is above and beyond what most vérité is capable of; doing double duty as the film's cinematographer, Fan demonstrates a pitch-perfect photojournalistic eye.

All of this is presented with Director Park’s usual eye for extraordinary compositions and the occasional baroque flourish — dig that shot from the bottom of a boilermaker, as it’s being consumed! — but rest assured his tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek.

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

Atlantics pulls you into an experience. The empathy machine runs at full speed here. Ada, c’est moi.

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.

Easily one of the best and most modestly brilliant piece of nonfiction filmmaking you’ll see this year.

This West Side Story proves someone can still leave their mark on the legend without building it from the ground up. It’s a classic Spielberg joint, a classic hat-tip to Hollywood, and a classic, period.

Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar.

Varda by Agnès goes out not with a bang but a graceful farewell, as the director sits on a beach, a sandstorm whipping around her as vows to “disappear in the blur” and slowly fades from the image.

You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.