David Rooney

Making ingenious use of split-screen, experimental montage and densely layered images and sound over two fabulously entertaining hours, Haynes puts his distinctive stamp on the material while crafting a work that could almost have come from the same artistic explosion it celebrates.

As bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element.

The film goes more and more off-kilter, with its jumble of black comedy and bloodshed and its mild-mannered protagonist embroiled in violent crime making it an unsophisticated foray into Coen brothers territory.

Like the film of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is too inextricably welded to its theatrical conception to become fully cinematic, even with Schliessler's lustrous visuals and the deluxe trappings of Mark Ricker's period production design, Ann Roth's gorgeous costumes and Branford Marsalis' jazzy underscoring. But watching actors of this caliber lose themselves in characters of such aching humanity is ample reward, with Boseman's towering work standing as a testament to a blazing talent lost too soon.

This is a wondrous and moving account of a remarkable life that puts us right there with Goodall to share directly in her discoveries.

Funny and frank in its observations, the film is a delightful snapshot of female friendship at that age, from the giddy highs to the melancholy funks, from the sustaining bonds to the jealousies and stinging betrayals.

It's short, sweet and effective, tying together the divergent threads of the decades-spanning Small Axe project on a note both poignant and personal.

Zhao collaborates with a major-name actor for the first time in Nomadland, guiding Frances McDormand to a remarkable performance of melancholy gravitas, so rigorously unmannered she's indistinguishable from the real-life nomads with whom she shares the screen.

It's the integrity of the performances by Hovig and Skarsgard that keeps the classy drama so engrossing, with the director making neither character entirely saint or sinner but giving them both infinite shadings in between.

For all its wit, its lively talk and deceptive lightness, this is arguably the writer-director’s most affecting work.

Hereditary takes the core haunting element of a spirit with a malevolent agenda and runs with it in a seemingly endless series of unexpected directions over two breathless hours of escalating terror that never slackens for a minute.

Writer-director Joshua Marston's strikingly confident debut maintains an unblinking focus and sustains an almost unbearable level of tension.

Zhao’s face is one of the most transfixingly expressive in modern cinema, and her long collaboration with her husband Jia stands among the screen’s greatest actress-director unions.

The title role in the austerely beautiful character study Rose is such a thrilling fit for Sandra Hüller — her flinty manner, her fierce conviction, her steely charisma and her incredible economy of means — that it becomes impossible to imagine any other actor nailing the part.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a raw, lucid retelling, rendered spellbinding by its enveloping stylized design and its masterful black-and-white visuals, evoking the chiaroscuro textures of Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Flow is a joy to experience but also a deeply affecting story, the work of a unique talent who deserves to be ranked among the world’s great animation artists.

This meticulously crafted jewel is del Toro's most satisfying work since Pan's Labyrinth.

Smart casting is the movie’s greatest strength; the entire ensemble shines.

All three principal performances are expertly synced and feel entirely lived in. But it’s Collias who gives the minimalist character study its lingering emotional amplitude, conveying the volatile inner life of a woman making discoveries not only about her camping companions but also about herself.

The resulting film feels highly personal, tender yet unsentimental.

The film's smart craftsmanship is ultimately less noteworthy than its humanizing, prejudice-challenging immersion into the lives of people who inhabit L.A.'s low-end drug and sex industry.

Running just 81 minutes, Fallen Leaves is slight compared to many of Kaurismäki’s more complex narratives, but its well of feeling creeps up on you and it delivers a good share of laugh-out-loud lines with droll aplomb. Besides, who are we to quibble about any gift from one of world cinema’s greatest treasures?

An exhilarating retelling of a 1950s tabloid murder, it combines original vision, a drop-dead command of the medium and a successful marriage between a dazzling, kinetic techno-show and a complex, credible portrait of the out-of-control relationship between the crime’s two schoolgirl perpetrators.

There’s integrity to the performances even when the writing falters, or when de Araújo gets overly literal in showing how haunted Josephine is by the incident, despite mostly maintaining an inscrutable expression.

Kent and editor Simon Njoo show maturity and trust in their material, expertly building tension through the insidious modulation from naturalistic dysfunctional family drama to all-out boogeyman terror.

The performances are impeccable. Sachs is a master of expressive understatement, and that applies both to the young actors playing the boys — there's not a false moment from either of them — and to the adults.

Whether or not you identify as queer, Welcome to Chechnya will leave you shaken by the evidence of an amoral autocracy taking extreme action under the hypocritical guise of religious purity.

Even for those limited to swimming virtually among parrot fish and sea turtles over vast marine ecosystems of astonishing color and complexity, this superbly crafted documentary is likely to wield an unexpected emotional charge.