David Sims

There’s absolutely nothing else like it in theaters this year, which I mean as both a hearty endorsement and a necessary forewarning. Zama is a viewing experience that can be frustratingly inaccessible at first, but it blooms in bold, surprising directions.

For all its eerie focus on the end of our lives, that’s what Johnson’s movie is about: celebrating the people we love.

A gorgeous and impossible puzzle of a movie.

Paddington 2 is gorgeous to look at, smartly written, and gleefully funny, boasting a fierce ensemble of estimable British thespians. For those looking specifically for excellent family entertainment, it’s a must-see; but even other viewers will find this movie well worth their time.

Cooper’s biggest innovation in this remake, which he wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, is his emphasis on partnership. He interweaves Jackson and Ally’s relationship with the music they create together, so the audience’s investment in both is palpable.

In depicting the out-of-sight, out-of-mind bubble mentality of Israel’s civilian citizens (and how easily that bubble can burst), Foxtrot is a uniquely powerful work.

Granik’s ability to convey so much about how a community works without didacticism is part of what made Winter’s Bone (which was set in the Ozarks) such a thrill to watch. While Leave No Trace is a more muted drama, it has a similarly firm grasp on its characters and the places they comes across.

How Scott is able to pump out these grandiose set pieces with such practiced ease (and a little CGI embellishment) is beyond me; he remains one of Hollywood’s finest craftsmen of action sequences, and I’ll miss him when he’s gone.

If Beale Street Could Talk is an impressive, mature, and determined work that ably reaches the great heights it sets for itself.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? may be a muted story, but it is a profoundly memorable one.

With its ever-evolving protagonist, Return to Seoul defies neat categorization. It’s a low-budget character drama with the twists and turns of a high-octane thriller. It’s also a consistently satisfying watch that honors the difficulty of wanting to be understood—and the relief of finally releasing that desire.

As these films have gone on, they’ve become more and more fascinated with Hunt’s essential ludicrousness. Mission: Impossible – Fallout decrees him elemental—a crucial, indefinable component keeping the very fabric of humanity knitted together. The film is so dizzyingly fun that, at least while you’re watching, it seems like a sound conclusion.

Nomadland is a work of exploration, and not just across the sprawling American West. Fern is exorcising her darkest demons, which spring from the systemic neglect that has been visited on so many Americans in recent years. The odyssey makes Zhao’s film a transfixing mix of reckoning and catharsis.

Hereditary is a great scare-fest and a middling domestic saga, one that probably needed to be either 90 minutes long and brimming with terror, or three hours long and suffused with glacial, Bergman-esque dread. Aster has charted a middle path, and for a first film, it’s hard to fault the skill he’s shown in doing it.

The world doesn’t really need another Spider-Man movie, which is exactly what makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse such an unexpected delight: Here’s the latest entry in a fully saturated genre that somehow, through sheer creative gumption, does something new.

The sparseness of the script matches the modesty of the staging. Because the film lacks lush period detail, or really any specific background visuals at all, the audience’s attention is thrown onto the performances, and the cast rises to the occasion magnificently.

Triet skillfully spins the viewers’ sympathy into a worst-case scenario, literally putting these feelings on trial, and it serves to compound the excitement. It’s a simple question, really: What if a domestic drama got crossed with a courtroom thriller? Anatomy of a Fall is the glorious answer.

Again, Fallen Leaves is a comedy, and a consistently funny one, even if most of its laugh lines are gruffly delivered.

The dazzling ambition on display, both aesthetically and narratively, justifies the swing. But I won’t be ready to call the Spider-Verse series a masterpiece of the genre until I watch it stick the landing next year—even though I’m a firm believer that it will.

Reichardt’s grasp of realism is peerless. She’s long excelled at building simple story lines toward profound revelations. Showing Up is a terrific example of how she documents low-stakes vagaries . . . What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.

Cronenberg has an obvious gift for making blood and viscera look inventive, even as they splatter across the screen repeatedly. But the film can’t outdo its initial hook.

The result is an embittered look at our world through the eyes of someone who’s increasingly horrified to be a part of it, and a film that’s one of the most searing cinema experiences of the year.

The Green Knight is most brilliant in its wordless sequences. Lowery is exceptionally skilled at conjuring otherworldly sights that somehow retain one foot in reality.

Spielberg’s West Side Story is a charismatic showcase for everything he does best on the big screen, and a genuinely thoughtful update, making gentle and incisive rearrangements to justify its brassy sashay back into cinemas.

Despite the grand scale, like all of Jia’s works, Ash Is Purest White leaves questions of good and evil to the viewer—this isn’t a philosophical story, but a personal one.

Zhao clearly understands that universal conflict between desire and reality, and with The Rider, she’s dramatized it beautifully.

What most stunned me about Eighth Grade was how well directed it is. It’s rare that teen movies have the kind of visual acuity and verve that Burnham achieves here.

It’s difficult to make a work that confronts, or even acknowledges, the rusting but seemingly immovable structures of institutional sexism. It’s even harder to do that and address how race and class are inextricably bound up in those oppressive systems, and it’s even harder still to accomplish that without delivering a hectoring lecture to the audience. Support the Girls somehow manages to do it all, and in the form of a breezy, heartwarming workplace comedy to boot.