David Sims

Hogg is not a sensationalistic filmmaker, but rather someone who can convey tremendous amounts of emotion through total tranquility on-screen.

The lesson of the film is a straightforward one—that in the future, people will still need to rely on each other—but Ad Astra communicates it with staggering profundity.

First Cow is a masterwork of indie cinema—a tale that’s both charming and unsparing, suffused with equal measures of wonder and dread.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is primarily a romance. But it’s also a film about the deeply personal process of creativity—the pain and joy of making one’s emotions and memories into a work of art.

Weerasethakul is unpacking a sensation everyone has probably experienced at one point in their life: the feeling that something is cosmically out of whack.

A tremendous but chilling achievement from one of America’s great storytellers.

Few filmmakers can manage such a dizzying blend of tones, but for Bong, one of South Korea’s finest directors, it’s a trademark. With Parasite he’s crafted his best movie yet.

Every visual composition is meticulously arranged, and every surreal twist of imagery feels nuanced and earned. But most important, the world around Tár seems real and tangible, so when it slips into chaos, the viewer becomes as overwhelmed as the protagonist.

The Worst Person in the World swerves from bustling comedy to erotically charged romance to bittersweet drama, executing each tonal shift seamlessly even as plot twists seem to come out of nowhere.

Wang, who has made only one prior feature (the little-seen 2014 comedy Posthumous), distinguishes herself as a thrilling new voice in filmmaking by crafting one of the most sensitively told stories of the year.

It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.

It’s an emotional, visceral triumph.

The action in Honor Among Thieves is well choreographed. Anyone who enjoyed Goldstein and Daley’s last cinematic directorial effort, the comedy thriller Game Night, knows that they approach spatial geography with more care than do many blockbuster filmmakers. But I was really kicking my feet with glee during the film’s flights of storytelling fancy (its 20-sided die rolls for intelligence rather than strength, if you will).

The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions.

Spielberg’s storytelling has plenty of humor and verve, but it has a devastating sense of self-awareness as well. In focusing on a boy who puts a camera between himself and the world, Spielberg essays both the power in that perspective, and the limitations.

Lady Bird isn’t a movie about any searing issue; it’s just a wonderful, rare character study of a young woman figuring out her identity, and all the pitfalls that follow.

Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation.

The Nest is one of the best films of the year: Though it’s set in the past, it’s about the feeling of one’s own home turning against you when the world outside feels all the more hostile—a theme that resonates far beyond its time period.

The final act of Shoplifters, like all of Kore-eda’s best work, is devastating. After seeing the director tease out every strange bond in this makeshift group, investing his audience fully in their future, one finds it that much harder to watch when things fall apart.

Villeneuve’s film is a grand success, working on an even broader canvas than the first Dune—but it’s tinged with deep mournfulness, a quality that sets it apart from its blockbuster contemporaries.

It’s a stunning achievement, worthy of a great director’s twilight years.

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

Licorice Pizza is an antic comedy about Alana and Gary tooling around the Valley, but it’s also a bittersweet reminiscence about how difficult embracing adulthood can be.

The film’s long running time doesn’t feel indulgent at all, but electrifyingly necessary, the only way to draw out the restrained sorrows of its insular ensemble. Few filmmakers can make simple conversation a blockbuster moment, but in Hamaguchi’s hands, the audience is hanging on every character’s next word.

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.

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

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.

The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you.