Emily Yoshida

It’s intermittently successful, but even in its more meandering moments it is a gripping, almost unbearably dark watch.

Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.

What makes Late Night — otherwise a largely predictable story in a familiar mold — really pop is Kaling’s script, which is at the blunter and frankly more exciting spectrum of what Kaling has proven herself to be capable of in her writing career thus far.

To mistake Garland’s succession of haunted-house-like spectacles as Acid: The Place would be missing out on so much emotional work that he’s doing. (Although, the squeamish should be warned those spectacles range from mildly disturbing to gory and disgusting to absolutely terrifying.)

Östlund’s eye for the subtleties of human behavior, especially public behavior, never fails.

A rainbow-colored scream into the abyss, Nagahisa’s story of a quartet of orphaned tweens who start a chiptune rock band is as rigorous in its exploration of grief as it is stylistically exuberant, and one of the most exciting premieres at Sundance this year.

To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.

Lu Over the Wall...is every bit as imaginative as the rest of his body of work, but whereas previous Yuasa works would veer from ominous to outrageous to sweet to explicit to metaphysical, Lu is perfectly happy to stop at sweet. And so am I, quite frankly: Yuasa can be really good at sweet, something that’s often overshadowed by his more mile-a-minute tendencies.

Brimstone & Glory, in a lean 67 minutes of cinematic poetry, bears that love out in dizzying extremes.

There aren’t a lot of people to necessarily sympathize with here, but the collective swell of a thousand nagging disappointments, both identifiable and not, make Perry’s film strangely haunting despite the bourgeois mundanity of its events.

Lisa’s drive is more than biological; it’s intellectual and emotional, and that’s what keeps what often risks becoming camp madness in an identifiably human place — almost all the way to the end.

It’s a deeply assured piece of direction, and though it only plays a few emotional notes, they are ones that won’t soon leave your memory.

It’s remarkable how engaging and light on its feet the director and cast are able to keep this subject matter, how much permission he gives them to f*ck up and try again.

The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together.

With a light touch but deep reserves of respect for fans both old and new Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an extremely fitting portrait of the influential composer. There’s an air of patience that presides over director Stephen Schible’s footage, even during a period that presents a lot of tumultuous questions for his seemingly unflappable subject.

For the most part, Mu’min’s script is pleasantly inquisitive, and its refusal to arrive at easy answers is its engine. Jinn is a special little film, one that never lets its complicated, contradictory characters become abstractions, but instead revels in all the disparate elements that make them who they are.

It elicits more than a few excruciating laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s also tragic and vulnerable — not to mention frequently unpleasant.

Graduation, like Mungiu’s lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," layers misfortunes and mistakes on top of one another in a way that feels both oppressive and true.

With its martini-swilling leads and swingy French pop soundtrack, A Simple Favor seems to yearn for a bygone era of nail-biter, but rather than wallow in pastiche, it comes up with something truly contemporary feeling.

It’s incredible what a difference 12 years makes: Baumbach is an altogether more generous and insightful filmmaker here than he was the last time he told this story.

A culture clash defined by an incredibly strong first-time performance, it’s continually more emotionally surprising than its dry packaging lets on.

It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.

Her ability to take in the chaos and darkness of the ’70s and find some kind of acceptance through her writing is what makes her as relevant as ever.

Though Gyllenhaal is making the clearest bid for the big awards performance and deserves any accolades it brings him, Maslany’s performance was the one that floored me.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

Merchant is more brutally honest than most sports movies — or any kind of rising-star movie, for that matter — about failure, and it makes Fighting With My Family better than it needs to be. The entire cast is a pleasure, particularly the dynamo Pugh.

So here, in the year of our lord 2019, comes Five Feet Apart, and if it ends up being a late entry in the trend, it wouldn’t be a bad one to go out on.

One of the films best visual treats are its alebrijes, the colorful fantastical creatures from Mexican folk art, rendered here as electrically colored lizards and gryphons that seem to pop off the screen even without the aid of 3-D.