Glenn Heath Jr.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a political tract that understands itself also as a cinematic exercise.

Chess of the Wind is a shining example of how familiar genres and tones can meld together to form something that feels brand new.

One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.

While not nearly as emotionally impacting as some of Disney’s other classics, Bambi might be the most restrained and lyrical of the bunch, a poem to the simplicity and purity of natural life.

High and Low is a masterful cinematic elevator connecting two warring social perspectives, finding a common ground between them in the pressurized corners of the classic crime drama.

This insane masterpiece shows the self-destructive properties of myth making and how they overlap with the downfall of a community damned from the beginning of time.

Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten.

For those curious and willing, this is a beautiful reminder of what it’s like to be properly throttled by an unexpected cinematic jolt.

The seamless juxtaposition of faith and pain, innocence and guilt, allows the film to transcend Spike Lee's occasional bombastic moments and become a strong examination of internal suffering.

Unquestionably one of this year’s great films, The Inheritance seeks to position them both on equal planes of historical and individual experience, one invariably informing the other.

The film remains a stunning collective of method acting and 1970s social critique.

Through its meticulous recreation of historical circumstance both personal and collective, Dear Comrades! beautifully counters these natural feelings of indifference through a blisteringly precise style of dramatic filmmaking that never shies away from revealing the fascism propping up all the propagandistic bluster.

This mammoth final effort by Ôbayashi, an artist who so often destroyed the conventional boundaries of cinematic space in works like 1977’s Hausu, is a completely humbling viewing experience.

Gomes contemplates the many human dimensions wavering under the surface of this town, whether it’s the mythologies crowding a town’s gossip session or the tall tales flooding rants at a local bar. This is a collective voice of character rather than a dry document of reality.

The endless scenes of burning buildings and macho posturing merely provide an action-driven context for the filmmakers to deal with more personal topics like loneliness and resiliency.

This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.

As a collage of glossy gangster conventions and one-liners, The Long Good Friday explodes with energy, but it’s the political and social tensions that make Mackenzie’s film a lasting vision of British tragedy.

Taking the title into consideration, Test Pattern remains clearly focused on the circumstances outside of our control that force adjustments in perspective.

Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies.

Documentarian and subject, past and present blur together like bleeding watercolors in Raymond De Felitta's gripping memoir.

When split in half, the title of Pushpendra Singh’s riveting character study represents competing forces of assimilation and freedom, patriarchy and artistic expression.

Set in a remote Sudanese village where religion and prophecy are valuable currencies, You Will Die at Twenty beautifully examines misguided notions of faith.

If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.

If the film covers well-tread territory (a morally bankrupt player trying to prolong his own influence), it does so with pinpoint control of mood and theme.

At the center of it all is Hanks, our moral compass, our trembling hand, who has amazingly never headlined a Western in his four-decade career. Only his bearded, weary face could have brought such empathy and grace to a brutal portrait of rotting Manifest Destiny forever stuck in the mud.

The film is ripe with powerful subtext, specifically how greed, celebrity, and technology help to form a misguided sense of opportunity that keeps the working class downtrodden.

What sets Undefeated apart from the usual underdog sports story is how the filmmakers emphasize the importance of mentorship as something separate from on-the-field interactions between coach and player.

A strange and intoxicating indie constructed as a series of vignettes that capture two children grappling with the overlap of trauma and nostalgia.