Inkoo Kang

For all its gentle groundedness, a quality that suffuses much of Kore-eda’s work, Shoplifters strenuously resists romanticizing its main characters. Its compassion is more convincing for it. So is its brilliance.

As Burning unfolds, it reveals new thematic layers until the film brims with allegorical potential.

It’s that devotion to truth that makes Son of Saul such a difficult watch — and also one of year’s most important masterpieces.

Hawke is probably too respectful a director and disciple to challenge anything that his subject says, or even query about the vaguest outlines of his personal life.... The title is truth in advertising; “Seymour” really is only an introduction.

The subject matter is inevitably somber, but the picture is also mischievously funny. Wang pirouettes along some tonal hairpins — in one scene, I guffawed in the midst of wracking sobs.

An exquisite, hand-drawn marvel and an alternatingly jubilant and heartrending epic pastoral.

The fissure between father and daughter approaches like a snake. It sneaks up on you, then leaves you in paralyzed shock.

In the movies, love is cheap. It’s everywhere and nowhere, too often reduced to a formula or a reward. Beale Street knows better. It restores to love, romantic and familial, its sanctity—an ambition that makes it one of the most distinctive love stories in recent memory.

The Sisterhood of Night is too messy to qualify as a great film, especially when it begins introducing, in passing, peripheral characters who survived rape and incest, but it certainly isn’t muddled.

The film bustles along through a series of reveals – a storytelling technique that can lose an audience’s sympathy or suspension of disbelief pretty fast, but which works flawlessly here because the filmmakers and the performers know exactly who their characters are and what kind of world they live in.

Larson excels at determined despair, simultaneously evincing vulnerability and fearlessness. It’s an exciting, tour-de-force performance by an actress who announces herself as one of the best of her generation. If only the film around her were as bold.

The Babadook is the rare horror tale that's also a triumph of empathy.

Even when Ford strongly foreshadows future revelations, Strong Island holds narrative jolts, many fueled by shocks of betrayal. In losing William, the family also lost their faith in their country, their community, and in themselves.

With the risks to both the filmmaker and his subjects on full display, it’s an impressively exciting and strikingly novel approach in chronicling a humanitarian crisis that has yet to receive its due.

Amy is both biography and autopsy, an exhaustive chronicle of her rise to the top of the charts and a bare-knuckled indictment of the vulturish men who took advantage of the emotionally vulnerable singer.

The film makes its primary case eloquently and elegiacally: The only thing more lonesome than a cowboy, surveying a land where no one understands him, is that same cowboy without a horse.

Save for a few standout scenes of carefree elation and daring camaraderie, Girlhood is largely a grim and stilted study of oppression.

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s smartest tactic — the one that makes McQueen such a pleasure to watch, even for fashion outsiders — is giving viewers a front-row seat to the runway, then letting us judge the designer’s oeuvre for ourselves.

Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, the documentary is best at offering a peek into the lives of Khabar Lahariya’s scrappy, self-made women, who are well aware that they are claiming for themselves a profession largely occupied by upper-class men.

Devastating in its simplicity and honesty, The Selfish Giant is a colossus of feeling.

Private Life is certainly very good at shivving its characters at close range and gutting these dyspeptic, privileged white people when they deserve it. Save for Sadie’s charmed fate, I can’t fault Private Life for nailing what it sets out to accomplish. But its cultural narrowness, however well-expounded, also left me wondering about the trials and tribulations of all the other couples in that waiting room long after we’d seen the last of them.

BlacKkKlansman may well be the first film to frame the Trump era as one of regression in response to the progress of the Obama years.

Red Army is a thoughtful and cheer-worthy examination of how sports can shape cultures, redraw borders and change history.

It’s an undeniable triumph of mood — perfect for anyone who wants to practice clenching their fists for nearly 100 straight minutes — as well as an ambitious effort at reinventing horror by eschewing the genre’s common tricks.

It's a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best films so far this year, it's a nearly perfect blend of pimple-faced naturalism, righteous moral fury, nuanced social insight, and unsentimental but devastating drama.

San Francisco may be waging war against its most vulnerable residents, but if you can enjoy its beauty, as Jimmie and Montgomery do for a magical few days, its unique picturesqueness makes it easy to love.

In a movie culture with near-inescapable CGI, old-fashioned animation like Shaun the Sheep is always a treat — and a romp this ambitiously aimless is an all-too-rare marvel.

As the dress floats above the couple while they sleep at night, fluttering in its indestructible refinement and invincible otherworldliness, one starts to wonder: Doesn’t the dress deserve to kill better people? Reg and Babs aren’t hateful, exactly, but their pathetic drabness make a case that the dress is getting the raw end of the deal.

The film’s compassion for everyday Americans...along with its energetic determination to entertain, enlighten, and infuriate make it a laudable surprise.

Closed Curtain is richly allegorical, but the film succeeds even more as an exiled artist's reassurance that the law can't stamp out art.

When I Walk is extraordinarily accomplished, poignant, and wise.

Like Wilson’s cornball “California Girls,” Love & Mercy is by no means a complicated portrait, and yet it’s a curiously satisfying one.

Introducing is a remarkably moving portrait of a 40-something woman forced to reevaluate her relationships and her sense of self in the face of a chronic illness that leaves her sometimes unable to speak or control her movements.

Wildlife is a confident and compassionate first film. But with its protagonist mostly relegated to waiting and observing, its main raison d’être is Mulligan’s masterful turn as a thirtysomething woman coldly testing her abilities to see what she’s capable of, while terrified that she won’t be able to provide a good life for her son.

The four main actors, all uniformly excellent, can wrap their tongues around Simien's verbose dialogue, but some of the minor actors have a harder time, resulting in several jokes falling flat.

Walker never has Pearce explain why he wants to return the lifts, and he never has to. The heights speak for themselves.

An immediate entrant into the pantheon of female friendship movies, Hustlers — a pretty much perfect film — makes plain the hollowness of so many other iterations of girl power in studio projects. You can feel its heart beat.

A documentary that's admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure.

Anchored by exceptional performances by the main actresses, Breathe is a confrontation with the terrifying volatility of adolescence.

Bujalski’s script does boast lots of smart, sad observations about how both money and self-improvement can lead to isolation. But the characters, while far from broad, aren’t very focused, either.

A chilly, yet engrossing drama, elevated beyond its four-people-locked-in-a-house framework by the eerie beauty of the production design and the thoughtful curiosity of Garland’s screenplay.

The second hour, though, strides toward its impressively unstinting resolution with magisterial confidence. With the characters finally stripped of the hardness they’d been forced to wear, their raw selves glisten in the sun until it’s time to wearily tie the carapace back on.

The script is programmatic to the point that its final shot is fully predictable. But that doesn’t take away from the ending’s earned poignancy, nor the freshness of everything that came before.

This uneven but funny and engrossing drama is less about Victoria than about time itself: how it slows down in the bleary middle of the night, how it speeds up relationships between strangers when no one else is around, how capacious it is in containing the most unexpected of swerves and stumbles.

A timely, thorough and truly inspiring documentary about the financial and marketing imperatives that lead academic institutions to deny their students safety and justice.

On American screens, at least, there is an almost shocking dearth of honest stories about European colonialism, one of the greatest forces to reshape the globe in the last half-millennium, and Kent’s humanist revisions of the rape-revenge and Western genres represents a visionary attempt to rectify this. It may not always be easy to sit through, but we’re nonetheless lucky to witness it.

The grande dame's performance, alternately goofy and grave, is an absolute tour de force.

Its lo-fi charms — the cutesy-scary monster design, earnest family values and Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack — make the film feel like an '80s throwback in a way that justifies the nostalgia.

The men are slightly forgettable, but the woman is not. Far from the flawless fembot in “Ex Machina,” Vikander’s slight gawkiness is highlighted here, allowing her to look like a real girl, absolutely the right decision by Kent.

Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.

Though The Dog can be seen through any number of lenses — a study of media distortion, an illustration of life-sustaining grandiosity, a love story gone deliriously wrong — it's perhaps most meaningful as an exploration of the limits of the gay rights movement's political correctness.

It's an ominous, claustrophobic, unhappily sapphic work whose thunderclap of a climax instills terror and awe of the fates' petty, whimsical cruelties.

The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor.

A vital, urgent and infuriating look at the devastating failures of the juvenile court system and the insidious reach of prison privatization.

The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.

See The Two Popes for its fine performances, but don’t be tempted by its naïveté.

I saw Tully twice. After my first screening, I wasn’t sure what to think of the ending. The second time, I was convinced of the film’s brilliance.

The recent proliferation of gray-haired cinema is a welcome development, but it hasn’t yielded very many notable pictures. “Dreams” doesn’t just buck that trend; it points a new way forward by being frank about living one’s final years and confronting that fact every day.

The dual portrait that Blindspotting offers is heady and dense and mighty compelling.

If you don’t mind your movies nasty, brutish, and slight, you couldn’t ask for a more delectable chocolate-covered razor blade.

Raya and the Last Dragon occasionally crawls, but most of the time it’s got urgency and momentum to spare. Just as impressively, it builds to a deeply moving climax whose resolution is unexpected yet consummate. This is a film that knows how to soar.

The cast is uniformly impressive in their naturalism, but Lewis, Diemir and Lemire — who have the luxury of actually looking like teenagers — are especially so for their young age.

The New Girlfriend is a delicate figurine: too quaint to feel necessary in the current climate of ever-bolder representations of trans lives, and yet rescued from disposability by its delicate beauty.

Emotionally layered, culturally specific, and frequently hilarious, Crazy Rich is a transportive delight, with food montages to die for (the film offers a splendid showcase of Singapore’s justly celebrated street-food scene) and a wedding processional so exquisite I started crying at its sheer beauty.

There’s a particular thrill when all of a film’s many story elements — here, so dense with symbolism — come together with such thematic and emotional vigor. That intensity pairs exquisitely with the tenderness the film never wants to lose sight of.

War is brutal and senseless and would be laughably absurd if it didn’t cause so much widespread, unnecessary destruction and suffering. Tangerines is a heartfelt reminder of that fact, but not a particularly essential one.

LaBeouf is so revelatory as both writer and actor that the film defies cynicism about its second purpose as celebrity image management. It just makes you excited about the work.

The sequential, numbers-heavy structure can make for plodding viewing, especially in the film’s first half. But the doc is ultimately a thoughtful and sensitive tribute to a luminary who should be a household name.

Unabashedly truthful and restlessly intelligent, Akhavan’s remarkable, near-perfect debut has wit and charisma to spare. Miss it at your own risk.

The Square lands its bullseyes, over and over, with a faultless precision that grows duller with each strike.

Handsome and moving if a bit cautious, “Battle” is full of smart complexities and sensational acting, and it deserves to be considered a serious awards contender.

Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.

The film boasts all the cinematic strengths we’ve come to expect from the animal-focused nonfic label... But director Mark Linfield’s film is also distinguished by its fascinating focus on the rigid but not immutable social hierarchy of the macaque world, as well as a smartly structured story of repression, rebellion, and triumph.

If Searching prefers to focus on plot mechanics over emotion, it at least makes up for it with minor but significant developments in Asian American representation. Given the predominance of the cultural and generational gap between parents and children in Asian American narratives, from "The Joy Luck Club" to "Master of None," it’s refreshing to see an example of assimilated families, whose numbers will only continue to increase.

A few of the self-referential gags get recycled one too many times, but an exuberant buoyancy — and the belly-laugh-a-minute pacing of the jokes — makes 22 Jump Street a hilarious highpoint of an already quite funny summer season.

Fassbender manages to find the psychological throughline that makes Macbeth’s increasing mental deterioration — a development that can feel overly formalistic, not to mention moralistic — wholly convincing.

Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.

Hoover's stubbornly ground-level perspective renders the documentary's lack of context about HIV in India...rather frustrating. But Blood Brother feels important anyway, not so much as a snapshot of one volunteer but for its passionate portrayal of the curative powers of love.

Surely Ginsburg is far more interesting than her devotees, her enemies, or this film make her out to be.

The heart of the film is the father-son bond, but Chadha, a filmmaker long preoccupied with the inner lives of Desi-British girls and women, also gives Javed’s sister (Nikita Mehta) a lovely reveal. If a couple of segments droop in their strict adherence to Manzoor’s biography, it’s certainly forgivable. This movie won’t blind anyone with its innovation, but it’s got plenty to dazzle and delight.

Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one's identity, albeit an essential one.

The wonderfully versatile Brewer, who’s in virtually every scene, pulls off essentially three “characters”: Alice, Alice as Lola, and Bizarro Lola. It’s a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot twists make narrative leap after narrative leap.

The film confidently switches gears into a moving character study of how life passes by while you’re busy looking like you don’t care. More interesting than the growing fissures in their friendship are the increasingly ruinous consequences of thoughtlessness as a way of life.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

The film is as heartbreaking as it is heart-stopping.

It’s a totally serviceable, if disappointingly uncinematic, film about a singular celebrity.

The script’s skillful tension makes it easy to forgive Operation Varsity Blues its occasionally clunky missteps. At least it tells a tale as old as time — of the insatiable rapacity of those who already have more than anyone else — with novel relish.

Blockers is about as funny and heartfelt as studio comedies get (which isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment), while smart and insightful enough to double as a guide to raising teenage girls.

Writer-director Hirayanagi runs into a few minor pacing miscalculations, but Oh Lucy!, based on her 2014 short of the same name, is a tense, observant, and heartfelt accomplishment.

Chon’s dense, ambitious, and observant film is full of impressive craft and insight.

Grainily shot but radiating life, The Amazing Catfish is an enormously affecting portrait of a family in crisis that dares to hope.

Jones’ riveting Western is bleak and very nearly misanthropic, but it's also passionate, earthy, unpredictable, sensitive, and gloriously distinct.

Tian-Hao Hua's documentary distinguishes itself not with false suspense but tremendous poignancy and humor, much of which come from the riders' varied histories and motivations for revving up their bikes.

The great achievement in writer-director Jono Oliver's poignant, superb debut, Home, lies in the balance between the film's empathy for those like Jack who seek independence and its compassion for others who may need care indefinitely.

More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.

Freedia is such a charismatic guide — and the explanations for gun violence so familiar — that the documentary loses steam whenever she's off-screen for too long.

What makes Neighbors exceptional, rather than merely great, is its successful attempt to reinvent the studio comedy.

Lady Buds is the kind of film whose raison d’être isn’t immediately obvious, but whose storytelling is engaging enough that we’re ready for wherever the journey takes us.