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.