Jake Coyle

The joys of First Cow are many. The thoughtful, unshowy textures of its clothes and surroundings. The fabulous chemistry of its two leads. The softly stirring guitar of William Tyler’s score. All of these details add up to a wholly original western, one with its own rhythms, ideas and iconography.

The tone is so farcical that the gruesomeness of some of Man-su’s acts come slyly.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s gloriously messy, madcap roller coaster ride through modern America, objects in the rear view may go out of sight, but they don’t disappear.

It’s the performances of Haim and Hoffman that most lend “Licorice Pizza” its authenticity. Neither has acted in a film before and their fresh-faced presences electrify the film.

When we talk about “movie magic,” the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in “E.T.” But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher’s wondrous “La Chimera,” a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground.

For a film about death, Lila Avilés’ “Tótem” is extraordinarily lived in.

Fallen Leaves is the best big-screen romance of the year even though its prospective lovers exchange only a handful of words and, for most of the film, don’t know each other’s names.

The Wenders’ movie that “Perfect Days” most recalls is “Wings of Desire,” where melancholy angels watched over Cold War-era Berlin and spoke of testifying “day by day for eternity.” “Perfect Days” has no such supernatural element, but its gaze is likewise attuned to what’s beautiful and meaningful in everyday living.

I’m sure for Johnson, Dick Johnson Is Dead will one day be a heaven-sent reservoir for remembering her father. But its larger gift is in spurring us all to meet mortality with humor and honesty, and appreciate loved ones while they’re here.

There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.

Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” is less than two hours long and yet contains nearly a quarter-century of time’s relentless march forward. Few films course with history the way it does in the Chinese master’s latest, an epic collage that spans 21 years.

Hold Your Fire... burrows into the real roots of an oft-replayed movie scenario with insight and care.

The whodunit turns out not only to still have a few moves left but to be downright acrobatic.

By burrowing within the brutal propaganda of apartheid, Hermanus, in his intensely expressive, achingly sorrowful fourth film, has captured a mean machinery at work — one that still abides, long after the end of apartheid.

By exponentially multiplying worlds and Spider-Men, Across the Spider-Verse risks making itself dizzy. Yet it surprisingly, even movingly, stays true to the teenage emotions at its core and the parent-kid relationships driving all these multiverse convulsions.

Just as the film’s near-sole setting — a remote mountain cabin beneath the peaks of northwestern Italy — beckons Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) throughout their lives, the intoxicating atmosphere of The Eight Mountains is a cherished retreat I’m already eager to revisit.

To say that the many parts of In the Fade are held together by Kruger would be an understatement. As a cocktail of grief, fury and regret, she’s a remarkably original protagonist — a chain-smoking, tattooed mother who, in her trauma, is always a breath away from drowning.

Black Bag follows a run of agilely directed thrillers by Soderbergh made with screenwriter David Koepp. They are both at the height of their almost-too-easy powers; the script, especially, is peppered with delectable dialogue.

There’s a profound, unresolvable melancholy to “About Dry Grasses” that’s hard to shake.

It’s Tassone’s perspective that Finley largely keeps to, which — if you don’t know the true story — lets Bad Education unspool if not surprisingly at least captivatingly.

[Petzold] turns “Miroirs,” a slender and sweet 86-minute puzzle, into one of the more lovely and profound little movies about how hearts can be mended by just opening a door.

The insanely winning Booksmart boasts too many breakthroughs to count. There are the two leads, Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, both of whom we’ve seen before but not like this. There is the director, Olivia Wilde, whose debut behind the camera is remarkably assured. And then there is the teen comedy genre, itself, which Booksmart has blown wide open.

Turn Every Page...is one of the finest films you’ll see about the craft of editing — not that there are so many of those.

Thrilling because it puts the future in the hands of the young. “Arco” dares to imagine a fate for them, somewhere over the rainbow.

Pitt, in particular, appears so utterly self-possessed. It’s a swaggering grade-A movie star performance in a movie that celebrates all that movie stars can accomplish — which, for Tarantino, is anything.

The Power of the Dog may in the end be more a twisty psychological thriller than a transcendent frontier epic. But the film’s shape-shifting transformation is also part of its ruthless finesse.

A Hero, in which Farhadi returns to his native Iran after a trip to Spain for 2018′s Everybody Knows, is one of the most labyrinthine moral tales you’re likely to encounter.

It’s a grand culmination of both Miyazaki’s extraordinary body of work and of a film that gathers, like a flock, or a symphony, so many of his trademark obsessions.

Of all the post-apocalyptic landscapes we’ve been treated to over the years, none is as beautiful nor peaceful as that of “Flow.”

It’s Pawlikowski second-straight masterwork, only one with a critical if seldom-seen error. His movie is too short.

Collective is not a walk in the park. But it’s admirably awake to the cause-and-effect tragedies that can follow seemingly slight or obscure governmental decisions.

What most vividly comes across in The Fight is the never-ending nature of freedom and democracy.

Sometimes Bowie, who refers to his public persona as “an intoxicating parallel to my perceived reality,” seems to be weighing himself like he would a piece of art. With an electric eye, “Moonage Daydream” finds the slipstream of that reality.

A potent and vividly acted drama about the FBI’s subversion and assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Till, an aching wail of a movie, is a story in many ways about the inevitable tragedy of American racism.

“Balance is key,” one character says of nature in the film. “Evil Does Not Exist,” though, is boldly uneven.

Though I’ve been apprehensive about the flamboyant severity of Lanthimos’ movies, I found “Bugonia,” a chamber-piece gut punch, hard to shake.

Adapting Rosa Liksom’s novel of the same name, Kuosmanen has moved the book from the ’80s to the ’90s and lost some of the story’s political backdrop in favor of a more out-of-time love story.

Anime master Mamoru Hosoda makes movies that, even at their most elaborate, can reach such staggeringly emotional heights that they seem to break free of anything you’re prepared for in an animated movie — or in most kinds of movies, for that matter.

If Soto’s film is loose and gritty, its satire is remarkably precise. This is a farce of creative life where the only pure artistic intention is a joke.

Apollo 11 might not tell you anything you don’t already know about the moon landing. But it will make you feel it, and see it, anew.

There is a wonderful feeling in “Between the Temples” that anything can happen at any moment.

In the bleak, everyday struggles the Dardennes dramatize, they are always, thank god, keenly on the lookout for grace.

Much of The Favourite is caustically clever but it’s Colman who elevates it to something magnificent.

Bones and All can be both brutal and beautiful. You have the sense of seeing a movie that in shape and style reminds you of countless others. But, well, cannibalism just has a way of throwing things off balance. The result is something that feels both archetypal and otherworldly.

In this remarkably fully formed debut, the moments that matter are the funny and tender ones that persist amid crueler experiences.

With a terrific ensemble, You Hurt My Feelings digs into the half-truths that keep self-doubt at bay in all of these characters.

Casarosa’s film comes and goes like a soft summer breeze, but that doesn’t stop it from being utterly charming and, by the time of its magnificent final shot, a little devastating, too.

In very ’80s environs, Baumbach’s film always remains — purposefully, I think — a self-conscious work of literature adaptation, juggling big themes and highly literate dialogue with a screwball touch. It makes for a heady concoction too constantly interesting to ever be boring.

One of the more sheerly delightful movies of the year.

This West Side Story succeeds most as a revival not just of Robbins’ musical but of the best of classical, studio-made, big-screen cinema.

Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, Black Panther has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. As the most earnest and big-budget attempt yet of a black superhero film, Black Panther is assured of being an overdue cinematic landmark. But it's also simply ravishing, grand-scale filmmaking.

Eighth Grade is a revelation of both a remarkably natural young performer and a clever, sensitive young filmmaker.

Soul turns out to be not an exploration of the afterlife but a wondrous whirligig of daily life.

Kranz’s film isn’t perfect. As the conversation ebbs and the four parents stagger out of the room and awkwardly part, the movie, too, struggles with how to walk away. But in this plainly photographed, mournful, restrained movie, the back-and-forth is bracingly sincere.

With an immense sense of scale ranging from mosquito to (Jason) Momoa, Dune renders an age-old tale of palace intrigue and indigenous struggle in exaggerated cosmic contours. Like any drift of sand, Dune feels sculpted by elemental, primal forces.

It’s a preposterous and tasteless ode to the messy, nonsensical struggle and bliss of being human.

Rankin’s film, his second following the also surreal “Twentieth Century” (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie’s slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? sings best — or rather, grumbles spectacularly — when McCarthy and Grant are together. They are kindred misfits and malcontents happy for each other’s company.

Like Haemi’s melancholy dance in the half-light, Lee has beautifully, wrenchingly summoned an unshakeable sense of disquiet.

It’s all so handsomely shot and deliberately staged that you might at times worry that The Last Black Man in San Francisco is leaning more toward picturesque than profound. But when Talbot’s film rises to its rousing and sensitive climax, the fairy tale falls away and something authentically soulful emerges.

Part of the fun of Amazing Grace is watching not just those in the thrall of Franklin (Mick Jagger can be seen bopping in the back of the church) but witnessing the awe Franklin evokes.

There’s a wistful, warm feeling when wandering into a Hansen-Løve film. Hers are delicate dramas keenly tuned to the rhythm of daily life, and “One Fine Morning” is her most radiant film yet.

A prize-winner at last fall’s Venice Film Festival, “April” could be accused of leaning too much into an austere, art-film obliqueness. But Kulumbegashvili’s absolute control over the camera and the intensity of her calling make her film a grimly spellbinding and unforgettable experience.

Bairead’s sensitive and heartfelt film, which is debuting in many theaters Friday, is a stirring testament to what’s possible on a modest scale with a few well-chosen words.

The movie’s gathering momentum, even as it grows more claustrophobic, is owed to a few things. It comes from Ben-Adir’s artfully calibrated performance as Malcolm — here more consumed with doubt, worry and self-awareness than the usual firebrand portrayal. It comes from Odom’s deft sense of Cooke. And it comes from King’s remarkable elegance as a director.

Beyond any direct lines of connection between past and present, “Two Prosecutors” has the neatness and timelessness of a parable, one that Gogol might have written, and one that could resonate in any era where the naively courageous challenge fascism.

To a remarkable degree, “Robot Dreams” has fully imbibed all the melancholy and joy of Earth, Wind & Fire’s disco classic. Just as the song asks “Do you remember?” so too does “Robot Dreams,” a sweetly wistful little movie that, like a good pop song, expresses something profound without wasting a word.

It’s the movie’s own power trio of Barrino, Brooks and Henson that makes “The Color Purple” one of the most moving big-screen musicals in recent years. Each in their own way transforms suffering into exhilarating portraits of survival and strength.

Much is just out of reach in Arnow’s shrewdly perceptive and very funny new film.

There’s an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. Blindspotting is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.

Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Yamada Naoko’s luminous anime “The Colors Within” gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life.

Ly’s film excels in its lively verisimilitude, its terrific cast and its intensity. Les Miserables is a powder keg, always at risk of detonating.

Pugh never looks quite at ease in the ring in Fighting With My Family, but her performance is so layered with ambition and self-doubt that the film exceeds its familiar framework.

They are outcasts, weirdos, laughing stocks and whatever you call Nanaue. That makes The Suicide Squad — as ridiculous as it is to say about a movie that renders a bloody rampage with gushes of animated daisies and birdies — kind of beautiful. Plus, the shark in jams is funny.

The Two Popes might promulgate an optimistic portrait of the Catholic Church and its leaders. But in these sweetly sincere scenes, you forget Benedict and Bergoglio are pontiff and pontiff-to-be. And the moment of respite from the world’s arguments and divisions feels like a benediction.

There is no doubt that these sequences are quite easily, in form and execution, a cut above what most any other action film is currently doing.

Thankfully, someone has come to the not-hard-to-deduce realization that Clooney and Pitt are good together.

Fair Play has been hailed for reviving the long-dormant-but-often-missed erotic thriller. While there are bits of that in Domont’s film, Fair Play is neither especially erotic nor much of a thriller. What it is, though, is often gripping battle of the sexes set in a toxic, misogynist corporate world where power and sex are inextricably linked currencies.

Polinger’s film isn’t a comfortable watch and it’s not meant to be. It gets under the skin.

Not all the jokes land but they do fly. Bottoms, a queer comedy with a chaotic beat, is here to break stuff — and that’s a very good thing.

Gladiator II isn’t quite the prestige film the first one, a best-picture winner, was in 2001. It’s more a swaggering, sword-and-sandal epic that prizes the need to entertain above all else.

Shyamalan doesn’t pump up the violence, nor does he rely on plot twists to carry Knock at the Cabin along. Instead, the film works as a brutal, neatly distilled kind of morality play that toys with fatalism, family and climate change allegory.

There are few more daring actors around right now than Moss, and “Shirley” may be her best performance yet. She’s brutally cutting but the pain of every slight ripples across her face.

Aside from verging on the one-note, that focus constricts the very linear, very self-contained Ad Astra, a taut but inflexible chamber piece in a genre given to symphony.

All the assembled parts here, including an especially high-quality cast (even Wendell Pierce!) work together seamlessly in a way that Marvel hasn’t in some time. Most of all, Pugh commands every bit of the movie.

It’s a little shaggy and you’ll occasionally yearn for a bit more humor along the way. But “Caught Stealing,” based on Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel, is a ride, foremost, in ‘90s nostalgia.

Bahrani, with Paolo Carnera’s vivid cinematography, builds a dense, incisive film that nevertheless feels uneven in structure.

Generous in humor, spirit and sentimentality, Anthony and Joe Russo's Endgame is a surprisingly full feast of blockbuster-making that, through some time-traveling magic, looks back nostalgically at Marvel's decade of world domination. This is the Marvel machine working at high gear, in full control of its myth-making powers and uncovering more emotion in its fictional cosmos than ever before.

While Radical, an audience winner at the Sundance Film Festival, is formulaic in its approach, it gets enough out of it likable cast to earn at least a passing grade.

It’s one of the freshest college movies in years, a nano-budget breakthrough of rare sensitivity that announces more than one new talent.

Velvet Buzzsaw doesn’t lead anywhere inward; it becomes just a litany of (exquisite) death scenes for art-world caricatures. Still, what caricatures they are.

Through twists and turns, The Painter and the Thief depicts not just the two-way transactional relationship between artist and subject, but the shared pain and mutual rehabilitation that can inspire and surround art making.

Watching The Trip to Greece at a time when such travel is impossible has only heightened the considerable pleasures of these movies (and made the food all the more appetizing). But mostly it’s reinforced the simple delight of sitting table-side with Coogan and Brydon. For all their trivial sparring, they are exceedingly good company.

Though Liman knows how to mix action and comedy as well as anyone, “The Instigators” is better whenever there’s less going on.

Polite Society, the feature film debut of writer-director Manzoor, creator of the British sitcom “We Are Lady Parts,” is a fun and increasingly preposterous comedy. But it’s propelled by an infectious and genuine punk-rock energy. Make no mistake about it, the sisters of Polite Society are here to take down Pakistani tradition, the patriarchy and anything else you got.

The Vast of Night is, in a slinky way, about escaping small-town small-mindedness.