Jake Coyle

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.

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.

The film is shot by Florian Hoffmeister with a cool, almost documentary-like perspective. It’s in these chilly, highbrow environs that Lydia operates with exquisite intellect and ruthless cunning — and Blanchett gives a colossal tour-de-force performance that may be the finest of her career, a career as decorated as Lydia’s.

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

By breaking down some of the old mythology, Johnson has staked out new territory. For the first time in a long time, a “Star Wars” film feels forward-moving.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Gunda ultimately falls somewhere between banal and profound. Maybe it’s both.

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.

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.

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 Death of Stalin may be both Iannucci’s darkest and most timely satire yet. More than anything he’s done before, Iannucci has narrowed the distance between slapstick and savagery, prompting us to contemplate — even as we’re cackling — their uncomfortable proximity.

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

A clever concept, not a profound film. Terrifically acted and finely crafted though it is, it’s a brilliant but hollow exercise in perspective that calls more attention to its artful orchestration than it does life or loss.

Here is a sweeping historical tapestry — no one does it better today than Scott — with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix — Scott’s spectacle and Phoenix’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance — makes Napoleon a rivetingly off-kilter experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aster, who also wrote the film, fills his movie with foreshadowing clues that give the gruesome events to come a cruel note of inevitability. There’s a curse on this family, whether by ghost or DNA.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

To a remarkable degree, Happening is viscerally connected with its protagonist, closely detailing not just her navigation of social taboos and restrictions but capturing her unapologetic determination. It’s a movie about abortion, yes, but it’s also a coming-of-age tale about a woman’s resolve.

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.

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

The chapters don’t cohere in a sustained rhythm, but in richly evocative imagery, The Green Knight makes its own vivid film language and pacing.

The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, is vigilant in widening is lens to capture the broader problems at USA Gymnastics.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s based on Adam Mars-Jones’ “Box Hill,” but Lighton’s film largely avoids the darker, abusive turns of the novel. Lighton is more keen to enjoy the unfolding dynamics of a relationship in the extreme, one that ultimately, like any other, is guided by needs and wants.

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.

Time is the fundamental metric of prison life, which makes a documentary like “Daughters,” filmed over years, uniquely, maybe even monstrously capable of capturing its passing.

It’s an affecting window into what remains very possibly the most benevolent broadcast ever regularly beamed out on the small screen.

Just as last year’s beekeeping beauty Honeyland, The Truffle Hunters is a richly allegorical documentary of a vanishing agricultural pastime.

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

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 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.

Dosa uses July’s narration to frame the Kraffts’ story with a playful sense of wonder and whimsy — a sometimes overly intrusive, too neatly packaged device in a film where what’s on screen is so overwhelmingly powerful that it might not need the extra layer.

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

To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it’s a lovely way to pass some time.

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.

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

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

It could be that, if we’re talking about representing hard-to-tame adolescent urges in monster form, “Turning Red” — bold as it may be — can’t come close to matching the messy comic farce of “Big Mouth,” the far less family-friendly but much more true-to-life animated series that paired seventh graders with lascivious “hormone monsters.”

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s the kind of comic, eminently British underdog story that Frears excels at. And with Sally Hawkins playing Langley as a woman undeterred by pompous academics and condescending naysayers, The Lost King makes for a charmingly droll tale of long-ago and not-so-long-ago reappraisal.

You Won’t Be Alone enchants in its novel perspective and in its sharp-shifting protagonist’s unquenchable curiosity. The witch, once so set in stereotype, has never felt so enthrallingly elastic.

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

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.

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.

The mythic simplicity is part of the point of The Northman, but the movie’s single-minded protagonist and its elemental conflicts verge closer to “Conan the Barbarian” territory than perhaps is ideal. Eggers’ film is only fitfully enchanting and squanders its mean momentum.

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

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.

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

In this forensic portrait of war, the only way to not get what’s happening on the ground is to be too far from it. François Truffaut famously said there’s no such thing as an anti-war film because movies inherently glamorize war. “Warfare,” though, is intent on challenging that old adage.

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.

The film, as you would expect, walks us again through the tremendous upheavals in Turner’s life. But it’s ultimately about Turner telling her story — why she struggles having to tell it; why she needs to tell it, anyway; and why she wants to be done with it.

A Man Called Otto is less after realism than it is a modern-day fable, with shades of Scrooge and the Grinch. As a tale of a solitary man, Hanks has made it a poignant work of family.

In Us, Peele has produced a terrifying artifact: a sinister ballet of doppelgangers and inversions that makes flesh the unseen underbelly lurking beneath every sunny American dream and behind every contented nuclear family. It’s a scissor-sharp rebuke to anyone who’s ever held hands and sang “Kumbaya.”

It’s a movie best seen less as a historical epic and more as a metaphor for a rising young movie star coming up in a culture he aims to subvert.

There’s a stale emptiness to Living that doesn’t entirely dissipate in even its most moving scenes.

But for all its fast-paced zaniness, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, scripted by Rianda and his writing partner Jeff Rowe (also co-director), is basically a good old-fashioned family road trip movie, and the Mitchells slide in somewhere between the Griswolds and a more accident-prone Incredibles.

The actors are uniformly good. And by fusing two types of films that have long been bedfellows — slashers and pornography — “X” makes for a gripping shotgun marriage of genres.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On could be considered a kids movie or an art-house indie (A24 is releasing). But its proper audience might be anyone who’s ever felt sanded down by life, and could use a roll in Marcel’s rover.

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.

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.

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

It’s less Haigh’s mournful view of American society — one that, for sure, rarely finds American movie screens — that makes the heartfelt Lean on Pete stay with you. It’s Plummer’s wounded, achingly alone Charley, humbly striving across a darkening land, holding on desperately.

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.

On the whole, the Ross brothers’ observational, immersive filmmaking gets close to something bracingly real.

Rarely has a film conjured such a thick atmosphere of dread and wonder as “Annihilation,” a movie that unfolds, grippingly, as an existential mystery.

Babygirl, which Reijn also wrote, is sometimes a bit much. (In one scene, Samuel feeds Romy saucers of milk while George Michael’s “Father Figure” blares.) But its two lead actors are never anything but completely magnetic.

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.

Like its predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” thrums with an intoxicating big-screen expressionism of monoliths and mosquitos, fevered visions and messianic fervor — more dystopian dream, or nightmare, than a straightforward narrative.

It would be easy to hail The Naked Gun as something better than it is, since it simply existing is cause for celebration. But like most reboots, particularly comedy ones, the best thing about the new “Naked Gun” is that it might send you back to the original.

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

As a movie, Priscilla is the diametric opposite of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” Where Luhrmann’s film was lurid and careening, Coppola’s is muted and textured. Her film is a kind of fairy tale that turns claustrophobic and cautionary.

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.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things nearly sustains something beautiful and sad that blends consciousness and time.

The most memorable images in Still are those of a present-day Fox in frame, speaking straight into the camera. The effects of Parkinson’s are visible but so is the jaunty, self-deprecating actor we’ve always known.