Jesse Cataldo

Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.

A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.

A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.

Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.

True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.

Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.

The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.

It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.

A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.

The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.

Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.

A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.

It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.

Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.

Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.

This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.

By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.

Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.

Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.

Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.

As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.

It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.

More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.

While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.

The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.

The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.