Jessica Kiang

Without a single weak link in the exceptional cast...it’s a film that makes you feel a lot. But overridingly you feel lucky — lucky to be watching it, lucky that something so sincerely sweet, sorrowfully scary and surpassingly strange can exist in this un-wonderful world, and desirous of hanging on to as much of its magic for as long as you can after you reemerge back onto dry land.

For those who miss the way the movies used to act on us, it is a reminder of the uniquely paradoxical pleasures of immersion and surrender: a dazzlingly cineliterate lesson in the lost art of letting go.

Force Majeure is a brutally smart and original film.

Wandel’s immersive, impressive debut is rigorous in its resolute focus on one little girl fighting a lonely, frightened battle for her future selfhood, in which what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the shape and measure of her developing soul.

Nebraska is a small-scale quixotic adventure about the importance of dreams, no matter how pie-eyed, in which the outlined flaws could all be forgiven, if it just went somewhere a bit more surprising.

This is the downer as an art form, a feelbad film of gargantuan reach and effect, and a brave, horrified commentary on a whole nation.

Ruizpalacios spins an irresistibly inventive and unusually intelligent tall tale from this kernel of truth. All the mischief, however, is precisely counterbalanced by a deep affection for his funny, flawed (largely fictional) characters and shot through with a surprisingly biting assessment of the compromised nature of the museum trade.

The low-key nature of what's come before simply serves to render all the more effective the final shootout, when the film careens completely, and bloodily, off the rails.

Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language – particularly that of performance – that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.

A beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother’s homeland, Jamaica.

It’s a beautiful, moving finale but it hardly needed all the digressions en route, which basically amount to Ceylan taking the very long (and often scenic) way round to arrive at the simple conclusion that the wild pear does not, after all, fall so very far from the tree.

While in formal terms it’s more of a standard, reportage-based doc than any of his recent essays, it is also the rarest of projects: one in which a venerated member of an older generation of political activists communicates a fervent admiration for his younger counterparts and a deep, grateful optimism for the future they are building.

The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature, is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be.

Sabaya is remarkable not least for how cleanly Hirori excises himself from it, careful to not get in between the viewer and these devastating stories with their 10 different flavors of heroism.

The more chaos descends, the more meticulous Park’s filmmaking becomes, as he finds giddy new ways to exploit pre-established quirks of terrain and architecture.

Though it is dense in allusion and rich in texture, there are choices he makes that ultimately pull The Salesman back from the greatness, and the engulfing universality of his best work. It is as compelling as anything Farhadi has ever made, but it’s also somehow smaller.

Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living.

It's a gripping and thoroughly effective, perhaps even brilliant piece of biographical documentary filmmaking.

Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind

To the Ends of the Earth is not flawless — for one thing, it’s questionable whether a journey to as mild a shore as this one needs two hours to complete. But its rhythm is deceptive — the gentle currents of Kurosawa’s attention sluicing across the surface of the film like developer fluid, under which all the colors, dark and light, of the fulfilling but also contradictory experience of world travel come up true and sharp.

Aptly named and drolly executed, leading to a transcendently funny, endearing and unexpected finale, The Treasure confirms Corneliu Porumboiu as the joker in the Romanian New Wave pack.

Like its characters, Moreno’s banally surreal, madly sensible, big-little movie eschews the safe old daily grind in favor of the perilous unknown, and so, in a uniquely pleasurable way, reminds us that we too have options: Choose work, or choose the whole wide, weird world instead.

An overlong but enjoyable metaphysical thriller that delivers pastiche so meticulous it becomes its own source of supremely cinematic pleasure.

Girlhood is a fascinatingly layered, textured film that manages to be both a lament for sweetness lost and a celebration of wisdom and identity gained, often at the very same moment.

Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.

This radically intimate exploration of the desperately fraught concept of “passing” — being Black but pretending to be white — ought to be too ambitious for a first-time filmmaker, but Hall’s touch is unerring, deceptively delicate, quiet and immaculate, like that final fall of snow.

In Two Prosecutors, perhaps out of deference to the source text, Loznitsa plays it straighter than in either of those titles and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control.

After the world-conquering success of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” and the small-screen domination of “Squid Game,” your new, sublimely accomplished Korean thriller obsession is here, and it is Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.