Jessica Kiang

La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and such magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportative power of movies.

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.

Though the film deals in tragedy, its sheer cinematic exuberance is immensely hopeful. As too, is the story of how one of the most exciting directorial debuts in recent memory was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing and planted in a few theaters before blossoming on Netflix.

It is so lived-in and authentic in its real-world detail, and so enigmatic and mysterious in its diversions and sidelong glances, that it's difficult not to see it as overridingly personal, not just to the director but to the viewer. It's a true act of the most optimistic communication and communion.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an astonishing, beautifully made corrective to the cultural amnesia that has for decades surrounded Hite, the author of “The Hite Report,” a landmark 1976 survey on female sexuality, that is apparently still ranked the 30th best-selling book in history.

The film does not stab as deeply in laying bare the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them.

The remarkable, raw-boned and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense.

Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.

While you’re still in the vice-like grip of its multilevel narrative it may not feel like it, but a film like Agnieszka Holland’s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.

Days is the first in a loose trilogy including In the Mood for Love and 2046, but here, amidst all the exquisitely deliberate, drippingly sensual imagery that would become Wong’s trademark, there is still the grit and grain of real life, and it makes this perfectly enigmatic film feel somehow thrilling.

Saint Omer challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity — and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas.

Matching Fukunaga's proven storytelling grace with a story truly worth the telling, the result is explosively authentic and yet lyrical, making an utterly inhumane and alien situation both completely real and completely abstract.

This thrilling directorial confidence, given his film’s elegant opacities and ambiguities, is a quality to marvel at, even as it’s binding your hands and tying you to your seat and forcing you to watch, possibly against your will.

If the immediate, textural pleasures of the film are such that you can almost miss the deftness of its construction, the skill with which Eggers balances out his ambivalent storytelling, while still ramping through ever-escalating climaxes, can’t be overstated.

Very possibly her most accessible and enjoyable film to date, still it remains an unmistakably Reichardtian investigation into the fabric of ordinariness and what happens when it frays.

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.

Made of crystal and suppressed tears, shot eternally through windows and mirrors and half-closed doors, Todd Haynes' Carol is a love story that starts at a trickle, swells gradually to a torrent, and finally bursts the banks of your heart. A beautiful film in every way, immaculately made, and featuring two pristine actresses glowing across rooms and tousled bedclothes at each other like beacons of tentative, unspoken hope.

The Best Is Yet to Come is superbly well-made, making a compelling case for recognizing the humanity of others even in the midst of illness, even when ignorance and politicized paranoia threaten your compassion. It’s not hard to discern the relevance.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Lanthimos with the gloves off, and it makes the absurd, amazing “The Lobster” seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison.

It's an absorbing, even thrilling head trip. It is a Heart-of-Darkness voyage of discovery. It is a lament for all the lost plants and peoples of the world.

This is the rare debut that derives its freshness not from inexperience but from a balance between compassion and restraint that most filmmakers take decades to achieve.

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.

The most disturbing thing about the impressively disturbing Rose Plays Julie may just be how satisfying it is.

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.

Like this extraordinary, ordinary family, latticed together by love yet supremely alive in their own individual hearts, Panah Panahi is not just part of a tradition, but his own filmmaker, finding new resonances in territory so familiar its power to surprise should have been thoroughly exhausted by now, but that here feels like a whole new universe.

There are ups and downs and soapish highs and lows, but what stops this from ever becoming a telenovela is the riveting wonder of the performances and the sheer brio of the filmmaking.

This is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking art that also happens to be almost unbearably moving. Actually, there is no “almost.”

It’s a lovely, gracious, soul-satisfying thing.