Jordan Ruimy

Talking head interviews from his victims, business and works partners, and friends mesh together with archival photos, videos, and audio recordings of Weinstein for a compulsively watchable, yet not definitive, look at the man whose predatory behavior spearheaded the #MeToo movement.

This is a hearty, four-course meal for film fans, which, once again, demonstrates that the study of a film can be just as invigorating an experience as the actual film itself.

What Western Stars best achieves, a universal notion that will hook fans and non-fans alike, is the shared sense of community displayed in the infectious love shown for playing vital and moving music.

Berman ultimately turns his incredible meta-story into an ode to documentary filmmaking. And its exhilarating stuff because you have absolutely no clue where this movie is going to take you next. Berman’s doc keeps pulling the rug from under you, and it’s a high-wire act of reinvention that rewards the viewer at every step.

In a film that is so disinterested to conforming to accustomed mainstream movie audiences taste and rhythms, and is committed to its sometimes difficult choices, the bold and exacting Beanpole sometimes feels damn-near radical.

All thanks to Herzog’s keen eye at having a continuous fluid flow to the story and his subject’s willingness to lay bare in front of an audience, this is one of the most important documentaries of the year because it still feels fresh and relevant to our times.

Sober, unflinching and fits perfectly with the current political movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp.

Melancholy in shape, but still hopeful, Crosby’s willingness to bare naked his personal struggles on-camera makes for a truly poignant movie.

Brügger’s movie plays mostly like a real-time thriller, to be honest, but whatever hybrid of non-fiction you want to categorize Cold Case Hammarskjöld, it’s nothing short of groundbreaking.

Beyond Ocasio-Cortez and her magnetism, we may look back at Knock Down the House years from now as a nascent document of the beginnings of a groundswell in American politics.

Luce is a dangerous minefield and simply crackles with the kind of distressing pressure that is beginning to define America in every conversation we have about race, marginalization, social strata, woke politics and even marriage.

Appropriately frosty and aloof, The Lodge is a meditative plumbing of the darkest parts of the human psyche, our vulnerabilities, and self-doubts and it’s these personal fears that resonate loudly.

It’s Wang’s singular gift for life’s simplest moments which makes The Farewell ring so truthfully bare, funny and emotional.

There are no dull moments in this ridiculously brutal, often severely dumb, but enjoyable, film

This is one of the most joyous and exhilarating movies you will see this year and because there is so much passion flowing out from the music, screenplay, and acting, you totally forgive the film when it strays into the predictable and even a little bit of corniness.

Brewer, of course, is the glue that holds the puzzle together. If we didn’t care for her surreal plight, then the film would just not work, but the actress builds a thoroughly believable character in Alice.

The set-up in Free Solo can sometimes be repetitive, as the filmmakers continuously fawn over their subject’s accomplishments in the nerve-racking build-up to the main event. However, the absorbing lure of the movie, the climactic, terror-provoking Yosemite climb itself, is overwhelming and worth the wait.

It’s an uneven film, but a deeply passionate one that also features an A-list actress at the top of her game.

This is an assured, confident feature-directing debut for Zagar who shows great promise in his ability to render a confident and brilliant work of art from difficult-to-adapt source material. His film is a complicated coming-of-age tale that not only brings refreshing insights but gives us beautifully rendered images that have the power to haunt you for days.

Unique, unforgettable and cathartic, Border is an oddball, but poignant cult classic in the making. Abbasi’s sincerity wisely avoids caricature and mocking his marginalized characters and in doing so he crafts a surprisingly humanist and artful story of love for the diminished and dismissed outsiders of the world.

Stripping the “I Will Always Love You,” singer away from sensationalist tabloid dirt that marred her life, MacDonald’s thoughtfulness is arguably its standout element. The finesse with which he crafts his doc makes for, quite simply, an absorbing and moving portrayal of an unforgettable heartrending figure.

A hyper-realistic urban tragedy Dogman is ferocious and in its own way, much more frightening than “Gomorrah.”

Capharnaüm is not without its issues. The director over-relies on the courtroom scenes and the movie’s message is heavy-handed at times. Yet, the sheer force of the filmmaking and its artful delivery overpowers sappy overreaching.

Trying to pick apart his native country’s struggles between tradition and modernity, legality and crime, Kore-eda takes the time to affectionately dissect the way family functions, before carefully deconstructing it and revealing the contoured complexities that live within.

Simmering with ambiguity, Burning plays its staging, writing, dialogue, acting, music, everything with carefully calibrated minimalism, but in turn it makes some grandiose statements. An unrecognizable murder-mystery Burning torches genre clichés and leaves a lasting, scorching blister.

While Long Day’s plot seems an afterthought, the experience is all that matters: the audience gathers all the clues, rummage through them to soak up the atmosphere and enter a world unlike any seen before. Make no mistake about it, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a flat-out masterpiece.

Through a few dreamlike, discreet and beautifully placed sequences, Rohrwacher makes us believe that a world of empathy and accord may someday exist again.

With enlivening performances and thoughtful filmmaking, Girl has the power to not just change lives but reinvigorate your belief in cinema.

The minute-to-minute detail is absolutely stunning, from the period costumes to the on-set locations, there’s a searing authenticity to the time period that is undeniably absorbing. However, the almost too tightening restraint he gives his film forces us to quickly witness its events rather than be enveloped or moved by them.

Ash is Purest White borrows heavily from “Mountains May Depart” — the narrative construct, the same actress, the musical gimmicks, even the flawed ending — and yet we are nevertheless absorbed by the finesse and grace in a film by this venerable artist.

As fraught with drama as this powder keg of heightened circumstances may be, make no mistake, The Wife is more than an actor’s showcase. The film itself is superb, a ticking time-bomb of simmering tension which benefits from the audience knowing as little as possible in advance.

Telling this story with a deep specificity, Larnell does the artist proud by artfully using his camera to capture a woman forging her identity through her art. He and Adams make a formidable team and finely stamp their own mark on the hip-hop movie genre.

The filmmakers brilliantly set-up an atmosphere that feels uniquely cinematic and wholly original. But when impressive world-building is established and story takes over, Prospect quickly devolves into a mess of contrivances and overstuffed characters in its more problematic second half.

As striking as some of these performances are, 6 Balloons is not without its problems. At a barebones 74 minute running time that doesn’t dive into the emotional texture as much as it could, 6 Balloons at times, feels slight.

Dazzling in form and a chase film at its heart, Ready Player One is exhilarating, but it also can’t sit still. Fitting to the content perhaps, the movie still arguably suffers from troublesome A.D.D. with its hyper fast cutting and its tendency to wander narratively.

A thrilling, near-silent film that brilliantly toys with the audience’s nerves while deftly avoiding familiar cliches, Krasinski shows a surprisingly assured and suspenseful touch within the horror genre.

After a string of films ranging from safe sequels (Finding Dory) to franchise duds (Cars 3) to not-fully-realized adventures (The Good Dinosaur), this is Pixar coming back in a heartfelt, gorgeous way.

Much of the film’s success does reside upon Chbosky’s mostly restrained execution, but it is Tremblay that carries it. His fully rendered and exceptional performance is something of a miracle as it joyously goes past the prosthetics and into the core of his character’s roller coaster of emotions.

A valentine to movies and an ode to the stinkers which we love and can’t live without, Franco exudes cinematic passion with his finest directorial outing yet.

Although it may be lacking originality, Battle of the Sexes is finely-tuned storytelling that has been consummated by real pros.

There seems to be something missing; his life was an enigmatic puzzle and Strong hasn’t found all the pieces. It doesn’t help that his visual style is flat and the narrative is conventional enough.

Through effective direction, the activism on display here is inspiring enough to rile one up to set aside preoccupations and try to make a difference in the world.

The tension that Franco builds with every scene is crafty and strong, leaving one curious enough to wonder where this narrative is going.

Wakefield fights formula and creates its own unique cinematic language.

It helps that the chemistry between Lister-Jones and Pally works, but one does wonder if another pass at the script would have elevated the film for one to care more about what’s at stake.

Although the film flies off the rails in its climax, the rest of Brigsby Bear is an outrageous concept that’s pulled off quite well.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power is an important and relevant worldwide look at the environmental crisis.

One of the sexiest and most joyful road movies in some time.

What one takes away from My Life As a Courgette might be a casually simple and forward affair, but a deeper, more considered look at Barras’ moving tale reveals an emotional resonance and non-saccharine uplift that is mostly rare in today’s animation world. Consider it a diamond in the rough.

Biller explores female fantasy in the most diabolical of ways imaginable and gender politics are dissected with a brutal honesty that could infuriate some feminists with its observations.

While ‘Life’s Journey’ might be a deeper meditation on the meaning of life and deeper questions of who we are, The IMAX Experience is a more realized version of similar ideas. Ultimately, The IMAX Experience is a tone poem that not only pays tribute to planet Earth and the life that inhabits it, but marvels at how this miracle was created.

The story is a simple one, and sometimes it might feel a little too slight for it own good, but Paulson carries it all the way through with bravado acting.

Oldroyd captures our gaze with every frame and doesn’t balk at the story’s more shocking sections. He means to shake us and does.

While Denial doesn’t do anything new on a technical side, it is fully aware of its gripping plot, one that welcomely avoids pushing its inherent clichés to the forefront of its story.

Whereas the aforementioned Southside With You was a calm, romantic watch, this is a serious and refined drama which has the feel of a political firecracker.

Wildly bizarre and imaginatively alluring, if not occasionally slight, the animated movie, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, is an engaging surrealist take on the disaster movie.

The difference between Lights Out and any other mainstream horror movie is that it actually uses the dark as the center of its plot, organically drawing out the majority of its jump scares in the process.

Filled with plenty of ideas and a strong sense of identity, The Witness can still be somewhat unfocused, unfolding in a multitude of directions, but failing to provide a complete portrait about Kitty and her life, which is a truly fascinating one.

Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian deliver wonders on both the technical and narrative ends of Search, but editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson do an astounding job as well.

If only more period pieces these days were as finely tuned and accessibly pleasurable as Westmoreland’s film.

Fisher must be given immense credit for making it all work as her performance is pitch-perfect in every respect. Sometimes, it feels like you’re not even watching an actress perform but an actual person. The way Burnham shot some of the scenes makee it feel like non-fiction rather than fiction.

Turtletaub does have a hard time finding a way to conclude Agnes’ story, but he ends Puzzle on such a delightful note of simplicity, that this near-perfect movie nevertheless stuns.

The film is easy to admire, but lacks the kinds of scenes necessary to truly make a emotional connection.

This is a remarkable, triumphant, and confident picture by Aster, who gives the film an almost meditative-like sensation, as you feel every space you’re in, every emotion, every moment of grief. Hereditary refuses to employ cheap thrills, creating its cinematic scares with atmosphere, and continuously reinventing itself at every turn.

Overall, this is astute, fascinating filmmaking from Hawke who believes the small details are all part of the bigger picture, the deeper experience of knowing who Blaze Foley was.

Topics such as race, poverty, masculinity and politics are tackled in thought-provoking ways. It all makes for an entertaining, if not slight, ride that proves Kahn has the chops to graduate into feature films and maybe has a genre classic in him just screaming to get out.