Joshua Rothkopf

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It’s a movie about memory that actually improves the more you go over its folds.

A masterclass in tension, visual panache and B-movie excess.

Moonlight takes the pain of growing up and turns it into hardened scars and private caresses. This film is, without a doubt, the reason we go to the movies: to understand, to come closer, to ache, hopefully with another.

As for that famous last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” it’s best left uncontextualized for those who haven’t seen it. It’s Hollywood’s subtlest moment of compassion, a wink and a hug at the same time, and the reason why the movie will always be immortal.

The Third Man is best seen as his romantic fantasy; we’d have to wait decades before another awkward scribbler, also a fish out of water, plunged helplessly into a misadventure. His name was Barton Fink.

By a whopping margin, this is Kubrick’s most radical film and greatest dramatic gamble.

Too few films take on the art of arguing as a subject; we could certainly use more of them, but until then, Lumet’s window into strained civic duty will continue to serve mightily.

To say Lonergan has evolved further with his third feature would be an understatement: He toggles between his new plot’s years with the relaxed mastery of Boyhood’s Richard Linklater. Plus, he’s finally got a complex central performance that anchors his ambitions to cinema’s all-time great brooders.

Much of the movie’s revolutionary impact should be credited to the city itself: The Dakota looms menacingly, every bit the Gothic pile as any Transylvanian vampire’s mansion.

Carné's film has never looked more lush.

Cuarón, a magician who brought personality to the Harry Potter series, is after pure, near-experimental spectacle.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Masterfully addressing the American racial divide, past and present, director Raoul Peck’s six-years-in-the-making documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, is a galvanizing, ominous film, thrumming with a sense of history repeating itself.

Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment.

It's not an easy sit; we're never let off the hook with golden-hued memories or belated bits of wisdom. Maybe this is love after all.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.

It’s a film that makes you want to sharpen your barbs and sling sass with the adults.

That’s the subtle level this movie operates on, and by the time it arrives at its powerhouse climax, a ruinous argument in a hotel room where all lingering doubts are finally and furiously outed, there’s nowhere left for them to ramble. They’re pinned down and have to improvise, but this glorious movie has infinite space to roam.

After a while, you adjust, or rather, you get tired of probing the slightly-off evidence of your eyes and the headache it produces. There’s a lot of fun to distract you.

Badlands is the American myth of freedom and violence; it doesn’t get old because it remains what we are.

Call Me by Your Name has a choking emotional intensity that will be apparent to anyone who’s ever dared to reach out to another.

Though it runs an epic five-and-a-half hours (it was made for French TV), Carlos books like no film since "Goodfellas." You will not be bored, ever.

Featuring powerhouse performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach's divorce drama is a bruising tour-de-force.

A miraculously subtle piece of work.

It’s made with so much love, care and enthusiasm—plus no small amount of risk—you thrill to think that they’re just getting started.

But mainly, it’s the film’s folk music that roots in the heart like a faraway lure.

Of all the things to be nostalgic about, warfare would seem the least likely candidate, but that's the unusual perspective of this one-of-a-kind 1943 landmark - maybe the most wonderfully British movie ever made.

It's meant to make you feel sad for what's lost, but a vitality throbs through it.

The idea that we would want even a few of these draggy, didactic scenes (the poorly paced French plantation sequence plays better with self-satisfied critics than with audiences) may remind you of one of Marlon Brando’s immortal lines, the one about an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

Indie wunderkind Sean Baker continues his celebration of communities on the margins, in a movie that vibrates with compassion and energy.

Clearly, Pixar’s genius for adventurous storytelling continues unabated.

While it’s unspooling, The Souvenir feels like the only film in the world—the only one that matters.

A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.

Little Women sometimes plays like a comedy, one that includes a crumpled cry over a bad haircut and several kitchen interludes that feel like Christmas miracles. Yet it’s Alcott’s visionary attitude, well-struck by Gerwig, that stays with you the longest: the loneliness of female liberty.

An extraordinary blend of personal reflection and inspired craft, Flee is a harrowing child’s-eye adventure that lends lyricism to the plight of migrants while showing there’s always a new way to make a documentary.

A film about the importance of cultural history and truth (two things deeply under siege these days), Wiseman’s epic Ex Libris might make you cry with happiness; it’s the good fight being fought. Movies aren’t usually a public benefit, much less an essential one. Here’s the exception.

Watching the first hour of I Was Born, But… (unspooling with a bright, new piano score by Donald Sosin) might remind you of a subdued “Our Gang” skit, and not unpleasantly.

A triumph of comic irreverence and dramatic purpose, Episode VIII dazzles like the sci-fi saga hasn't in decades.

Polley has gone further into the thorny subject of forgiveness than any of her peers. Her movies ache with ethical quandary; Stories We Tell aches the most.

What makes The Favourite work are its women—who rule, both literally within the movie and outwardly, dominating our enjoyment.

The movie takes risks that Hollywood isn't even aware of anymore.

You'll be arguing with your friends about the ethics of secrecy and defense for hours; that's what makes these exit interviews so essential. They come late to the spy game, but are welcome regardless.

Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.

The acting, especially from Menash Noy as an ineffectual attorney, is phenomenal, resulting in a feminist knockout told in inverse.

When superfans speak of the superiority of The Godfather Part II, this is not merely to be contrary. Coppola took Mario Puzo’s pulp and darkened it with Nixonian paranoia and the power of political back rooms.

The rich atmosphere of the movie may be the sexiest thing about it: It’s no wonder these women breathe in the air of possibility and find themselves imbued with boldness.

Deceptively hidden under layers of gorgeous surfaces, Paul Thomas Anderson’s borderline-sick romance waltzes toward a riveting tale of obsession.

Thus comes My Perestroika's most sophisticated idea: Day-to-day family struggles have a way of trumping even the most profound political change. Don't miss this.

Why do we care? Because never before have the steps to thugdom, as depressing as that destination may be, been so rigorously detailed, neither romanticized nor negated. Don’t miss.

A dynamite crime comedy and identity meltdown that can rekindle one’s faith in movies.

Whiplash scrapes the far edge of crazy passion. It never apologizes.

We are in the presence of a new classic.

A fascinating experiment is about to happen, and who doesn't want to be part of a little fun? That rarest of birds - a b&w silent film - is set to swoop into multiplexes. Trust us, it won't bite.

The film’s languorous, tangential flow isn’t for everyone, but you’ll be surprised by how easily you can roll with it, especially if you tune into Zama’s cringe-funny frequency.

It teases out the distinctly modern subject of celebrity profile-writing, a rare one for the movies, detouring into avenues of attraction and envy.

Though play with fire she might, couldn't screenwriter Jonas Frykberg have played with a little button called DELETE? There's no reason why a two-hour movie should feel like three, nor require quite so much fidelity to Larsson's plot curlicues.

The Arbor's pummeling second half begins with the collapse of its celebrity subject; the following spirals of self-destruction make you suspect that some childhoods are simply too hard to escape. Tough, worthy stuff.

This film leaves you with the thrill of a good fight fought hard. It’s a scrappy, absorbing tribute to the pragmatic value of compromise, carefully proffered in pursuit of a greater good. America’s candidates would do well to take a page out of this doc’s book.

Prepare to fawn at Bergman’s most metaphysically profound film; you may even laugh.

See this film immediately.

The auteur’s style — dramatic zooms, winking symmetry — is balanced against a newfound political context; this one’s his "To Be or Not to Be."

Calling the new A Star Is Born a “valentine” from its star, Lady Gaga, to her fans sounds a bit coy and delicate, so let’s call it what it really is: a hot French kiss (with full-on tongue), filled with passion, tears and a staggering amount of chutzpah.

Firth is exceptional in letting us into his dissolving pride.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

The movement of the story—from wrenching homesickness to blooming confidence and a smile on one’s stroll to work—elevates the movie into universal urban poetry.

A proper profile of Hefner would start and end with sex, and not merely glance on casualties like Dorothy Stratten (and even the loveless Hef himself). The movie can't seem to get it up.

Subtly, the film draws you into the science. You’ll be nervously eyeballing ticking velocity numbers in the corner of the screen. But always, Apollo 11 is about people working together in a single-minded spirit of peaceful ambition.

Two struggling souls come together to pull off a hoax on a world that's rejected them, in this powerhouse showcase for Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant.

Either via clay dolls or fragile flesh, the truth is unmissable—as is Panh’s film itself.

The best style has a purpose to it, and Russian Ark, in its hypnotic, endless swirl, gets at a deep truth of the post-Soviet psyche, haunted by its legacy of czarist rule and Stalin-era sacrifice. The film is a sad home for ghosts.

In its colorful, Godardian way, Return to Seoul becomes a quest movie, but not the one you're expecting — it's the opposite of sentimental or overly therapized.

The new drama, best viewed as a church movie, is a return to the kind of corner-chat indie cinema Lee revolutionized, with an emphasis on a towering performance by The Wire's Clarke Peters as a local bishop inflamed with the Word.

The most gratifying thing about the film is feeling Moodysson’s warmth return to him.

Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.

Rarely do movies-never mind foreign ones, of any nationality - explore an honest-to-God ethical quandary. Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Ten Commandments–themed Decalogue.

Redford, already a giant, has never been more suggestive. His character’s misadventure — might be a kind of cosmic penance. It’s the salvation of the moviegoing year.

The story is a little slight compared to the grand romantic ache of Pride and Prejudice, but Beckinsale and Stillman do their inspiration proud: Finally, a Jane Austen movie that's fresh and deliciously rotten at the same time.

A harrowing story of unthinkable family tragedy that veers into the realm of the supernatural, Hereditary takes its place as a new generation's The Exorcist—for some, it will spin heads even more savagely.

Particle Fever is that rare, exhilarating science doc that’s neither dumbed down nor drabbed up.

Unusually moving (not only to stray film critics in your crowd), director Steve James's keen profile of the late, great Roger Ebert works both as a compact appreciation of the reviewer's vast public impact, as well as an unflinching peak into a cancer patient's final months, fraught with pain, hope and constant treatment.

The Shape of Water is a movie of too many ideas, including love. For that reason alone, it drinks like a bottomless glass of velvety wine.

How filmmaker Robert Greene got an entire town to ham it up remains a mystery, but his gift for inviting self-interrogation (also on display in his equally fascinating Kate Plays Christine, a 2016 hybrid about an actor’s plunge into the life of a suicidal newscaster) marks him as an innovator who may become a future Errol Morris.

Try to get Siegel’s masterful camera rise out of your head: gun-happy Harry looming over his jabbering perp, who screams like a stuck pig as the shot recedes high into a dense night fog. This is not a cop film. It’s a monster movie.

The film has a traditional appeal that's wholly separate from its surface.

The film builds riotously via a series of verbal takedowns as male authority goes limp in the wake of a regrettable impulse. This is slender material to build a whole film around, but Östlund turns it into something deep, for viewers with patience.

Christopher Felver, while an inspired photographer, is not the director for the job; he dutifully ticks off Ferlinghetti’s major achievements — such as the founding of North Beach’s literary mecca, City Lights — yet never imbues his life with anything more than lefty zeal.

Provocatively, the film suggests that winning small battles was victory enough; Saigon natives, also interviewed, were left behind to endure death camps.

On purely formal grounds (the ones on which the genre lives or dies), Kent is a natural. She favors crisp compositions and unfussy editing, transforming the banal house itself into a subtle, shadowy threat.

If [it] doesn't feel quite as revelatory as Keep the Lights On (2012) or the heartbreaking Love Is Strange (2014), it still impresses you with its quiet, confident maturity.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams feels stuck in a middling zone of too much conjecture and not enough scholarship.

The movie has the proportion of a fable but the scope of a mythical lifetime.

The true value of the film is universal: These kids study the knotty viral science, pressure doctors into taking daring, inventive steps and make their cause a global emblem.

It's a moviegoing experience, sure — and if you need to hear it, one of the best of the year. But it's really a call to compassion, which makes it transcendent.

Director Showalter does a beautiful job of twining Nanjiani and Romano’s similar slump — you smile at what a perfect almost-father and son they already are — and he steers Hunter to a rapprochement of uncommon complexity and grace. And we thought we were watching a Judd Apatow film.

No performances stand out, which is a shame given Affleck's track record with actors. Ultimately, it comes down to a chase to the airport, with a scary Revolutionary Guardsman at the gate.

As brightly alive a movie as the season will offer.