Joshua Rothkopf

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.

[Russ] Meyer could never make a psychodrama as sophisticated as Biller has now.

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.

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.

A miraculously subtle piece of work.

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.

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

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

It's more like confession, the director still seething and replaying Vertigo in his head, lost in the curves of his career. De Palma is a public therapy session that upturns all expectations.

Carné's film has never looked more lush.

As brightly alive a movie as the season will offer.

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.

Paradoxically, this is not a tale about summoning inner strength, but about shedding pride. Sometimes, there's no choice.

The essential thrust here is both knowing and undeniable: No is pitched at the pivot point when the image makers were brazen enough to push ideology to the side. Considering how high the stakes were, it’s amazing they almost didn’t get the gig.

Is Joaquin Phoenix putting us on? After watching the terrifying, near-brilliant exposé I'm Still Here, in which the Oscar nominee's public and private unraveling becomes a sick joke, the question doesn't matter.

It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term - a cult classic - and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.

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

It's a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage).

It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.

The film isn’t heavy on earth science, yet these orange-tinted tide pools and shuddering protomammals indicate a strain of serious research. The world is a miracle and a gift in the movie’s eyes; it would be no small thing if audiences left with the same sense of wonderment.

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

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.

This is a drama about finding one's self-worth; you simply have to see it.

How perfectly perverse: In a summer crammed with sequels, remakes, '80s nostalgia and the frustrated sense of "What else y'got?" comes the most original nightmare in years.

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

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.

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.

Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, artists who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. It’s a movie desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection.