Justin Chang

It's an exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline.

With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.

The fragile interplay of nature and civilization is best expressed in the way Diaz frequently sets the stage for each scene, allowing us to absorb the contours and details of every location before ever so gradually introducing human characters, looking small and ant-like, into the frame.

About Dry Grasses may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.

Let no one, in their understandable eagerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist of the human condition, downplay just how entertaining Hard Truths is. Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force.

A captivating 1930s-set caper whose innumerable surface pleasures might just seduce you into overlooking its sly intelligence and depth of feeling.

The result invites obvious yet not inapt comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick, but Bentley’s film—for all its crystalline imagery, its vision of Grainier’s home as a fallen Eden, and its air of metaphysical wonderment—unfolds in a more dramatically direct, compacted register.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers with Winter Sleep, a richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus that surely qualifies as the least boring 196-minute movie ever made.

Gorgeously shot, lighted and scored, and acted by both leads with an incandescence that feels fully lived in, Cooper’s movie seduces you almost immediately. It doesn’t promise the shock of the new, but from the first frame it casts a spell, the kind that lets you know immediately that you’re in good hands.

One of the show’s more obvious lessons is that history is a living, breathing entity, and that the cyclical rise-and-fall narratives of leaders and empires can be studied and recounted in ways that uncover bold new patterns of meaning. This film, a straightforward capture of a momentous work of art, illuminates those patterns in ways both sobering and thrilling.

The moment-to-moment pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.

The genius of Parallel Mothers lies in the way it gathers up so many of its maker’s preoccupations — the heroic fortitude of women, the tragic absence of men — and rewires them in an unexpected and entirely necessary direction. It finds Almodóvar doing something new by doing what he has always done well: finding grace and beauty amid suffering, and keeping memory alive.

A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.

Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce remains a rip-roaring entertainment.

Lanthimos may have cobbled together a rambunctious psychosexual odyssey from many Frankensteinian parts — a little “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash of “Metropolis,” a soupçon of Voltaire by way of the Marquis de Sade — but he and his skilled collaborators have marshaled them into a remarkably coherent and purposeful vision.

Some might well accuse this stubbornly singular woman of living in the past, but to watch Aquarius is to see her surrendering again and again to the bliss of the present moment — never more so than in a final scene of thrilling, annihilating ferocity.

Its glimmers of comic rage and generous helpings of battlefield carnage, though patchily entertaining on their own, never coalesce into a coherent reason for being.

While Cemetery of Splendor is unabashedly a work of slow cinema, the oft-hurled pejorative of “difficult” seems a particularly poor fit for a film whose unforced lyricism could scarcely be more graceful or inviting.

Calmer and less shattering than his masterly psychodrama "Secret Sunshine" (2007), Poetry is a deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.

In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.

The film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.

But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.

Familiar Touch, its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.

An alternately sensitive and heavy-handed small-town drama that turns the Salem witchcraft trials into a tenuous metaphor for the intense pressures brought to bear on today’s female youth.

Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to soft-pedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.

Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.

The absence of God, the trauma of war, the weight of history: None of these are new ideas for Andersson, a fact that reaffirms the wisdom of this movie’s title. But the implied grandiosity of those themes is dissipated, again and again, by the exquisite lightness of his touch and the startling tenderness of his gaze.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

There is no transcendence at the end of her long, harrowing journey, but there are unexpected gifts, guardian angels and places of refuge. It would be hard to overlook the spiritual presence — a good word for it would be “grace” — that hovers over every frame of this movie and the spare, wrenching story it has to tell.

A wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian helmer Andrei Zvyagintsev in outstanding form.

A virtually wordless film that speaks with grave eloquence and simplicity about the human condition. Nothing here feels fancy or extraneous, least of all Redford’s superb performance.

One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.

[Stillman] takes the inherent sophistication of Austen’s worldview and introduces just the right note of sly, self-deflating mockery.

The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining”), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.

It is taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. But what it bears witness to, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance test, in which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.

Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.

The movie is, paradoxically, both artifact and construct; the instability of the image is precisely what holds it together. Jia’s sense of the ephemerality of the medium, and of the world that the medium reflects, has seldom been more stirringly profound.

This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.

Animism, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, sex with a catfish -- there's all that and more in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's wonderfully nutty Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

It’s terrific — a quick-witted entertainment, daring and familiar by turns, that also proves to be sweet, serious and irreverent in all the right doses.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an immaculate vision: coldly efficient, aesthetically faultless, splendidly acted. I do wish it had a bit more blood in it.

One of the pleasurable discoveries of this continually surprising movie is that artifice can be the most direct route to the truth.

Resurrection, a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It’s more like a love labyrinth—a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish.

This is a lyrical ode to the glories of summer and the collaborative joys of filmmaking, suffused with the hope that we will never be deprived of either for long.

Desplechin perfectly times the moment when drollery ends and anguish begins, and it’s that sense of vulnerability that lends the film an unexpected emotional force as it moves toward its return-home epilogue.

It has the irresistible freshness of a recipe that many have tried to copy and none have matched: a barbed, sprawling, scintillating vision of a society happily in thrall to its taste buds.

The triumph of Diane is that the movie, no less than its heroine, refuses to be diminished. What looks at first like a solid, well-carpentered exercise in downbeat indie realism ends up, by dint of its unexpected tonal and temporal leaps and sudden formal ruptures, in less easily definable territory.

No one in this movie has a complete understanding of what’s going on, but Wandel proves that a sensitive enough camera can provide a fuller picture than most.

Writer-director Sean Baker’s sun-scorched, street-level snapshot is a work of rueful, matter-of-fact insight and unapologetically wild humor that draws a motley collection of funny, sad and desperate individuals into its protagonists’ orbit.

It’s a testament to the story’s underlying integrity that, even when deprived of some of the elements that made Emma Donoghue’s 2010 book so gripping, director Lenny Abrahamson’s inevitably telescoped but beautifully handled adaptation retains considerable emotional impact.

One of the reasons An Elephant Sitting Still is so absorbing is that it has the advantage of duration, a willingness to linger in moments of silence and stillness. Paradoxically, as a result, it moves far more swiftly than you might expect.

Triet’s movie is a monument to the ambiguous and unknown, a labyrinth of half-glimpsed causes and vague, sinister effects.

Shults’s approach craftily favors observation over exposition, and he proves as attentive to Krisha’s surroundings as he is to her inner life.

Filtering the world's oldest paintings through the latest in cinematic technology, Werner Herzog delivers a one-of-a-kind art-history lesson in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Our Land is the work of a great filmmaker exploring the boundaries of a relatively unfamiliar form.

Toward the end of this searing, finally overwhelming film, it’s unclear which is the more disturbing realization: that Alyosha was lost long before he went missing, or that you don’t really want him to be found.

More than once in Showing Up, her wry and wonderful new movie, the director Kelly Reichardt gives us something that feels rarer than it should in American cinema: a lingering moment in the presence of an artist at work.

A story of love and subterfuge in 1980 East Germany that never quite accelerates into an outright thriller, Barbara reps another assured collaboration between director Christian Petzold and his main muse, actress Nina Hoss.

Less a movie about a scandal than a movie about a movie about a scandal, it seeks to interrogate and even subvert its own promise of ripped-from-the-tabloids titillation, even as it challenges the predilections of an audience that might seek out such a movie.

Kulumbegashvili’s gaze is by turns coolly diagnostic and furiously exploratory, a dichotomy that manifests itself in the compositional extremes of Khachaturan’s cinematography.

This is cinema that pushes beyond the medium’s usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation.

To call this movie timely would be both an understatement and a bit of a misnomer, since the battle for women’s bodily autonomy has never not been a timely issue. It might be more fitting to praise Happening for its urgency, not just because it arrives in American theaters under particularly fraught circumstances, but also because of the gut-clutching suspense and the wrenching intimacy that the director brings to the telling.

The Big Sick is both a delightful comedy and an imperfect milestone. With any luck, we’ll look back on it someday and it won’t feel like a milestone at all.

The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.

The movie is undeniably long, talky and dense, but it is never uninteresting. You might call it slow too, though at the risk of mischaracterizing the speed of its verbiage and the dizzying complexity of its ideas.

Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.

A poignant, sometimes piercing triptych of tales, each one predicated on chance encounters and romantic possibilities (the original Japanese title translates as “Coincidence and Imagination”), it finds Hamaguchi in playful, beguiling and quietly affecting form.

It is an exquisite piece of filmmaking and also a blunt, pulpy instrument, a despairing, fully sustained howl of a movie that is easily this director's finest work in years.

This is movie craftsmanship and showmanship of a very high order.

A Little Prayer is spare yet brisk, and it unfolds with a graceful, almost musical sense of modulation: Camp and Weston, both veterans of MacLachlan’s work, strike bracing high notes of acerbic wit, which Strathairn and Levy answer with an understated bass line of emotion.

More than most real-life stories about marginalized individuals overcoming daunting odds and deep-seated prejudices, “Crip Camp” manages to be at once sweetly affirming and breezily irreverent.

[A] beautifully bittersweet and generous movie — which, like life itself, draws no distinction between the significant and the insignificant.

This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.

[Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

What begins as a realist snapshot of the global migrant crisis gradually expands into an aching story of love, loss and the return of the repressed.

What does it mean to be a knight, or even just to be human? It isn’t an easy question, and The Green Knight, in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus.

With its accelerated rhythm, relentless flow of incident and wizard-war endgame, "Part 2" will strike many viewers as a much more exciting, involving picture than the slower, more atmospheric "Part 1."

This deliberately paced psychological drama builds an ever-tightening knot of tension around an excellent Michael Shannon, here playing a family man slowly driven mad by apocalyptic visions that could be paranoid, prophetic or both.

The world of The Salesman isn’t quite as intricately imagined as some of its predecessors, and the story’s sleuthing element, while absorbing, often feels more narratively expedient than germane. But if the setup is creaky, the payoff, when it arrives, is a thing to behold.

This is surely the nerviest, most confrontational treatment of race in America to emerge from a major studio in years, and it brilliantly fulfills the duty of both its chosen genres — the horror-thriller and the social satire — to meaningfully reflect a culture’s latent fears and anxieties.

Spielberg’s movie may be rougher, grittier, more lived-in and, in terms of cultural representation, more truthful than its 1961 cinematic incarnation. But it is also more unabashedly classical, more radiantly stylized, than just about anything a major American studio has released in years.

Despite or perhaps because of its lightly sketched premise, To the Ends of the Earth emerges as the director’s most gracefully assured work in a while, though his natural gift for building tension is still made subtly manifest.

Exquisite and ferocious.

With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.

From unsettled beginning to wondrously open-hearted finale, The Delinquents is wise enough not to offer clear or easy answers, beyond its certainty that getting lost is the only way to be found.

I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story.

Fisher neither wilts under the camera’s scrutiny nor succumbs to the temptation to stare it down. She gives precise form and delicate feeling to emotions and experiences that, despite the specificity of the circumstances, most everyone will recognize.

The Ornithologist” is both an opaque narrative and a deeply inviting one. Even as the film commences a series of radical formal and dramatic mutations, you are held rapt by the steadiness of the camera’s gaze and the sublime, sun-dappled beauty that it invariably discovers.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

Despite its generally frictionless flow from meal to meal, its showstopping delicacies and subtly comical asides, The Taste of Things is haunted, from the start, by an awareness of the passage of time.

To a degree that is both formally impressive and politically astute, Rees and her co-writer, Virgil Williams, have largely retained the symphonic, almost Faulknerian structure of multiple narrators that governed Jordan’s story. The radicalism of Mudbound thus lies in its inherently democratic sensibility, its humble, unapologetic insistence on granting its black and white characters the same moral and dramatic weight.

[Hall] picks up on their contrasting energies, the way Negga eagerly draws the camera’s gaze while Thompson quietly deflects it. But what’s most striking about Hall’s direction is her visual acuity, her gift for composing images that are gorgeous, disorienting and strangely intuitive.

At the simplest level, the stories of trauma and loss told in In the Same Breath exist as a necessary corrective.

[A] lovely, heartrending movie.

In the push-pull between Secareanu’s resonant stillness and O’Connor’s barely sublimated intensity, you feel the struggle of two souls forging a path toward each other, gradually realizing that while life may be harsh and unforgiving, love doesn’t have to be.

Showing an unobtrusive mastery of camera movement, Bi lends concrete form and rich dramatic life to the Buddhist notion that past, present and future are all equally untenable.

Enthralling...An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some.

Linklater indulges his characters’ antics with such wild, free-flowing affection that you might miss the thoughtful undertow of this delightful movie: Few filmmakers have so fully embraced the bittersweet joy of living in the moment — one that’s all the more glorious because it fades so soon.